Life long learning

Congratulations to Eden Prairie Physical Therapist, Meredith Butulis, on completing her MBA this weekend. This life-long learner also holds a Doctorate and Master's in Physical Therapy, Bachelor's in Pre-Med Health Studies, and several Personal Training and Pilates certifications. 

Hip post op labral tear

After surgery, people typically ask how long it will take to get back to various activities. Today, we will focus on post-op hip labral repairs with bony resections.

A labral tear means that the cartilage rim that helps support your hip stability has been injured. Not all labral tears require surgery. Surgical procedures and post-op protocols are also highly variable. The ideas presented here relate to one of our more common protocols, but again, it does vary by surgeon and exact procedure.




Here are the typical time frames for common activities:

1 week: Driving (for left hip surgeries)
3 weeks: Walking without crutches, Driving for right hip surgeries
6 weeks: Elliptical trainer
10 weeks: Some jogging and sport training
12-16 weeks: Modified return to sport
6 months-1 year: High level competitive sport without restriction

We hope this provides you an overview of activities. You should always check with your surgeon on his/her specific time frames for your specific surgery. Have a question or idea to share? Leave us a post!

Patellofemoral syndrome

What is patellofemoral syndrome? This is a question that we hear quite often at OSR Physical Therapy!

Patellofemoral syndrome means that your kneecap is not staying in line with thigh when you perform activities like walking, stair climbing, running, squatting, lunging, and jumping.

Think of your kneecap (aka patella) like a train. Think of your thigh (aka femur) like a set of railroad tracks. The train needs to stay centered on the tracks while you perform activities.

While traditional physical therapy focuses on strengthening your VMO (aka vastus medialis) and providing orthotics (shoe inserts), we use a more comprehensive sports medicine approach at OSR.

As suggested at the annual Cincinnati Sport Medicine Conference, the focus needs to be on the hip, not so much at the knee cap. Therefore, we assess the hip, knee, ankle, foot, and even core for muscle imbalances. Once we find those imbalances, we create a comprehensive custom treatment plan to resolve the muscle imbalances and retrain how you are performing the activities that were provoking the pain.

Most of the time, we find that we focus much more on how the "train track" works, and then the "train" just needs a little fine tuning so you can enjoy activities again!

Here is a video of one "train track alignment" exercise that we find almost everyone benefits from at some point in time:


Have questions or comments? Leave us a post!

This article was written by Meredith Butulis, DPT, who works at our Eden Prairie office.