Almost from birth, Johnny Collinson has proven that no obstacle is too great to overcome.
By age 4, Collinson had already climbed to the top of Washington’s Mount Rainier. before his 18the birthday, he went on to scale the highest peak in all the continents, becoming the youngest person to climb all Seven Summits.
Today, Collinson, one of the best freestyle skiers in the world, is one step closer to completing a different type and perhaps his most challenging uphill ascent: regaining his best form after a horrific downhill mountain accident that nearly killed him. destroys most of the knee almost two years ago. .
For him red bull athleteKnown the world over for dazzling social media and YouTube viewers with death-defying 360s, half pipes and other freestyle feats, his goal has been to get both feet back to the top of mountains full of dust since being sidelined by an injury that required multiple surgeries. , exhausting months of inactivity and a lot of uncomfortable rehabilitation.
the 2021 catastrophic accident It happened during what was supposed to be a fun day of skiing in the Lake Tahoe mountains. was one of red bulls emblematic events, the Red Bull Raid. As he prepares for a 360, a move in which he jumps off a cliff, does a 180 and starts skiing backwards, Collinson recalls that the extreme icy conditions caused him to accelerate faster than anticipated. After an awkward takeoff, Collinson says he hit the next cliff at a bad angle, crashing and rolling at more than 40 mph before coming to a stop. But the damage was done.
“I immediately felt my leg explode,” he recalls. “And then I kept falling down the mountain and I could feel my leg moving and trying to keep it in place. But I realized other things were tearing apart.”
To make matters worse, his skis never let go, causing what he describes as a lever-like effect that creates extreme force and more trauma during the dangerous descent.
He was rushed to an emergency room in Salt Lake City, and the prognosis was as bad as the pain: his knee ruptured: the patellar tendon, the anterior cruciate ligament, the anterior cruciate ligament, the anterior cruciate ligament, and the meniscus were torn; Right posterior ACL tears in both 2018 and 2019.
“My patellar tendon was stretched to the point of rupture, which I think is pretty uncommon,” he says. “My surgeon said he had never seen it before.”
Now, more than 18 months later, Collinson is inching closer to returning to competitive skiing in November. His winning strategy has been a combination of accepting the risks of his extreme sport while practicing patience and sticking to a rehab and training plan. After nearly two years, Collinson is just over a month away from achieving his goal.
“The goal for me is just to be in the snow when the resorts open here in North America,” Collinson says. “So that’s the end of November. So I have some work to finish everything. And then it’s more or less time to go.”
Take the risks with the rewards
By the time I took off and started doing my 360, I could feel that the rotation wasn’t quite right on the ground I was going to land on. I was like, this is not really what I want. And then as soon as I landed, I was just trying to handle the situation, but things were moving so fast. I hit the cliff and then everything exploded.
Those fractions of a second, where it’s slow in your mind, I can still imagine that slowness of the moment. I knew it injury was imminent, again, it was like, this is not going to end well. But to be honest, I accepted the risk of doing that kind of thing. I know these things can happen, so when it does, I just need to step up and manage the mental stress and the physical stress.
There’s no such thing as a Plan B up there when you’re in the air and it’s not really the best. Still, that’s why you put in all the training and all the work to be your best. And even then, all the work can only take you so far sometimes.
Rewind and reassess the situation
I saw the replay, which was nice to see because I had it pictured in my head in a way. So it was nice to see what the accident actually looked like, this time from an outsider’s perspective. I have a harder time watching other people get hurt, but for some reason seeing myself [go down the mountain] It wasn’t that bad, I had already hurt myself so I knew the outcome. So watching the replay a few times became more like a clinical breakdown of what went wrong. It was like, “Oh, that looked bad. Or, “That didn’t work out.”
Honestly, the hardest part was re-injuring myself, after trying to control myself after two more ACL tears. I worked to get stronger and made sure I felt good and ready for anything that was thrown at me, but then it hit me with this crazy injury. That is the hardest part. It was like, “What did I miss?” Or, “What could I have done better?” But in hindsight it’s 20-20. You just have to take the bad in stride and keep working to give your best.
Johnny Collinson trusts the process (no matter how long it takes)
I definitely wanted to go skiing again. And no one specifically He said no but…
Just from a timeline perspective, it takes about a year for your ligament to like being strong again. So that’s kind of a baseline for what was going on, I got an ACL in October, no matter what those nine months give us, no matter how good I feel, how strong I feel. And then after those nine months, it’s like, OK, when can we start skiing again?
It was almost eight weeks where I wasn’t allowed to bend my leg at all, or use my hip flexor or core, to let the patellar tendon heal. That basically holds all the quad muscles in place, so when that snapped, my quad muscles slid down my leg. So, in surgery, the doctors had to lower it and put enough tension on the patellar tendon. And then we had him straighten and immobilize. And we had to let that tendon heal without any flexing.
Yeah, so for eight weeks, I was pretty much sitting there. I did some basic upper body exercises in my basement. I’d sit on the floor and do kettlebell halos, bicep curls, shoulder presses, anything to get the blood moving. After getting clearance to bend the knee, he was trying to get that range of motion back.
Time and patience help heal
We did scraping, cupping, heavy rolling, everything we could to loosen up the muscles and tendons. So we spent about a month and a half working on it without going too far because of all the scar tissue.
That’s when I had to undergo manipulation, where they took me out and then the doctor just rotated my knee to break up the scar tissue. That was a game changer. Right after that, I was able to get on the spinning bike, right after I got home from the operation. I wandered around for about two hours. I wasn’t worried about the watts, just getting movement back.
That was the beginning. Five months later, I started moving him around a bit, which was still a bit tricky because there was no plan for this injury. As I was starting to recover and trying to build muscle, I still had no ACL or PCL and still had a lot of movement in my knee which still limited me in terms of physical therapy.
At the same time, we were working knowing that another surgery was coming that was going to be another setback. The second surgery, in October 2021, was really good for me mentally. Before, it was hard trying to work knowing another surgery was coming up. Here, it was easier to fully recommit to physical therapy and rehabilitation.
Keep it strong and simple
For most of my life I have done some kind of basic level of training. At one point, I was actually training more specifically to climb for rock climbing. Then my first ACL injury got me down the road of really getting into the training aspect and getting ready for ski season and just exploring the world of fitness a little bit.
My family was always super active, so ever since I was a kid, I would play pistol squats or play tightrope; we always trained for alpine ski races. So I always had a good, full range of motion.
Having that is important when it comes to skiing and other action sports because there are so many external forces acting on your body – we’re doing really unnatural things with our bodies. So having that much mobility and then strength through that range of motion is pretty important because if you only train a certain range and say, make a big enough jump skiing, it’s going to force you out of that range of motion. So, for me, it is very important to take care of that mobility.
As for the training philosophy, I would say mine is to keep it simple. You see a lot of guys on the internet coming up with these really crazy and wacky workouts. And I think if you have a goal, that’s great. But for me, the basics work great.
Single leg work such as Bulgarian split squats rank very high on my list. When it comes to ski-specific drills, I also like single-leg RDLs and good mornings. You’re getting more balance and stability work by being on one leg. You want strong quads, but you also want strong hamstrings, strong glutes, so trying to target those would be my recommendation.
Johnny Collinson is cautiously confident
I mean, I would be totally lying if I said I don’t think the injury will repeat itself in the snow.
But I think the most important part for me has been doing all this work in the gym and knowing that I’m trying to turn every stone and putting in as much time as I can, physically. So it’s like, my body is fine, we throw as much as we can in the gym. And now I will go back to skiing and feel confident that we did an outstanding job of strengthening my leg again. And then it’s just spending that time in the snow, knowing that the first couple of days he’s going to be a bit hesitant. Every time I do something, it’s for the first time again, like taking a jump. So he’s weighing whether that risk is worth taking right now. It may not be worth redoing a 360 from scratch. You may need a lot more time just skiing before doing a trick again.
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