Jordan Love Injury Update! Jordan Love MCL Injury Explained

Jordan love quarterback of the Green Bay Packers suffered a lower leg injury last night in their match up against the Philadelphia Eagles in the final moments of the game at the time of the injury there was speculation as to whether or not it was a knee and or an ankle injury and to the severity of the injury it looks like as of right now Jordan love has in fact undergone some tests that have ruled that his ACL is intact and the ankle has been spared in this injury however as of right now they are saying that the MCL was injured pending further testing so it looks like as of right now love has dodged a major bullet in the fact that this injury should not be season ending however these MCL injuries do have a grading system of them and that depends on the severity with today's video I want to take a look at the injury video we're going to go ahead and explain the anatomy of the knee including the MCL and talk about the grading system and what that person should expect when coming to physical therapy ladies and gentlemen welcome to my channel if you're not familiar with me my name is Nick Gallow and I'm a doctor of physical therapy and with my channel I take a look at sports injuries and I explain them so that they're a little bit easier to understand I will also go over the pertinent Anatomy as well as talk about the rehab process if you enjoy this sort of content and you want to see more of it please hit that Thumbs Up And subscribe to the channel because I will be making more of these in the future regarding sports injuries Rehabilitation and other Physical Therapy related content also if you yourself have dealt with an MCL injury go ahead and comment on your experience in the comment section below we can see here in the injury video that as love is going to be tackled the defender is going to wrap around that leg here as he's doing this he's putting a lot of torque going through the knee and we see what looks like a slight pop here I have a model of the knee joint and so the knee is formed by the femur also known as the thigh bone that's going to come down and form the top portion of the knee then the bottom piece here is going to be formed by this other long bone known as the tibia also called the shin bone that's going to come up like so as we flip the model towards the side here we also have a long bone known as the fibula bone and all of this is going to make up what we know as being the knee joint now the knee joint is stabilized by four major ligaments the first one known as that anterior cruciate ligament or ACL for short is located right in through here the MCL or the medial collateral ligament is along the medial or inside portion of the knee right here as we flip the model towards the outside or lateral portion we have the lateral collateral ligament also known as the LCL and finally as we flip the model to the back here we have the posterior cruciate ligament also known as the PCL there are also two other very important structures located within the need they of course are the medial and lateral miniscus now let's talk about why the MCL is implicated in this injury anytime somebody is going to be having a force known as a valgus force where it's going to be coming from the outside pointing in towards the knee here like so you can see that it's going to greatly stress that MCL often times the force is not perfectly lateral to medial a lot of times it can be also directional in terms of being posterior to anterior which we kind of see in this video it looks like the defender is actually going from the back to the front as well as lateral to medial and this this is why there was a lot of speculation initially as to whether or not the ACL was involved because anytime we have a force going diagonal coming posterior to anterior and lateral to medial this can not only disrupt the MCL it can also disrupt the ACL as well as the medial miniscus and this is known as a terrible Triad injury fortunately in this case sources are already saying once again the ACL is intact and it's expected that he's dealing with an MCL injury however it's important to know that this is why this is an extremely risky position for the knee sources are also reporting that the ankle has been ruled out in this injury however I want to go over briefly why it was thought that it could be implicated anytime a person's foot is going to be planted into the turf and there's any sort of rotational Force going through that ankle joint as the foot is planted you can see here it wants to essentially separate the tibia and the fibula bones we have two ligaments that are located directly above the ankle and so often times when this type of a mechanism occurs they're dealing with something known as a high ankle sprain we call it a high ankle sprain because the ankle ligaments that we know are located in three in through here medially and laterally however the two ligaments that are damaged in a high ankle sprain are slightly above the ankle joint now let's go ahead and talk about this pop that we see on the injury video there are a number of scenarios where this pop can occur of course the big one is going to be an ACL tear that's why it was speculated initially however that's been ruled out so there are some other structures that can pop in and out out one of them being the patella also known as the kneecap on the knee that can subl loock where it goes out of the place and then comes right back in or if the MCL injury is severe enough this can be that MCL snapping it has not been revealed what the exact source of that pop seems to be at this time however if I happen to hear more information about that I'll be sure to update everybody if we believe somebody is dealing with an MCL injury whether it be on the field or in the clinic what we'll do is we'll put them through a very comprehensive evaluation which will also include a special test known as a vgas test and so essentially what we're going to do is we're going to reproduce the mechanism that leads to these MCL injuries we're going to have the person Li down we're going to put a valgus force going through the knee and in this testing position once again it's going to be straining that MCL and so what we are looking for here we're going to see whether or not this is going to reproduce the person's pain and or if we feel laxity in the affected leg compared to the non-affected leg if it reproduces their pain and if we start to feel a little bit of laxity then this can help us toer wom basically think that we are dealing with an MCL injury however the gold standard of course to diagnose these is the MRI M of course are going to give us the grade of the ligament injury and so I want to go over that grading system there are grades 1 two and three in a grade one MCL injury this is where we're getting stretching of the affected MCL in a grade two this is where we are getting partial tearing and finally in a Grade Three you're getting a full rupture in a grade one MCL injury their recovery process could take anywhere from about 1 to three weeks time in a grade two because you're getting partial tearing this can take anywhere from about 4 to 6 weeks and finally in a Grade Three this could take at least 6 weeks and sometimes even longer depending on the severity and how the person is presenting the good news is that often times MCL injuries rarely need surgery however if a person is dealing with extreme instability in the knee then this of course will be the worst case scenario and then they will require surgery as a person comes to physical therapy we are essentially initially going to treat them with the acronym rice where R stands for rest I stands for ice stands for compression and E stands for elevation because during this phase we essentially want to pump out as much swelling and inflammation from The Joint as possible then as the person starts to progress with physical therapy we can start to work in range of motion exercises and finally start to work on strength and when finally appropriate we can work in sports specific movements so we wish Jordan love the best of luck moving forward it looks like he has avoided a very significant injury in this case however he is going to miss sometime so as I happen to hear more information regarding the updates on him obvious sure to update everybody in the comments section also if you happen to hear anything please feel free to update me as well thank you so much for tuning in to my video today if you enjoy this sort of content I'm going to go ahead and Link another one of my playlists so that you can watch some of the videos that I've talked about in the past thank you once again for tuning in and I'll see you next time