World Champion Sailor's Patellar Tendon Repair

The real secret to success is the patient's attitude and the ability to train harder and train smarter during their rehab phase of healing and then during the fitness and conditioning phase that it takes to get back to sports fitter, faster and stronger than you ever were before.

Andrew Holdsworth 51 years old, I'm now four months after procedure for repairing a patellar tendon. I said, let's use this as an opportunity to do the best recovery that's possible, the fastest recovery and not do any have any setbacks and put as much pride in the quality into the recovery of workouts as I would in any other sport I was doing. So my recovery became my sport. Sailing was my first love. I was lucky to win my first world championships at 21 and I've had lots of top 10 in world sailing championships ever since. Two years after buying a bike, I was putting a number on for the first time and I got beaten up for a couple of years and then about the third, fourth year of racing I was able to get to US National Mountain Bike sSandards and actually got ranked first that year. When I'm committed to do something, it's 100% focus and I'm doing research and putting as much effort into it as I possibly can. Working with the physio team here, it was blatantly apparent I had to do a number of gym workouts and I also had to do workouts with accelerated heart rate. It reminded me very much of when I was racing cycles in that you have to have a method and you have to have a system and you have to measure it.

Three two one above 135 feet PM for five minutes.

Technology and a lot of the apps out there now are able to help patients keep track of their reps. That's intervals and time of rest between each side, which helps them stay focused and on track when they're doing their rehab. There's no hiding from data, you know, it is a value. You can't hide it. You either did better or you did worse. I know when to show up and I know providing us stick to the schedule, I will get all the workouts done and be on schedule and so it kind of makes life a lot easier. And so now we're at four months in every week I'm seeing, Oh, I couldn't do that last week. I'm finding ranges of motion or bits of strength that I didn't have last week.

The solution that you just saw with Andrew is it takes going into it with smart, well organized, well thought through surgery, followed by incredibly dedicated rehabilitation that is designed for each phase of both healing and fitness. And Andrew has done it as well as anybody possibly can.