Training After Surgery
Physical therapy has signed you off, your surgeon is pleased, and you still take the stairs down one at a time. Here is how the strength comes back from here, for a new knee or a new hip.
Craig ChapinNASM Certified Personal Trainer
You are sixty-four. The knee was replaced in the spring, physical therapy did its job, and at the last visit you were discharged: walking without the cane, bending well, safe on your own. Everybody was pleased, and so were you.
Three months on, you still take the stairs down one step at a time. The low sofa needs a hand on the armrest. You have not been down on the floor since before the operation, and you are not sure you are allowed to be.
So you went looking for a personal trainer after knee replacement in Tampa, and found the physical therapy clinics you have already graduated from, surgeon pages about the operation itself, and group classes built for somebody else’s knees. What is missing is the part in between, which is where most of the strength actually comes back.
Physical therapy is built to make you safely functional, and discharge usually comes when you are. Strong is a different finish line. Orthopedic guidance commonly describes recovery continuing for months after the visits end, up to about a year, and what you do in those months decides a lot about where you land.
What usually lags behind, for a new knee or a new hip:
None of that means physical therapy fell short. It means the next stage is training, and training is a different job.
Not how much you can squat. The first questions are what your surgeon has said and what physical therapy left you with, because those two answers set the edges of everything that follows. Bring them with you:
Then the free first session does what it does for everyone: a free body-fat analysis, and a fitness evaluation that tests balance, strength, coordination and flexibility. On a new joint, each of the four answers a specific question:
Most people want something specific back: golf, pickleball, a long walk down Bayshore, a flight of stairs without the rail. All of those are built from the same five pieces, and the order matters more than the exercises.
A knee that will not quite straighten, or a thigh muscle that is slow to fire, makes every movement after it harder. If your home exercises were working on either, they are not finished just because the visits are.
From a chair, then a lower chair, then a box that decides the depth for you. It is a squat with a seat under it, and it is the movement you do most in a day.
Up is strength. Down is control, and down is what stairs actually test. A low step first, a rail or a strap within reach, and height added only when both legs look the same.
Beside a rail, then holding a strap, then on your own. Balance comes back when it is trained and rarely before, which is why Balance and Fall Prevention is a course on my record.
Last, not first, and only after you have asked your surgeon about kneeling. Many people find it uncomfortable on a new knee. It starts half-kneeling onto the other side, on a pad, with something solid to hold.
My fitness and personal training philosophy is that if you make small changes every day, it will result in a huge transformation over time.
Load is not the enemy of a new joint. Impact and guesswork are. Broadly, and always inside what your own surgeon has cleared:
Nothing on the right is off the table forever, and several of those are exactly where people want to end up. When is a decision your surgeon makes and your training earns. What a fast class cannot do is make that call for you set by set, and a new joint needs somebody making it.
Almost everything above applies to a new hip. Three things change the emphasis:
Two sessions a week, thirty or sixty minutes, starting once your surgeon has cleared you for independent exercise. This is the usual shape of it, not a promise about your joint:
The evaluation sets the baseline, and your home exercises become the warm-up rather than the whole plan. Load goes up slowly, only on movements that looked good last time. Nothing is tested to a maximum.
Lower boxes, slower step-downs, longer single-leg holds. Your body-fat baseline is rechecked as we go, so progress is something you can see written down.
Whatever you told me on day one, now trained for directly and within what your surgeon has cleared. From here some people stay one-on-one, and some add a Buddy Session with a friend, scaled to where they are.
One Tampa note. From June through September the long outdoor walk is usually the first habit to slip, because the heat makes it miserable. Two sessions a week indoors keep the work going through the months when Bayshore is too hot to enjoy.
All training is in person at Empire MMA and Fitness, 5006 S MacDill Ave in South Tampa, in thirty- or sixty-minute sessions, private one-on-one or with a friend. Sessions run Monday – Sunday, and clients come from South Tampa, Westshore, Brandon and Channelside.
You would be training with me: Craig Chapin, NASM certified since 2004, with 20+ years training clients privately. The person who runs your evaluation is the person watching every session after it.
Older-adult training is the deepest part of my continuing-education record, 13 of 31 courses, and two of them are about exactly this: “Exercise for Chronic Disabilities: Life After Hip or Knee Replacement” (2015) and “The Bionic Elder: Training with New Knees and Hips” (2019). Beside them sit “Balance and Fall Prevention” (2015) and “Good Knee / Bad Knees” (2017). The full record, with years, is on the About page.
Once the joint is settled and strength is the bigger goal, there are pages for strength training for men and strength training for women. If the knee arrived with a sore back, the back-pain article covers that order of operations. The session prices are published in full, and if you would rather ask a question before booking, use the contact page or call 813-310-4323.
Start Here
Bring your surgeon’s restrictions and your physical therapy notes, let me watch how the new joint moves, and leave with a plan built around what you are cleared to do. It costs nothing, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
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