Achilles Tendon Recovery: 10 Weeks Post-Surgery Progress

It’s been ten weeks since the surgeon put my Achilles tendon back together again. This article shares exercises I’m working on, strategies for pain and fear management, and my comeback progress.

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March 4, 2025

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than two months since this terrible injury happened. The day I was getting more comfortable with a tumbling pass, my Achilles tendon snapped. I was being brave and confident, and my body failed me.

Since getting my cast off two weeks after the surgery, I’ve been faithfully going to physical therapy twice a week. My therapist’s name is Sagar and he has done a great job supporting my recovery. The only downside is the pain he inflicts in our sessions. I’ve always been an anti- “no pain, no gain” kinda gal in my workouts. It seems when you are rehabbing an injury like this one, you don’t get away with that.

What does physical therapy look like now?

I think it’s necessary to keep in mind that not everyone is at this point at the 10-week mark. Individual timelines vary greatly. If you are reading this early after your injury, you might do this much later on in your recovery timeline.

That said, this is what I’m doing now.

Warmups & Exercises

After work, I go to physical therapy. When I arrive, I start on a machine that combines a recumbent bike and a stair master. I push with my toes, then my heels for five minutes each. This gets blood flow going and reduces stiffness from a long day at work.

Then, I’ll do any of the following:

Other therapeutic modalities

In addition to the exercises, physical therapy uses different strategies to assist healing. These are the ones Sagar has been applying during our sessions.

Manual massage

Depending on the day and how I’m feeling, Sagar pokes and prods different areas around my foot, ankle and calf. He checks for range of motion, strength, scar formation, and tight muscles throughout the kinetic chain. For example:

• If I walk in limping, he checks my hip rotator and lower back muscles. He literally digs his elbow into my gluteals then works internal and external hip rotation. Then he digs into the quadratus lumborum next to my spine to loosen it up.
• As he checks my range of motion, he’ll usually find a tendon in my ankle that is particularly sensitive. Then he digs in to loosen it up.
• He’ll find scar tissue that’s forming and break it up with deep tissue massage. It’s a pain party.
• If I have any swelling around the ankle, he’ll aggressively massage it until it’s gone. Apparently, you can push all the excess fluid into the lymphatic system to eventually be excreted.
• Around week 8, I was feeling a lot of strain in my anterior tibialis (outside of shin muscle). He dug so hard that I felt sore for almost a week after. After the week passed, the pain and strain went away. I haven’t felt it since.

Ultrasound

This is technology similar to what doctors use to see babies in the womb. However in this application, sound waves are used to create heat wherever the wand is applied. In my case, it is rubbed over tissues in my ankle that are sore or sensitive.

The wand creates heat in the area. Every so often, he’ll linger over one spot and I’ll feel a quick zap of searing pain. I don’t like it, but the process is used to increase blood flow, create new cellular growth and help repair tissues. So, I endure it and hope that I don’t kick him in the process.

Electrical stimulation

At the end of the session, Sagar uses a TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) machine. Two sticky pads with wires are applied to specific areas on the skin. Then, waves of electrical pulses are sent through the wires to the area being treated. It creates a tingling sensation and muscular contractions which is supposed to help strengthen the muscles.

The higher the intensity, the more zappy it feels. A damp heating pad is placed over the pads which dilates the blood vessels, increasing blood flow to the area. The weight of that also makes the zapping more intense. I sit there for ten minutes distracting myself on my phone while my ankle is electrified.

No pain, no gain?

Physical therapy is not comfortable. These healing tools are a mixture of both torture and relief. I hate the pain. Mentally, it goes against my “no pain” philosophy. Sometimes it hurts too much and I have to tap out. Then, he’ll back off or move to another area to give me a rest. Then he’ll go back and do it again. In the moment, I question the methods. But after it’s done, I somehow walk out feeling a little bit looser and more mobile (and exhausted). Since I am healing, I’m willing to endure some pain in the name of progress.

Making progress happen outside of PT

I returned to the gym in the third week after surgery. Of course, I was really limited with what I could actually do. I dabbled in some things I could do in the boot: headstands, stretching, upper body strength work. I also saw my flippy friends, who I missed seeing each week.

Now that I’m past week 10, I can see significant progress. There’s still a lot of weakness in my foot and ankle, but every day gets at least 1% better.

This is what I’ve been working on throughout this week:

Building strength and range of motion

In addition to the things I do at PT, I do the following as often as possible at work, at home and at the gym:

Theraband range of motion

The resistance from the band helps warm and strengthen the small muscles in my ankle and foot needed for walking. I try to do this as often as possible and increase the tension of the band as I get stronger.

Walking with a normal gait

With this injury, you don’t walk normally for a very long time. Weeks are spent in the cast, completely non-weight bearing. In the boot, you walk with an uneven limp for even longer.

Even when the boot is gone, your ability to walk normally is impaired. This is why:

1. Muscle mass has been extremely diminished in the foot, ankle and calf. You’re just not as strong as you were before the injury.
2. Your brain has been trained to compensate for the injury. After you leave the boot behind, you will spend months retraining the proper neuromuscular patterns for simple walking.
3. You must relearn how to push off the toes through pain. Your brain won’t like it. It feels very strange, like you can’t remember how to walk normally.
4. Nothing feels right. There’s a painful pull on the tendon and incision as it stretches out. This makes you want to default to a limp. You have to constantly be mindful to walk normally.
5. Sometimes there’s numbness or pins and needles in the heel that’s uncomfortable to step on.
6. Making more demands on the underdeveloped muscles, tendons and ligaments in the foot and ankle, you get exhausted quickly.

In order to retrain the brain how to walk, it must be done very slowly. I practice slow heel-toe walking every day when I’m not trying to get somewhere fast. Otherwise, each step will reinforce the brain’s tendency to protect itself, by limping.

Knee to wall

At gymnastics

At the gym, I am inching my way towards progress. I’m still really limited, but I’ve been adding some skills each time I’m there. These are a few things I’ve been working on as of week 10:

Floor

There are not many floor skills I can do right now. Most require either pushing off or landing on both feet, like cartwheels and round-offs. So, I’ve been working on improving my handstand holds and rolls. Of late, I push off my good foot (my “dork side”) and then stand up on two feet. I’m not quite ready to push off the injured side yet.

The big advancement was moving my handstand roll from the cheese mat to the floor. It was a huge boost of confidence to roll and stand up on both feet. It showed that the work I’ve been doing really is having a positive effect.

Trampoline

While my trampoline repertoire is definitely limited, the bed is very soft and absorbs impact slowly. I always feel very comfortable trying new things there. The chance of injury is much lower there than anywhere else in the gym.

I’m not trying any actual flips yet; that will wait until the four month mark. But, I have felt comfortable taking baby steps to start gentle rebounding work.

My goal: to train my brain to start pushing more off of my toes.

Like I said, you forget how to do that with foot and ankle injuries. The bouncing on the trampoline has been a safe way to build that neuromuscular pattern back up.

The video below gives a sample of the things I’m doing now:

• Higher bouncing, pushing off the toes
• Tuck jumps
• Back drops
• Low dive rolls
• Donkey kicks from standing
• Putting skills into combinations
• Starting single leg bounces on the injured side

Each week I feel emboldened to try something new. As long as there’s no pain on the first try, I add it to my list of safe skills.

Bars

The only thing I feel comfortable doing are pullovers. To be honest, I didn’t have a ton of skills to begin with. But now, the fear of losing my grip and jamming my foot wrong is real. So, I’ll keep working on making my pullovers more consistent for now. One of these days, I’ll try a back hip circle again.

Managing the challenge of pain and fear

The hardest part in this phase of my recovery is re-gaining lost dorsiflexion range and strength. Simply put, it hurts and the fear of re-rupture is real.

After I do any exercise, no matter how good it feels, as soon as I rest, everything tightens up again. Sitting down for any length of time sends me back to square one. Waking up in the morning, that first step hurts a lot. It takes some time to warm it up and feel comfortable again.

The experience of dealing with ongoing pain is frustrating and discouraging. Sometimes, when Sagar tells me to try something new, I want to cry. The mix discomfort and fear can be overwhelming. I can see how some people might not want to do the daily work required to improve. But, that becomes problematic in the long run. The less you do the work, the harder it is to progress.

To be honest, there is a degree of acceptance of the discomfort and pain that is required. I can’t wish it away, so I tell myself that this is part of the process and to breathe deep. I accept that I will be feeling some degree of pain for the foreseeable future. This helps me to keep going. As time passes, the overall pain experience does decrease.

In addition to acceptance, there are three things I have come to respect as requirements for healing:

1. Respect Lizard Brain: Be patient

The fear associated with this injury is very real. I’ve talked a ton in the past about Lizard Brain and how it sometimes holds up skill progress. Right now, I can’t fathom chucking a front tuck. The fear of the landing stops me in my tracks.

How do I deal with this? Patience. As with any other skill I’ve gained, I know it will happen eventually. I just have to wait until the time is right. More rehab and strength building must happen first.

2. Respect my physical therapist’s instructions

Personally, what drives me is seeing the regular progress happening from day to day. In that light, I stretch as often as I have a chance to do so. I make myself do the strength work, even if it is a little scary. If Sagar said it’s okay, I do the work to move forward.

How do I get there? Modification. I also look for ways to do easier forms of the exercises first. That way, I can work up to the harder stuff slowly.

3. Respect the need to rest

When pain and swelling get to a certain level, I know it is time to stop and rest. The ankle feels much better after a good night’s sleep. I know I can get back to work the next day when I am well-rested.

How do I do this? Go to bed early. I’ve been turning in much earlier, sometimes starting the routine as early as 8:00 p.m. If I am utterly exhausted, I know I need a few more healing hours of sleep.

Enjoying the progress

Despite the pain, fear, and struggle associated with Achilles ruptures, hope remains. Two things have shown me the light at the end of the tunnel:

1. I am not in pain all the time. Once I warm up my ankle, I can move around and walk with more comfort than before.
2. I am able to do much of my job as a dance teacher with less difficulty. I still have to modify a lot. I can’t yet do turns on relevé (on my toes). But I am able to demonstrate much more now.

The following video shows a nice development in my healing in week 10. My friend Debby, owner of Flipper’s Gymnastics, decided to have her first showcase this year. She asked me to choreograph a little dance for the adults to show. At the time, I was early on in my healing process. I figured I could choreograph it and the others would perform.

Well, it turns out I actually got on the floor and lead the dance. The floor was bouncy enough and I was able to go easy on the injured side. This was the end result (I’m in front with the socks):

Making a comeback from an Achilles tendon rupture takes lots of time, work and patience. It is a pretty grueling rehab period. Slow and steady is what wins this race. There’s no wishful thinking that will help; only acceptance of the struggle and perseverance every day. Recovery requires you to be graceful and kind to yourself every day. It’s the only way to finish this marathon.

If you have any questions about this recovery, reach out in the comments. I’m happy to help.