Pre & Post-Operative Physiotherapy

Most people assume physiotherapy starts after an operation. In practice, the weeks before surgery are some of the most valuable in the whole process. Patients who enter knee surgery with better quadriceps strength, fuller range of motion and less pain and swelling have measurably better function at three, six and twelve months afterwards.

Prehabilitation with us covers strength and conditioning of the affected limb and surrounding structures, range of motion work (particularly important for stiff shoulders and knees), practical swelling and pain management strategies taught in advance, and clear education about what the operation involves and what the recovery stages will look like. Entering surgery informed removes a great deal of avoidable anxiety and poor decision-making later.

Before your programme begins we contact your consultant directly for the operation note and any procedure-specific protocol. That means your rehabilitation reflects the graft, the fixation, the tissue repaired and any restrictions your surgeon has set, rather than a generic template, and there is no conflicting advice between the two of us.

From there, rehabilitation runs in phases: protect and restore (swelling, range, activation, gait), rebuild (progressive strength, often supported with blood flow restriction training and EMS while full loading is restricted), and return (power, plyometrics, sport or work-specific exposure). Each phase has entry criteria you have to meet, and we retest rather than assume.

We rehabilitate ACL and other ligament reconstructions, meniscal repairs, rotator cuff repairs, shoulder stabilisations, hip and knee replacements, hip arthroscopy, Achilles repairs, ankle stabilisations and spinal surgery.

Dynamometry establishes a pre-operative strength baseline, which is far more useful than comparing you afterwards to a population average, and then tracks how much of that baseline you have recovered.

ForceDecks testing exposes loading asymmetry in jumping, landing and squatting that is invisible clinically but strongly associated with re-injury and poor long-term function.

Diagnostic ultrasound lets us assess effusion, tendon and repair-site integrity in clinic when a joint flares up, so we can tell an ordinary loading reaction from something that needs to go back to your surgeon.