Three surgeries, 150 weeks, and what slow progress feels like, looks like.
I have the dubious distinction of having four knee surgeries for the same injury: torn ACLs. At some point, it stopped feeling like an injury and started feeling like a long-term project.
The timeline looks quite ridiculous when I write it down:
- 2013: Left ACL tear, followed by surgery
- 2022: Right ACL tear
- Also diagnosed with a torn left ACL again, timeline unknown
- 2023: Right knee surgery
- 2024: Left knee surgery, part one
- 2025: Left knee surgery, part two
That is a lot of hospital gowns, swelling, pain management, ice packs, physio appointments, and learning how to walk properly again. It's certainly more than I would have liked.
In this post I write about the last three years — three surgeries, and just as much rehab. It is also about what happens when incremental progress is too small to notice day to day, but becomes monumental over time.
First, WTF is an ACL?
The ACL, or Anterior Cruciate Ligament, is one of the key ligaments inside the knee. It connects the thigh bone to the shin bone and helps keep the knee stable, especially when you pivot, twist, turn, slow down, or change direction. It is a small but very important piece of engineering.
That is also why sports like football, basketball, skiing, and other high-speed, high-impact sports place such a heavy burden on it. These are sports where your body is constantly changing direction at speed, often under fatigue, pressure, or contact.
And when the ACL goes, it really goes. The moment it happens, it feels like the knee has given away, and you can't really control your feet. There is a loud, audible, and heartbreaking pop sound.
The difficult thing about the ACL is that it does not heal like a normal muscle strain. It has poor healing capacity, so a complete tear often does not simply repair itself with rest. ACL reconstruction surgery is often the route to return to any sort of activity.
In simple terms, ACL reconstruction means replacing the torn ligament with a graft. This graft can come from your own body, commonly from the hamstring tendon, patellar tendon, or quad tendon, or it can come from a donor.
Surgeons remove what's left of the damaged ligament, drill tunnels through the femur and tibia, thread the new graft through those tunnels, and fix it in place with screws or other fixation devices. Over time, the body adapts to the graft and it begins to function like a ligament.
When you say it like that, it sounds mechanical. Almost simple. But the lived experience is not simple at all.
Because the surgery is a one-shot process. It's everything that happens after where the real work is.
Painful, Slow, Boring Rehab
ACL rehab is slow. I may be biased, having done it four times — but it is the most painfully slow process there is. Not slow in the romantic, cinematic, montage kind of way. Slow in the boring, frustrating, repetitive way.
In the early days after surgery, you cannot do much. You ice the knee. You manage swelling. You try to bend it a few more degrees. You try to straighten it. You try to wake up the quad. You celebrate tiny wins that would have sounded pathetic a few weeks earlier.
A little more bend.
A little less swelling.
One better step.
One better night of sleep.
One more basic exercise done.
That is the strange thing about rehab. The work is tiny, but the stakes feel massive. You are not just recovering from surgery. You are teaching your knee, your body, and your mind to trust movement again.
Becoming Bulletproof
When I first went to my physio in 2023, before my first of the planned three surgeries, I had one goal in mind. I remember, in the Virgin Active treatment room, I told him, "I know I'm a bit fucked. I have two torn ACLs, need three surgeries, and have a long road ahead. But I want to become bulletproof."
That was the goal. Not just to recover and get back to normal. I wanted to become the strongest version of myself. After that, there was nothing clever left to do. Just the work.
I knew this was going to be a long journey. I also knew that the progress would be incremental. It would not be obvious every day. It would not always feel rewarding. Some weeks would look exactly like the previous week. Some days would feel like I had gone backwards. But it's one thing knowing about something, and completely another thing doing it.
The Weekly Proof
I also started documenting the rehab journey on Instagram. At first, it was just a way to track progress. A way to look back each week and see what had changed. It also made me accountable. A thing that I had to do, as a weekly milestone.
Week after week, the posts became proof of what I knew in theory. They were the theory in practice. They became a live timeline of evidence that something was changing, even when it did not feel like it.
Small steps, repeated long enough, do eventually turn into big distances.
It has now been more than three years. A little over 150 weeks. Every week was a reminder that there was work to be done. Probably there is work still too. Every week also became evidence that the work was working.
I always find it amazing, as I look through my videos — and I do that often — that I went from struggling to walk to squatting and deadlifting well over my bodyweight. I went from protecting my knee to trusting it. Gained a lot of confidence, but I also lost some stuff too.
What I Lost, What I Found
Football was the hard one. Running too, to a certain extent.
Leaving football was heartbreaking because there was no farewell, no last match, no testimonial as the romantic footballer imagines. Just the quiet realisation that one version of me belonged to the past. There was no clean closure. Just a slow acceptance that my history with football had become exactly that: history.
I'd changed. And my sport needed to change with me.
Now it is cycling. It wasn't a completely cold start. I was already commuting on the bike and doing a bit of work on it in the gym, and I'd always enjoyed being out on it, just never as a sport in its own right. My physio pointed me toward it too. It's non-impact, easy on the knees, and it scales — you can put in as much work as you want and keep getting more out of it. And London helps. It's a genuinely cycle-friendly city, with parks and routes that make it a proper year-round sport rather than a fair-weather one.
I train biking in the gym now. I regularly take my bike out for long rides. It gives me the sense of movement, effort, freedom, and progression that I used to find in football, but in a different form.
Along the way, other things changed too. I started eating better. Sleeping better. Training better. My routines became more disciplined. Now I am in the best shape I have ever been in. Of course, Im not bullet proof. I know that. Far from it actually. But the pursuit always continues.
And strangely, it feels like I am only getting started.
That is the thing about incremental progress:
Day by day, nothing seems to change. But suddenly, everything is different.