Rehabilitation Journal
Welcome to your ACL Rehabilitation Journal! There are four main reasons why it is useful to keep a Rehabilitation Journal. First, filling out your journal entry each day will help you stay aware of and focused on the specific requirements of your rehabilitation program. Second, charting your progress through rehabilitation will provide you with the encouragement you need to rise to the challenge and persevere with your rehabilitation program. Third, documenting any setbacks or unusual pain you might experience will enable you and your rehabilitation professional to identify the source of the problem and modify your rehabilitation program accordingly. And fourth, maintaining the journal will enable you to apply physical and mental rehabilitation techniques that accelerate and improve the quality of the recovery process.
As soon as you have had your ACL surgery, you can begin to use your ACL Rehabilitation Journal. To get started, print out a copy of the weekly journal page (or, better yet, print out several copies for the first few weeks of rehabilitation).
Because goal setting is one of the most powerful rehabilitation techniques available, the first thing you should do in the Rehabilitation Journal program is to write in your Long-Term Rehabilitation Goal at the beginning of the first and each subsequent week. This goal, which likely will involve your knee functioning sufficiently well to perform a particular activity you value or enjoy, should reflect where you would like for your knee to be at the end of the rehabilitation period. Writing down your your Long-Term Rehabilitation Goal will remind you of where you hope to be and help keep your “eyes on the prize.” You can modify your Long-Term Rehabilitation Goal should your aspirations change over the course of rehabilitation.
Weekly Rehabilitation Goal:
You should set a Weekly Rehabilitation Goal at the beginning of each week. Although you are likely to be working on several aspects of rehabilitation at any one time (flexibility, strength, guided imagery, etc.), pick the most important aspect of your rehabilitation for that week when you are selecting your Weekly Rehabilitation Goal. You may wish to consult your rehabilitation professional for assistance in determining an appropriate target for your goal or you may decide to choose a Weekly Rehabilitation Goal that involves doing your guided imagery sessions. To get the most out of your weekly rehabilitation goals, double check to make sure that they are:
Specific Goals such as “feel better” or “ice more” are too vague to have much of an impact on your behavior. More specific goals such as “ice at least four days per week” or “do guided imagery at least three times per week” have a stronger motivational effect.
Measurable To enable you to evaluate your progress toward achieving your Weekly Rehabilitation Goal, you need to set goals that can be easily measured in terms of time, frequency, or rating/score.
Controllable Your goals should involve matters that are under your control. You cannot directly control how quickly your knee heals, but you can do things that make it possible for your knee to heal rapidly (such as icing/cryotherapy, completing your rehabilitation exercises, doing your guided imagery sessions, and eating a balanced diet). In other words, focus on the process of rehabilitation, not on the outcome.
Challenging For goals to be motivating, they need to be challenging and require some effort to accomplish. At the same time, the goals need to be attainable and realistic given your current rehabilitation situation.
Positive Goals work best when they direct you toward completing a behavior rather than avoiding a behavior. For example, a weekly goal focused on increasing the number of scheduled rehabilitation exercises you complete is likely to be more effective than a goal aimed at reducing the number of scheduled rehabilitation exercises you fail to complete.
After recording your Long-Term Rehabilitation Goal and Weekly Rehabilitation Goal at the beginning of each week, you will be all set to go! It will take you just a few minutes each day to write the following information in your ACL Rehabilitation Journal:
| Date: | Record the date. |
| Clinic: | Indicate whether you attended a rehabilitation appointment at a clinic (or other supervised setting) that day. |
| Home Exercises: | Record how many sets of your prescribed rehabilitation exercises you completed that day. |
| Ice Time: | Record how many minutes of icing/cryotherapy you did that day. |
| Guided Imagery: | Indicate how many times you listened to your guided imagery session that day. |
| % Rehabilitation: | Rate the degree to which you think your knee is rehabilitated from 0% (not at all rehabilitated) to 100% (completely rehabilitated). |
| Pain: | Rate your average level of knee pain over the day from 0 (no pain) to 10 (pain as bad as it can be). |
| Goal Progress: | Rate the progress you made that day toward achieving your Weekly Rehabilitation Goal from 0 (no progress) to 10 (a lot of progress). |
Self Talk:
Maintaining a positive attitude is critical to the success of your rehabilitation program. Negative thoughts can hamper your rehabilitation and make you feel bad in the process. One of the best ways to keep your thinking on track is to use positive self-talk. To apply positive self-talk in your rehabilitation, a good starting point is to write down a few positive affirmations or self-statements that you can say to yourself on a daily basis to encourage and motivate you through rehabilitation. Examples might include “I’m working hard at my rehab and my knee is getting better” and “I’m on the road to recovery.”
ACL rehabilitation can be full of challenges and frustrations, and it can be difficult to remain positive all the time. When you find negative thoughts creeping in, do your best to identify the thoughts and counteract the negativity with positive self-talk. For example, if you find yourself saying “My knee is healing so slowly—I feel so restricted,” catch yourself and reverse the tide by saying “With patience and hard work, I will heal more quickly and be back stronger than before.”
Comments:
Each day, record at least one example of positive self-talk that you used during that day in your ACL Rehabilitation Journal. Even if the only time you use the self-talk is at the time you are writing in your journal, put it down anyway!
Record any thoughts and feelings you have about your knee, your rehabilitation program, your guided imagery sessions, or any other aspects of the rehabilitation process. Note any unusual symptoms, complications, or unexpected medication effects you are experiencing.
At the end of the week, you can chart your recovery progress (% rehabilitated), pain, home exercise activity, ice time, guided imagery activity, and weekly goal progress on graph paper or a spreadsheet. As your charts develop, you can show them to your rehabilitation professional so that you are both aware of how you view the state of your ACL rehabilitation.
That’s all there is to it! In just a few minutes each day, you will keep your rehabilitation on track and compile a record of your rehabilitation that you can look back on and learn from in the years to come.
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