AVA - ACL Virtual Assistant 17+

Having experienced knee pain for the majority of my life, I love how this app gave me a clear roadmap on exactly how to return to playing my favorite sports. The knee readiness score is a really cool concept that lets me quantify my progress and see how close/far I am from engaging in various activities. The work progressions are specially tailored to my unique situation based on the questionnaire I answered in the beginning. Loving the app and progress I’ve made so far! Would highly recommend to anyone recovering from an ACL tear or experiencing knee pain!!

I tore my ACL and Meniscus while playing volleyball and had absolutely no frame of reference for how to navigate the recovery process from deciding what type of surgery to get, how to do PT (physical therapy) immediately after surgery, and longer term PT. My recovery process ended up being a hodge podge of hopping around to different PT clinics that resulted in a recovery process that was long and not cohesive. As a busy college student, I didn’t have a ton of time to invest into PT and not a lot of financial resources to invest into expensive, 1:1 PT where I wasn’t passed off to an aid for most of the hour. At a certain point, I got very unmotivated and didn’t want to return to the sport. I was functional (could walk), but wasn’t able to kneel all the way and had no confidence in the left knee for activities like jumping, running, and lunging. But, I met the app developers 1 year after my surgery coincidently when I decided to give volleyball one last try and they pointed me to the same resources they were integrating into the app. 6 months later I’m working towards jumping and building technique that’ll help prevent injury in the future, even as I’m traveling and am not able to see a physical therapist in person regularly.

AVA was the app I wish I had when I first got injured. It would’ve clearly helped me differentiate criteria for returning to daily life vs. returning to competitive sport play, customize guidelines based on my specific graft, sport, and timeline, and explain the reasoning behind those guidelines. How are you supposed to know how different the recovery process will be depending on whether or not your meniscus is torn? How are you supposed to know when to start playing your sport again? The app developers are avid sports enthusiasts who have gone through ACL recovery themselves and a handful of other injuries so they definitely understand how tough it can be and care a lot about injury prevention ( they act as informal PT/injury experts within our volleyball community also).

I highly recommend downloading this app no matter what stage of the recovery process you are in. When you’re in the depths of recovery, clarity is what you need, and AVA can provide that without a significant $$ investment.

Thanks AVA + team, and to those who are going through the recovery process, you got this! It takes time and support, but you definitely can get to where you were before!