Chris Cooley feels like Iron Man. The Washington Redskins tight end is rehabbing his sore left knee on an anti-gravity treadmill. An air-filled suit provides a lift as he works out at Redskins Park.
“I’ll run at 40 percent of my weight. Tomorrow I’ll run at 50, the next day run at 60 until I can run without [the suit],” Cooley said. “As long as I can run without swelling, we’ll increase 10 percent each day.
“You zip in this cool thing, and it fills up with air all around you. You take it down to 20 percent of your weight, it’s like walking on the moon. It’s awesome. Whoever thought of this is a genius.”
A sore knee has sidelined Cooley most of training camp. Indeed, he’s not expected back until the Sept. 11 opener against the New York Giants. Not having its second leading receiver working with quarterbacks John Beck and Rex Grossman has restricted the offense. They just will have to jell during the regular season.
The offseason lockout probably caused the delay in his rehab. Cooley couldn’t talk with team medical personnel about his treatment options from March to July.
“My guess is it would have been taken care of earlier,” he said. “I probably would have had the same issue in OTAs and would have been able to take care of it earlier. … My mindset has always been to push through things, and I was hurting it more, more, more.”
Fortunately, two blood platelet treatments and two weeks of rest reduced the swelling. Now Cooley’s anxious to ditch the bulky brace.
“This is the best my knee’s felt since last year before I started having soreness,” he said. “The joint was so irritated that it had to have some time to calm down. It wasn’t the meniscus. I have enough cartilage in my knee. The problem was over a long period of time I was starting to bruise around it, and the joint was becoming so irritated.”
Cooley figures to return to practice next week “in some capacity” but already knows he needs a new workout routine to avoid long-term problems. After all, the two-time Pro Bowl selection is 29 years old. Despite a sore knee, he still played 16 games last season and had 77 catches, the second most of his seven-year career.
“It’s something you end up managing for a period of time, managing two months, three months,” he said. “[Other players with knee problems said] once they learned how to manage it, a proper workout routine for them, it seems to dissipate over time.
“I’m so confident I will be ready Week 1,” he said. “I’m not at this point thinking Week 2, 3, 4.”
Examiner columnist Rick Snider has covered local sports since 1978. Read more on Twitter @Snide_Remarks or email [email protected].
