Leading up to the injury: “So the weeks, months leading up to it, I’ve been having a really, really good training run… a lot of PBs on my squats, my deadlifts, everything was going really, really awesome. My strict pressing, I’d started getting back into push pressing after a bit of a break because whenever I push pressed always got knee pain for like the last probably five years before my injury. I couldn’t seem to push press and squat in the same program without overloading my patella tendons. So I’d been working back into push press for probably six weeks. It was feeling pretty damn good. I wasn’t really aching. I just hit some front squat PBs a couple of weeks before that, some farmer’s walks and deadlift PBs. I was feeling good.”
Day of the rupture: “I was looking down the barrel of a 14 hour day with not many hours sleep that day… It wasn’t a normal training day, but it was kind of my last chance to get the lift in. So I decided to train when I’d normally be resting. I started working up in the log, you know, I got to a hundred kilos push pressing and my knee was really starting to ache. Just one of them. And it’s like a really smart person. said, yeah, whatever. And I kept going.”
“Whenever I watched Strongman, that one injury I never wanted to have was patellar tendon ruptures. Cause I’d seen a couple of them over the years on log press and they’re always horrible… And so for me, it was always in the back of my head a little bit, because I’d always had these achy knees push pressing.”
“So when I went to go for the 150 [kg], I was actually worried about it happening. My brain was telling me, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. And of course, in my sport, if you listen to that voice, you never get any good. So it’s kind of standard practice to push that voice away and do it anyway. And that’s what I did. And I walked up to the 150, cleaned it, it sitting on my chest. I went to dip down and hit the bottom of the dip and started to drive back up. You know, I had headphones on like this. I felt this thunk, thunk, and I fell with the 150. I fell to the ground. The log landed on my shins. A lot of people who get my injury in strongman, they’ll break their ankle as well from where the log lands. For me, I had pads on the side, so they caught the log, thankfully. I still wrecked my shins horribly. They were cut up and bruised and the bones were a bit notched afterwards.”
The rupture: “Firstly, it was pretty painful. These people that say, those ruptures are pretty pain free, have no fucking idea. Excuse me. What they’re talking about. It was not good at all. It was bad. I was screaming as I went down and my legs went into spasm straight away. Like my quads started spasming”
The hospital: “Straight away they did ultrasounds and I said to the guy, I was like, look, I’m really hoping it’s my quad here. Can we check that tendon first? And he’s like, your quad tendons look great. And I’m like, ⁓ God. And he’s like, yeah, your patella tendons are ruptured. Both of them.”
“When they were putting me into the ambulance, they were like, we’re going to have to get your knee sleeves off. And they’re like, do you want us to pull them down? I was like, I don’t want anyone to touch that area. So they cut my knee sleeves off. And I remember watching as my knee sleeve came apart, my knee cap going up my leg. I remember feeling it slide off my leg. And so that was pretty gross.”
Rehab differences side-to-side: “If both of my knees had been the same level of difficult as my left knee, I’d probably be months ahead of where I am. My left one’s been a dream. You know, my right one’s been a bit stubborn. They’re always a little bit like this. If, if I managed to do as clean of a rupture on my right as my left, think that I would be a few months ahead of where I am. But every rupture is a little bit different in every recovery is too. But yeah, right side had more tendon delamination than the left side. So it was a little bit of a rip and snap.”
“I didn’t do any form of training or rehab for 10 days post-surgery. I just did that [moving around]. And each day I got a little bit better, a little more mobile. After the 10 days, I started doing a little bit of rehab stuff myself, which was basically just lying in bed. ⁓ would lie on my side and do adductor raises. I would lie on my side and do abduction. I’d lie on my stomach and lift my legs up as far as I could. And I would lie on my back. And at first I couldn’t lift my leg because the tension was too much through the tendon, but I would do an isometric hold, pulling my leg up as until I felt the tension take. And then I would hold there for 30 seconds. I would do two sets of all of those three times a day. And I did that every day for 10 days, 10 days post surgery to four weeks post surgery. added in calf raises at about day 14, because I was starting to feel up to it.”
“The physical therapist told me to go home and do nothing and come back in six weeks. ⁓ but that was the hospital physio, you know, I had a physio locally that I was using and he, ⁓ he said to me, like, you six weeks is a long time to do nothing with something like this. That’s probably not going to be good for you. And it’s probably not necessary. And between advice from him and stuff that I learned from talking to other people who went through my same injury, you know, like I said, I’d known other strong men who had it happen and powerlifters and I reached out to them and they helped guide me in the right direction. And that’s where I got a lot of those ideas for what can I do that doesn’t hurt my patellar tendon or stress it that keeps my body moving so I don’t lose strength or muscle condition. And that then leads me back to recovery quicker.”
“As soon as I had enough range of motion to use the bike, I was on the bike every day.”
“We’d been doing kind of isometric leg extension holds just with no weight, like just body weight, just sitting on a bench. I would just kind of hold my leg up. We started doing that at six weeks. And at about eight weeks, we jumped onto an actual leg extension machine. And we were doing that three days a week. So three days a week of five 30-second holds. That started at 5 kilos and that felt heavy. That’s not with one leg. That’s with both legs. And I would do that every second day or three days a week. It was every second day at first. And I would just really gradually be building it up. So when I could do it and it didn’t feel so crazy, I wasn’t shaking because I was shaking with the five kilos at first. Then I would add a little bit of weight. I would put a, you know, a five pound drop down adjustable plate on there and I would keep building. That was my first major thing.”
“When I was able to do my isometric [leg extension] holds with about 30 to 40 kilos, then all of a sudden, I could do the lunge holds and I was doing lunge holds and they felt okay. And then when I was doing lunge holds and I felt ready to add weight, I was like, cool, you know, now I can also add in these other different exercises like a reverse banded hack squat with bands that make it lighter down the bottom where I had pain so that it was light enough I could progress it. And if it’s light enough that I can progress it, then I’m in business. And I just track that out over time and keep building.”
“I’ve had patellar tendonopathy for years, so I can relate the difference in how it feels. They [post-rupture] feel very different for me at least, you know, in the traditional achy knee sense of patellar tendonopathy, my knees feel better now than they did pre-injury. But the pain, it’s more stiffness and inhibition that you feel. So at first I’m really fighting to make sure my quads are doing the work while I’m doing exercises and something else isn’t taking over.”
“You’d be amazed at what else that isn’t your quad can do hacks squats or even a leg extension.”
“I’m doing my 5 sets of 30 second holds and by the last one, I’m shaking like a leaf, you know, the more fatigued I get, the worse it got. And it didn’t necessarily go away because whenever the shake got went away a little bit, I upped the weight and the next weight had just as much shake, you know, because I wanted to stay on the edge of that fatigue line.”
“Before the injury, I had like 30 inch quads. And then after the injury, my upper arms would be bigger than my legs. And so they got down to like, I think 14 inches at their smallest when I was completely inactive. And initially, yeah, it was, there was a lot of trouble regaining any quad mass, but as soon as I got back on the leg extension, I could put them back in my program, particularly when I started being able to work the load up on leg extension and leg press reps, the muscle came back decently.”
“The VMO took ages to come back, but now that I can basically do leg extensions till the cows come home, they’re pretty good. And it’s actually the outer quad that’s struggling a little bit. I think that’s probably due to the fact that my squat patterns just haven’t gotten back to what you would call appreciable load.”
Squats: “I’m still only jumping up five pounds a week because I don’t want to get eager, jump too far, have a flare up, and have to step back. And if you track it out over the next three to six months, if I jump up five pounds a week, I’ll be back front squatting 300 to 350 pounds for reps easily by the end of the year. And that’s fast enough for me. And if in the meantime, squats can feel good, like I could go in and not be hesitant, just have fun with it. I don’t care that it’s a bit lighter. They feel normal.”
“I think everyone thinks with these injuries, you’ll hit a certain point, then be able to take big jumps back to where you were. And those big jumps are the enemy. You know, no matter how good I feel, I don’t speed up my progression. And then I just feel better and better while putting more weight on the bar. To me, it’s a no brainer. That’s the way to do it. But a lot of people will be like, well, this felt really easy this week. So instead of taking a five pound jump, I’m going to take a 10 pound jump. And I think that’s where people get caught up.”
“I dropped from rehab three days a week to two days a week. And that’s the biggest thing besides taking squats out for a while that resolved that [quad tendon pain]. It was just too much for my body for one reason or another. And I stuck with two days a week rehab frequency. ⁓ That’s not including two other days where I ride the bike and do some plyometric stuff, but two days of loaded lifting and that’s my sweet spot for recovery. That changed everything for me. The early phases, I could do it way more frequently because the loading was so light and the stimulation that I needed was more smaller, but more frequent was the way. But now that there’s more loading back in, it’s the other way around.”
“Every time I tried to get into moving events and progress them, I would go for a couple of weeks and kind of run into a wall. Because when you look at a moving event, it’s basically you’re taking a light plyometric. So say running’s a light plyometric and you’re adding a load to it. And it’s completely non-yielding. So you hit the ground and you bounce straight back off of it. And all of that force is your tendons being springy and absorbing the force. I still find I have a decent amount of inhibition in the muscle when it comes to impact related stuff. So I can load it, but after a certain point, it just makes my knees angry. And so I’ve been using plyometrics to build that capacity. So I think of strongman moving events as loaded plyometrics. So I feel until I can do normal plyometrics comfortably and without muscle inhibition, adding weight to it.”
Standing pain/stiffness: “I think I could go about 20 minutes and then I got to sit down. And the thing is, you kind of get a feel for when you need to sit down or you’ll pay for it later. So I have like a whole bunch of tactics to avoid getting put in that position. So when I’m at work, I’ve got a stool I sit on, you know, and so I carry that around with me so I don’t get caught standing. And I can get away with a lot more standing than I used to.”
Isometric lunges: “That split single leg progression. I think that leaps me forward massively. Cause when I could do the lunge holds without pain, then I could do step ups and then I could load and do actual lunge reps and being able to work that rec fem properly, it was massive in the rehab. That was a big turning point really, where I went from like injured to functional in a really meaningful way.”
“I can lift weights and have no inhibition and feel good, but whenever it involves impact or explosive movement, I get a lot of inhibition. So when I first started to try running, my legs would just collapse because I would land in my quad would just refuse to do anything. So I actually had to focus on walking, but landing with bent knees, not stiff knees, going uphill and then going downhill. And that started getting rid of the muscle inhibition.”
Deadlifts: “I didn’t have anywhere near the amount of quad contribution to the movement that I normally would. So the movement quality wasn’t there. I could do the reps anyway, I found another way, ⁓ but I had to work around not using my quads.n So to me, wasn’t happy with that. So I reset my deadlift completely and I’d only progress when I could add weight and still feel just as much quad drive. I think if people can still use their quads in a way that doesn’t hurt and have them fully contributing to the movement, I think it’s a great way to do things.”
“Before I injured myself, I had been eating a lot of food for a long time. You know, I was trying to get bigger, which is a bit of a challenge for me that involved like 6,000 calories a day for, think it was about three to four months prior to the injury. And I think you’d be kidding yourself to think that isn’t going to have some effect on metabolic health, no matter how much cardio you do, no matter how much you train. So I think it played a bit of a role.”
Biggest thing for me that played a role, you know, I just spent the last few years building heaps of leg strength. I’d come along massively in my squats and I’d built heaps of capacity there and I hadn’t been push pressing. I’d been strict pressing so I could train my legs and make them stronger more effectively. In my mind, I was like, yeah, then I’ll come back to push pressing and I’ll have all this extra leg strength and I’ll make leaps and bounds in progress. And when I came back to push pressing, the difference here is I think my tendon wasn’t adapted to that specific task. So I’d gone away, built heaps of capacity to produce force. My technique on push press was still great because I’d been doing them for like 15 years. Even with time away, technique was still pretty good. So I got really great technique, heaps of new strength, no adaptation to the movement in terms of like tendon capacities. Cause I’d been away from it for like a year or so. So I think it’s fair to say the tendon’s not used to that strain. And then I waltz right in and I go, yeah, 150 kilos, this’ll be fine. And here we are, you know, just no adaptation to the specific task. My muscles were like, we got this and my tendons were like, screw you buddy.”
Jack on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fenrirstrength
Fenrir Strength website: https://www.fenrirstrength.theprintbar.com
