Episode 237 | The $200 Lesson That Could Save Your ACL Rehab

What is up team? And welcome back to another episode on the ACL Athlete Podcast. I want to share just a simple story today of something that happened this past week. Our air conditioning (or our AC), as we call it here in the States, and our upstairs of our house, has had some issues over the past month and a half. This Georgia’s humidity and heat do not play y’all. When the AC is out, it is not great because it just gets hot here in Georgia. It has been hot everywhere here in the States recently, but it is really hot here in the south. And I grew up in a motel, which my parents have owned all my life. I was born there, raised there, and I was born in a hospital. But then, when I got home. I was living in a motel, the motel office, and our home was attached together. I basically lived at a motel growing up. 

One of the things that I thought was a normal thing, but I realized is not normal. After talking with friends and people were like, dude, you grew up in a motel. I did, and that’s a super unique, fun fact about me. But with that, my dad was also the one who did all of the main repairs and maintenance of this motel. This goes back to his story of immigrating and having to go through different jobs and being fired. And part of this was going to get a skills-related job where he learned to repair things, and a trade job within that. And he built up his skillset to understand how to fix things and just be called to work and be able to just learn those different ways of fixing and maintaining things, in a home or in a commercial space. Anyways, he translated this over to our motel that we owned and managed, and there he would handle a lot of the maintenance. And that led to me growing up and tag teaming with my dad and being able to learn things from him of how to put drywall up, how to run an electrical cord, how to replace certain parts of different units, repairing a washing machine, being able to replace a tub, a shower, just any of the things that you can imagine. 

I was helping my dad with those things. And I feel like I know a few things about being able to be handy or fix things around a home. I take pride in it because I know it also saves us money, but there’s also this feeling of just being like, hell yeah, I fixed that, or I solved that problem.We all love that feeling, especially when we can solve it ourselves. And that is something that I take pride in, especially being the husband and the man of the house. That’s something that I love. It doesn’t have to be the man or the husband. But with that said, like I just love being able to fix things.

I tried to do that for our AC unit that broke, and it was just something that had been cutting on and off over the past month or so. I’ve tried all kinds of troubleshooting. I’ve been trying to use ChatGPT to help me fix this. I’ve been trying to troubleshoot with some other methods, YouTube videos, and just different diagnostics. And being able to try to piece these things together. It’s okay, if this doesn’t work, then maybe it’s this, then maybe it’s this. The one thing I figured out is that if I go up into the attic where the actual HVAC unit (the AC unit is) and hit this switch under this panel, I have to undo it. I put this panel on it, and basically, it’s this kind of kill switch that resets it. It somehow resets it to cut back on the air, and I’m like, oh, cool, it works. It works probably like 80% of the time. It’s a pretty successful rate. It doesn’t go out every single day, but now that I’m reflecting on this, it went out on most days. Most days, I would be making my way up to the attic to be able to reset this, and hopefully, it’s good to go for the day. 

And then last weekend I had to go up and do this in the middle of the night, which was not fun while you’re asleep. And my wife woke me up, and she was like, Hey, the AC is broken. And it is 12:30 AM. We can’t operate here at the Patels’ household without AC, especially being hot sleepers as we are. Plus, we’ve got a one-and-a-half-year-old and my pregnant wife, who both get hot easily. We are just hot by nature. Therefore, when the air conditioning goes out in this hot Georgia heat, it is not great.

Then I realized this past week, after going up to the attic to restart it four times within an hour. Now, this hasn’t happened often, but it happened four times in this hour. I started to think, because I was like, okay, I can’t keep doing this, and I was like, what the heck am I doing? This is not a long-term solution since I don’t even know what the exact problem is. I don’t know what is wrong. I just know that there is something I can do sometimes to fix this temporarily. I don’t have that level of background to fix it, knowing what’s wrong and really what the blind spots are and what I’m trying to do.

And then thought about several times I’ve been up there to reset this freaking AC over 40 in the past month or so, when I total it up and I zoom out. Day to day, though, for me, I was like, ah, it’s not that big of an issue. It’s a quick get up there, climb the ladder, and then hit this switch, and hopefully it works most of the time. But then, when I zoomed out, I realized I wasted so much time trying to figure this out on my own. I called a solid HVAC company to come and help us. This AC guy, he was awesome, Jeremy. He let me watch and even educated me on what was going on. Because I was like, really, just what is going on? What is this problem here? And I could have never ever fixed the problem he found, which was a faulty wire that would go in and out with current, that had to be changed out. 

The thing is that it even tripped him up for a second because he tested it and it was fine, and then the next thing you know, it reset. It did this weird thing, and he was able to catch it and figure out the problem, and then he was able to fix it. $200 later, the problem was solved in less than an hour. No more trips (knock on wood), hopefully, that I have to go up to the attic or figure out what the problem is, and you’re like, cool. 

What is the point here, Ravi? I was stubborn and I tried to solve this problem myself. It cost me a lot of time, to be honest, that I didn’t realize till after zoomed out. At the moment, I didn’t think that I was that big of a thing. And it was just frustrating when I look back at this of like, why did I let this go on so long? I know just enough personally to be dangerous about these things, but not enough to fix complex problems like this. I don’t know enough about these units. There are so many different pieces that could be dangerous, like working with electricity or working with gas. And these are things that you don’t want to mess up because they’re influencing your home, influencing other people in your home and you don’t want to ever just be worried about this or be like, okay, I think I got this, but there’s like a 20% to 30% of me that’s is this good enough. Or is this going to lead to a bigger problem later? I just needed to find the right help. 

And where is my ACLer comparison here? I talk to ACLers every single week about this same problem.  While ACL rehab (don’t get me wrong), it is not like fixing an AC. I’m not going to say that is what it is, because I know it is still a very different process. There are a lot of parallels here that I just want to share with you. One thing as a side tangent, that I’ve realized is that reminders are helpful. I think that often we know better, and yet in our gut we’re knowing these things or thinking these things, but sometimes you just need to hear it. Sometimes you just need someone to say it for you. Sometimes you need someone to remind you of these things. We don’t need someone to necessarily tell us to eat healthy, but sometimes it’s nice to be told, Hey, like we should maybe think about eating some more whole foods instead of the Costco chicken nuggets that are good and have great ratios. But with that said, that is something that can be helpful in this. And that is one thing that I want to bring up to you. This is not the first time I’ve shared this, and it won’t be the last time, I promise. But the thing is that I am not trying to say that ACL rehab and fixing an AC unit are the same because one’s mechanical and one is so complicated in so many different ways. But the parallels here are so important. 

First, we need to acknowledge that ACL rehab is the hardest musculoskeletal injury to recover. From outside of neuromuscular stuff like a spinal cord injury or a stroke, or other things that kind of happen in this process that have such a big neurological component that we know is going to be so impacted by this, by the brain or by the spinal cord. Yes, some neural pathways are influenced by ACL rehab, but it is mostly a musculoskeletal injury that has a byproduct of a neural component to it. But your nerves are not necessarily directly impacted by the motor or the sensory aspects that will grossly impact your overall recovery.

But with that said, I think it’s the hardest. No one has this list of the hardest and the easiest. And of course, other ones are hard too, like Achilles and Tommy John’s and all these other different musculoskeletal injuries and surgeries you’ll recover from. But having gone through some pretty complex ones myself, between hip resurfacing to ACLs, dislocated shoulders, broken bones, torn ligaments, straining so many different muscles all over my body, concussions, having herniated discs in both my neck and in my spinal in my lumbar spine. I am very familiar with injuries. This is not unfamiliar to me. My ACLs have been hard to recover from. I think working with all these different injuries throughout my career has made it hard. This is parallel to having the worst possible AC problem possible.  Your air conditioning unit has the worst problem possible. That’s like parallel to this injury and this surgery. 

Second, we need to recognize that we can’t do it ourselves. This is like me fixing the worst AC problem possible that has happened. I can’t, I just can’t do it. I don’t have the experience. I don’t have the background. I don’t have the knowledge. Even with some of my electrical knowledge and HVAC system knowledge, I can’t fix this. I have some folks who have training backgrounds, studied exercise science, personal training. And for some reason that they think they can do this ACL rehab process, they think that they’re like, I can figure it out. I’m the one person who can get by and figure it out on my own. 

We have physical therapists, people who have gotten their doctorates, who have studied the human body, who have cut it open, who have been able to look at the body all the way down to the spinal cord in the brain. We harvest these things during our first year in anatomy.  We see how this stuff moves, we see how it works, we see the interconnections of everything. We have such a good understanding of the human body. We get to see how this functional anatomy works by mechanics. Everything about the human body, like our degrees helps us to understand the basis of this. We have physical therapists on our rosters who have done these things, who specialize in sports rehab. Not only do they know how to do orthopedics, but they also know sports rehab, who are working with our team because they don’t feel comfortable enough doing their own ACL rehab. 

When I hear of the people who have training backgrounds or experience with exercise science or personal trainers, this is not to discredit any of what you have done or experienced. But with that said, being in this space and knowing this injury, that’s almost like a dangerous place to be in because you’re almost like, maybe I should be able to figure this out. But in reality, the thing is, we need to make sure also that we know where our blind spots are and what this injury and this recovery takes. These PTs working with us they’re going through this ACL rehab process, working and doing the remote ACL rehab. The in-person components are also for people who are local to here. And it is just one of those things that we just have to be able to check for ourselves. We can’t do it ourselves.

This is the same thing, even for my hip rehab and the hip resurfacing, I could try to do it myself. But at the same time, I don’t want to, and I also will not recognize my blind spots, and I have not worked with an extensive amount of hip resurfacings like I have with ACLs. And even if, God forbid, something happens to my ACL ever again, I won’t do my own ACL rehab. I tell every ACLer of this because this is just something that I think is so important to be outside of ourselves in terms of the guidance we receive.

The third point to this is we need help, but not just any help; legit, qualified help. This is where the calling in the big shots, the experts who know this stuff really matters. I didn’t just call like a general maintenance guy. I called the guy who knows HVAC systems. He solved a problem and could have saved me, honestly, like 38 trips to the attic and lots of annoyance and waste of time. That’s my own fault, and I take ownership of that. I learned a lot from him. But even in other cases, I’m going to have someone come out sooner because I was just being stubborn. And in this process, I realized it was an opportunity cost. I wasted time, and I should have done that the first two times that it happened. Sure, you could try some things for a second. But once I realized that it’s just not working, there needs to be some sort of change. It’s the definition of being crazy. You keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for there to be different outcomes or a different expectation or result.

And the thing that’s important about from the PT and ACL side is that you can’t just find any PT that takes your insurance because that isn’t going to be the move here, and that’s not what’s going to get you there. Sure, it might help you within the first post-op period. But usually, the expertise or the bandwidth and skillset exhaust, I would say, after the 8 to 12-week mark in reality. That’s what we consistently see, whether it’s insurance-based or whether it’s just like the skillset. Because in PT school, we don’t specialize in this, as I’ve shared before. This is something that you have to get further education for. Some clinics are just not built and designed to appropriately serve the ACLer. That’s just calling a spade what it is. And sometimes you have to invest in something outside of that. It could be during this process. We have ACLers who work with us while they’re in-network clinics. We’re going to be in-person. Or it might be after the process, as they’re finishing up with their in-person. It could be something that you might have to invest in after that has been exhausted, but you need an expert in your corner. This will massively help in not only navigating a complex process alone or with not the best help. So that’s the important thing, is that maybe you don’t have someone in your corner, or maybe who is in your corner is too generic, or they’re just not providing what you need. But also mentally, it’s giving you the peace of mind, knowing you have guidance, you have structure, you have intention. You guys are following what the research shows, and there are objective measures also tied to this. Therefore, you can give it your best shot and make sure that this is your first or just your last ACL. That’s what’s most important. You’re doing everything you can. And this is where vetting who you’re working with is so key, or finding someone who you feel is the right person to be in your corner.

I have been having so many conversations with ACLers who are just like, yeah, my PTs are nice, but they feel lost in this process. Or they’ll say, Yeah, we’ll update things, we’ll get there. And the conversation just never happens, or they never get the updates. And to me, I’m just like, man, I just feel so disappointed in this. Or maybe they’re trying to piece it together themselves and figure it out. I just want you to know that you should not be responsible for that. And if you are, then I feel like the healthcare system has failed you. And that is something that is just the reality of the way ACL rehab and the way healthcare is. It is not going to take you all the way there.

And the thing here is that it’s like me trying to fix this AC. I just needed to find an expert to help me with this. It becomes an absolute game-changer in every single domain. And it’s huge for my ACLers to find an expert. While I’m sure you can navigate it on your own, the biggest thing is: what’s the cost of that? The time, not only daily, but in the long term. I wasted time for sure with my own trying to fix this thing. We have ACLers who say they spend two to three hours in the gym a day. And they’ve been at it for 18 months or two years. I just talked to somebody who was like, Yeah, I’ve been working out two to three hours a day, five to six days a week, on my legs. What could you possibly be doing for that much time every single day? There is not a single ACLer we have who is doing that much volume of work. And honestly, it is probably playing against you. And we have seen so many people who are putting so much time and effort in, and they’re seeing no gains or progress because they don’t have any specific guidance. They’re just shooting in the dark with things that they see. And they’re just thinking that more volume and time are helping, but they’re also dealing with pain, swelling issues, and limping. What we need to do is create structured targets, be able to balance volume, intensity, and be able to make sure that when you need to go hard, you go hard; and when you need to recover, you need to recover. And that is where we make our gains. And it’s all about strategically programming this and creating structure around it. 

This is also going to help with possible setbacks, lack of progress, fear, anxiety, and feeling lost, whether we admit it or not. But what about getting back to what you love most? What if someone said that they could cut this time in half for you? And then what about the re-injury piece? One that a lot of folks avoid talking about and assume it’ll just work out. It does not. And it’s why one in three or four athletes go on to get re-injured again. Twenty percent to 30% re-injury rates is currently where ACL sits, and then people think they save money by doing it on their own. Maybe in the short term, yes, but what about the long term? And especially if it drags on for months and years, and more so, the cost of another re-injury? That is the ultimate question you have to ask yourself in situations like this. I’ve heard the quote, “Buy once, cry once.” But the thing is, if you have to go a shortcut route, oftentimes you end up having to pay for it in multiple different ways.

But then what about the flip side of finding and investing in an expert? You have someone who knows this stuff, can spot the issues, and even the potential roadblocks and the ones you can’t see. There’s a solution, a plan to get you to your goals, not something that’s generic, one built for you. It has structure to it. You’re not feeling lost through it. Instead of feeling all this like fear, anxiety, you feel like you have that GPS, you feel assured, you have confidence where you’re going, and to can make adjustments as needed. Most importantly, you feel hurt and that you don’t have to wonder what if anymore. You’ve got a guide with you, alongside you. The experts cut through the noise; they cut down the time for you and how much it would’ve taken to do it on your own. Seriously, this is huge—the opportunity cost of it. And it gives you the confidence to test it out and know you don’t have to stress or worry about it, and if it’s going to hold up versus just you trying to figure it out, or me trying to figure it out myself, especially with this unit just being like, all right, hopefully it does hold out. 

Now, some of you’re like, all right, cool. Pitch me, Ravi. I don’t have a pitch right now. All I care about in this episode is that you find an ACL expert, seriously. Don’t do it on your own. Just because you have a nice PT doesn’t mean that they are good enough for this process. You can respectfully find your own path. You can do it in conjunction with working with them. There are so many different routes to go about doing this. And I tell this to any of the athletes who consult with us for the ACL remote coaching, I don’t care who it is, just find the proper help. We’re not like, hey, work with us. We offer what we offer. And then if people want to work with us, then great. If not, then my biggest thing is I always want to make sure that people can just know that they need to find the help. I try to assess this based on the calls we have, based on their situation, and let them know, Hey, this is a red flag. I know that you trust this person and they’re nice, but if you guys haven’t had strength testing in six months of working together, it’s a red flag. In the first four months, it’s a red flag. The thing is, the ACL literature is up to date, but the thing is, practice is dragging behind a lot because PTs are just not being educated about this. What we’re trying to do is get on the front lines and help this by doing mentorships and educating other PTs and other professionals in this space. But it is a long time to come for that because there are just a lot of PTs and a lot of clinics. PT education is still way behind on this. 

This is something that we just want to make sure that you can just find someone that you can work with that you trust, because there are so many good humans out there doing really good work in the ACL space. Find the one that aligns with you best. The one that you know is your flavor of what they communicate, what they offer, and what you feel will be best for your lifestyle, financially. All the different factors you have to play into this are going to be super important. 

Please just don’t be that person six to 12 months from now, stuck in the same spot, figuring out, just doing it on your own. And I’m sorry for the healthcare system we’re in and our PT education. I wish that it made ACL rehab equal across, but as we know, in any profession, it is not equal across any single domain. But especially in ACL rehab, we are just not equipped for this. You have to pursue someone who knows this stuff. But you do have the opportunity to find the right person who can guide you in this and who has put in the work and has the credibility. So please go do that. Don’t fix your own AC. Don’t fix your own ACL rehab. I will call this guy again, Jeremy, the next time this happens, because I’m going to lean on an expert with this. I should have learned it previously, and I didn’t. As an ACLer, I really hope that you do the same. If you just needed this nudge to seek out some other options because your gut is telling you, I don’t know, like I feel like things are not adding up with this process, or I’m not getting the guidance I need, or you’re just left to piecing this together. I just think that no matter who you are, no matter what domain you’re in, what setting you’re in, insurance, whatever it might be, whatever country, you should never be left to do it on your own. You should never piece it together. You should have someone in your corner who is that GPS, who is guiding you. That is how healthcare should be, and you deserve that. If you don’t have that, then find a way to make that happen. Until next time, team, this is your host, Ravi Patel, signing off.

.