The Truth About "FULL Recovery"
First up is differentiating between what it means to make a full recovery and achieving peak athletic performance because both terms are used interchangeably but they actually mean different things.
Full Recovery
Making a full recovery means that your lengthened bone or bones are fully healed when your surgeon says so after seeing the final x-rays, as well as your soft tissue (muscle, nerves and so on).
It also means you’ve regained full flexibility in your limbs and you have the potential to do the activities you did pre-surgery .
Peak Athletic Performance
However achieving peak athletic performance means doing your activities at your maximum athletic potential assuming you were even able to reach this peak capacity - which most people never do, outside of Olympic athletes between the ages of 18-34 in their heyday that is if they are checking off all boxes on workout, rest, nutrition, supplementation and so on.
And any “untouched” body undergoing any major orthopedic structure-altering procedure will not be the same. This means, assuming you don’t have a deformity, even a small incision to your soft-tissue will degrade max performance potential let alone breaking bones and distracting them. But it doesn’t mean you can’t do the same things you did before to a high-enough level to completely suffice you.
In fact, I bet if a vast majority of limb lengthening patients trained as hard as they could post-consolidation they would probably be more athletic than they were pre-surgery just due to the intensified training stimulus being greater than they had pre-surgery even if their body was only 90-95% as capable.
We usually just fear losing what we don’t even use. You’ll use your height every single day but you probably won’t care about hitting a sub-11sec 100m dash for the foreseeable future unless you’re an elite track athlete of some sort in which case this isn’t a procedure you should consider until you’re done competing.
So what are some factors that dictate how much athleticism you’ll regain post LLS?
- Time:
- Assuming no complications, it takes on average up to 2-3 years post surgery to achieve full recovery but then again it’ll vary by...
- How fast patient heals, rebuilds and matures new bone and soft tissue
- How much they rehab to regain full flexibility & strength of their limbs
- How much they’ve lengthened - conservative vs. extreme amounts
- Biomechanics
- When you lengthen any one of your limbs you automatically change your biomechanics. Why is this a big deal? Because it affects your
- Proprioception - which is how you move your body through space and after limb lengthening your center of mass shifts a bit affecting things like running, jumping and agility
- You can eventually adapt to these changes but it will take specific training and even then it can be awkward for some time.
- Lifting - longer limbs can affect things like squats and deadlifts because of how it impacts your moment arms forcing you to change your stance wider to prevent excessive forward lean or posterior pelvic tilt.
- Besides your stance and rebuilding muscle strength and size, LL should have less impact on your lifting game than aggressive agility at least initially.
- Device Removal
- If you have your lengthening device still implanted DO NOT expect to be able to regain anymore than 80-85% of your athletic ability. The devices cause rigidity to some extent within the body meaning there will be a cap on what you can do all out.
- Once you get the device removed, rehab and rebuild for another year and retest your abilities and tell me you aren’t able to achieve far greater athletic feats.
- Nutrition
- I know it’s not as popular with a lot of patients, but nutrition is so important for a full recovery. Eating a meal from the drive-through vs. one that is optimized with ideal macros for your goals is not even a contest. You are what you eat and this is so true for coming back after limb lengthening. I mean, it’s what I do and I run circles around people in the gym.