Tanith's Story: ACL rupture, netball and volleyball player

I met Tanith in October 2010, she was in her early 30’s, working in the Civil Service, a keen sports women playing volleyball and netball for her work teams and she also enjoyed running and the gym.

We met in the gym at Fitness First on Tottenham Court Road, another trainer in the gym had done a few sessions with Tanith and she was leaving so recommended that she train with me instead.  Unfortunately before we started Tanith ruptured her ACL playing netball so wanted to put doing any sessions on hold but a PT friend of hers suggested that she should train with me anyway for rehab.

I could tell Tanith was nervous about training with me.  Not only because she was in a lot of pain but also I am aware that I can come across as intimidating because of the way I train/look so I was conscious of making her feel comfortable.  Tanith later told me that she was nervous about training with me as she’d watched me train and thought I was tremendous but that once we had sat down and spoken she thought I was brilliant and a perfect fit for her.

We started three months before she was due to have knee surgery, she’d partially torn her ACL, had multiple tears to her cartilage and a fracture to the tibia after landing badly in a netball match which she’d gone into with an ankle injury.  She was pretty low and mental drained as had been misdiagnosed for 4 weeks and her previous PT had contributed to her injury through novelty inappropriate exercises.

Tanith’s original goal in coming to me was to build up as much strength as she could before the surgery to give herself a greater chance of full recovery and get back to doing the things she loved again.

Going over Tanith’s case history we built up a good picture of what was going on, she told me about multiple ankle sprains through sport, locking/’thick’ feeling knees, sacroiliac pain, general back pain, ‘tight’ IT bands and pain around the collar bone area.

My first goal was to get Tanith out of persistent pain, understandably it was affecting everything in her life.  I was also very conscious of needing to build her trust in me to allow this to happen not only because of the pain and making her worse but also her experience with other professionals.

From my observations I could see Tanith held a lot of tension in her neck and shoulders, most likely triggered by poor breathing patterns, she had asthma and I could see she struggled to take a full deep breath.  She was predominantly breathing up into her neck, rather than down into her diaphragm to get a full 360 degree breath. This in turn created poor position and movement of the rib cage and therefore her pelvis too as she wasn’t using her breathing muscles effectively.  Also her multiple ankle sprains, which never really got rehabbed properly, were causing problems further up the chain.

We spent the three months before Tanith’s surgery getting her as strong as possible, mostly focusing on a lot of ‘core’ and breath work to get her to feel her deep abdominals, build overall strength and improve the positioning of her rib cage and pelvis to take her out of pain.  We then went on to do single leg exercises and ankle strength and control work.

Tanith had also been told in 2007-2008 after a sacro-illiac dysfunction diagnosis “you will never run again”.  It makes me so frustrated that professionals can throw out statements like this which I think can be very damaging and limiting, making people fearful of ever doing certain movements again.  I explained to Tanith that if running was a goal of hers and she was prepared to put the work in to get strong then I for sure would do my best to get her back there!

After the surgery Tanith continued to train with me and we worked on gradually building back her range of motion in her knee, overall strength and structural balance and agility through a structured training programme of a session with me once a week or every fortnight with homework to do on her own.  We also got Tanith doing more aerobic work to focus on improving her lung function and helping to prevent asthma flare ups. Tanith also had a weight loss goal so we did a lot of work on changing her lifestyle too. Over time she lost weight and really big she got back to running!

The biggest successes I feel for Tanith were getting her out of constant pain and feeling confident that her body could do all the things she wanted to do.

I’ve now been training Tanith for 9 years on and off and through two pregnancies too.  Over that time we’ve worked through many challenges that life throws at you and Tanith has always come out stronger.