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http://www.palmbeachpost.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/palmbeach/miamidolphins/entries/2008/06/12/ronnie_brown_not_avoiding_cont.html

Ronnie Brown not avoiding contact along comeback trail

By Tim Graham | Thursday, June 12, 2008, 11:00 PM

DAVIE — In 11-on-11 drills during today’s voluntary workout, RB Ronnie Brown got jostled around rather aggressively for someone coming back from a serious knee injury.

But that doesn’t seem to matter to Brown. He said he appreciated the defense giving him some contact. He will need to deal with the bumps to get mentally prepared for live action.

“I feel comfortable with it,” Brown said of the bumping. “Especially coming back off the injury, I think the main thing is trying to get it out of your mind and not be too conscious of it and just trying to go there and play without thinking about the injury.

“The (drills) I get to go in and fully participate, you just do what you’d normally do. When I’m in, let ‘em go.”

Dolphins coach Tony Sparano said he was pleased with where Brown is in his recovery. Brown took part in some seven-on-seven drills during mini-camp over the weekend, but the team decided to increase his activity this week.

“Ronnie has progressively worked in team drills all week, just giving him a little bit more than where he was in mini-camp with where you guys saw him,” Sparano said. “And that’s good. We got him behind the line a little bit and I think that’s helpful.”

Good Luck  Ronnie, Hope you are 100%

Good that he's making some contact, but I read in the Miami Herald that at one point, he was favoring his knee.  That shows he's not 100%.

  Well, it's been 8 months since the injury happened.  It'll be nine months at the start of training camp.  So, there will still be some issues with knee.  Nothing major, the team just needs to continue to be cautious and take it slow with Ronnie's recovery.

Not disagreeing with you as such, just pointing out that the knee should be 100% healed at this point. What's left is reduced proprioception (the body's ability to sense it's position), balance, muscle strength and flexibility.

Strength is something you can't really start working on until the knee is healed (until the bone forms around the grafted ligaments, securing the in place). That takes about 6 months and there's not a damned thing you can do to speed up the process. Flexibility is hard to work on as well, but it's something that newer surgical procedures have done a lot to improve.

Proprioception is the real killer. This can manifest itself in any number of ways, including "favoring a leg". The fundamental problem is that "the body" doesn't have a firm grasp of exactly how bent / twisted the knee is in a given situation and therefore cannot "tighten up" to prevent significant (re)injury. It's natural to overcompensate for this and rely on your conscious mind to tell the body to react. That takes way too long though, and significantly impacts performance.

Even with the best rehab available today, regaining proprioception takes a really long time - sometimes years, sometimes it never fully recovers.