SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Five days after an Aug. 3, 2017, surgery to repair a “crushed meniscus” in his left knee, Coyotes defenseman Jakob Chychrun flew from Vail, Colorado, to Philadelphia with a prime directive from surgeon Robert LaPrade.

“The surgeon is telling me, ‘Stay off this thing,’” Chychrun said. “’Use your crutches. Keep your brace on. Keep the sleeves on for two weeks for the swelling.’”

As soon as Chychrun and his dad, Jeff Chychrun, walked into the office of Bill Knowles, the director of reconditioning and athletic development at HPSports in Wayne, Pennsylvania, that approach spun 180 degrees.

“We sit down and Bill goes, ‘What are those?’” Jakob Chychrun said Friday at the Ice Den Scottsdale. “I go, ‘Those are my crutches.’ He goes, ‘Oh, those are cute. You can set those aside. You won’t need those. What’s on your knee?’

Chychrun told Knowles it was a brace The Steadman Clinic had provided after surgery.

“He goes, ‘Yeah, you can take that off. You can get rid of that,’” Chychrun said. “He goes ‘What are those sleeves for?’ I said, ‘They gave them to me for blood clots and swelling.’ He said, ‘You can take those off, too, now that you are no longer at altitude.’”

The Chychruns were stunned. Knowles had come highly recommended by multiple acquaintances, including renowned chiropractor Mark Lindsay, who owns a cottage on the same lake as the Chychruns near Ottawa. Coyotes’ president of hockey operations, John Chayka, had been so impressed with Knowles’ results that he gave the green light to a process he knew some medical experts still viewed with skepticism.

Even so, the Chychruns had great faith in the work and knowledge of LaPrade so Jeff Chychrun shifted into dad mode.

“All I could say was, ‘Are we sure about this?’” he said.

“The big thing from the surgeon was everything had to be non-weight bearing for a certain amount of time,” Jakob added. “But Bill says, ‘I’ll teach you the proper gait and you’re going to be walking in a couple days.’ My dad’s freaking out and I’m in the same boat. I’m freaking out, too. I was sweating. I was like, ‘What did I get myself into? Who is this guy? What am I doing here?’”

Knowles’ methods have been labeled anything from cutting-edge to unconventional to controversial, and Knowles understands why surgeons might take a more conservative approach to healing.

“They want to make sure their surgery lasts,” he said. “They don’t want anything to harm the reconstruction and I respect that. When they don’t know who is doing the rehab or what their philosophy is, they give a protocol that is about protecting. Protect it, let it rest and it will heal. There is truth in that statement and again, I respect that, but I don’t agree with the approach. It’s about optimizing healing, especially with professional athletes, but to me, it wouldn’t matter if we were talking about my mother.”

Knowles believes that neuromuscular control – the ability for nerves and muscles to communicate well with the brain – is the best protection available. He has 30 years of evidence, including case studies with some of professional sports’ biggest stars, to back that assertion. Among his more notable clients: Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez, Peyton Manning, Henrik Zetterberg, Dara Torres and Cardinals quarterback Sam Bradford, who trained with him this summer.

“If your quad and your abs and your hamstring and your calf muscles are all working really well, they stabilize the joints really well,” he said. “Get that established as fast as you can because it will brace and protect the joint better than any brace on the market.

“Braces lie on the body. Neuromuscular control lies within the body. It’s going to nourish the healing process better because movement is a nourishing action to the body. To put it another way: You can go ahead and take the vitamin cream and rub it on your skin or you can just swallow the pill instead.”

Chychrun returned to action last season on Dec. 3 against the Vegas Golden Knights, exactly four months after his surgery and at least two months ahead of the most optimistic projections. Having been through the Knowles’ rehab process, it is no surprise to Chychrun or the Coyotes that he is once again ahead of schedule as he rehabs a torn right ACL suffered in a 4-1 win over the Calgary Flames at Scotiabank Saddledome on April 3 when Flames forward Michael Frolik tripped him from behind with his skate and leg along the end boards.

While conventional wisdom would have had him off his knees for a lengthy period of healing, Chychrun was in the therapy pool at HPSports less than a week after each of his procedures, gradually building into other forms of training. Knowles’ philosophy is complex and multi-faceted, but it begins with a core belief.

“We want to get them back to what we call athletic normal as quickly as possible, and restoration of athletic normal starts with the restoration of normal movements like walking, sitting and squatting before we take these things to higher athletic discussions,” Knowles said. “You can’t walk normal with a brace. That’s why you have to get rid of the bracing. If you wear it all the time it begins to map a wrong gait.

“Think about sitting in a chair. It is actually a very athletic endeavor if you do it right. It’s squatting. If you can get a rehabbing athlete to sit down in a good position, you’re already preparing them for athletic movement. If you don’t sit down with the right ankle, knee and hip movements, you forget how to bend as an athlete. Do it improperly for a few weeks and you actually start mapping wrong movements. It’s like a new golf grip. It sticks and it can screw up your golf game. Then you try to go back to the old one and now your wires are crossed.”

Chychrun spent three months with Knowles this summer. He’d rise at 6 a.m., train in the gym for 2½ hours, eat, take a 20-minute nap, train in the pool for 1½ hours with waterproof dressings over his wounds to protect against the nominal risk of infection. He’d eat again, and then sometimes he’d go back to the gym for upper-body weight training or tackle more pool training.

“Some people might go crazy being there that long but I’m built different,” he said. “When I’m hurt I want to do everything possible I can to get better.

“It was scary the first time in the pool, but that first session goes by and you realize this guy knows what he’s doing and he’s not going to hurt me. You do what he says and you’re going to be alright.”

Knowles emphasized that Chychrun wasn’t attempting outlandish movements. He wasn’t abandoning caution. Everything they did was precise, measured, calculated and careful.

“Bill always says you want to fool the judges,” Chychrun said. “We’d use the crutches sometimes but you want people to think you’re putting all your weight on that leg when you’re really not. You’re putting some weight on the crutches and it’s all about timing. You can take 80 percent of the weight off, 50 percent, right down to 10.

“I was on my crutches for a while, but only like 5, 10 percent until I knew I was ready. I’d go home and ice and I might bring them out for a couple weeks to be smart and take an extra precaution, but after a while, you realize you don’t need them anymore.”

Knowles’ approach had two other specific benefits for Chychrun. When athletes return from surgery, they often mention breaking up scar tissue as one of the most painful and difficult processes in rehab.

“When you go through this protocol of getting in the water right away, doing your cycles in the water and just moving, scar tissue doesn’t have a chance to form,” Chychrun said. “If I were to follow a protocol where I was non-weight bearing for two months, in my brace with limited movement and range of motion, obviously scar tissue is going to build up. It’s inevitable.”

The other hurdle athletes discuss is the mental hurdle of pain endurance. In the pool, often with flotation devices attached to further reduce his body weight, Chychrun moved past that hurdle in eight days.

“Movement is a struggle when you’re not in the water,” Knowles said. “It hurts sometimes, but in water, it’s not a struggle. It’s incredibly free so you start desensitizing yourself to the idea that every time I move it’s painful. It isn’t. It actually feels good and that transfers out of the water and onto land. You start overriding the expectation of pain because you’re getting positive responses to movement.”

Four weeks after surgery, Chychrun posted this video on Twitter.

4 weeks post op: pic.twitter.com/JSRq0tNAtg — Jakob Chychrun (@j_chychrun7) May 10, 2018

One week later, he posted this.

5 weeks post surgery: pic.twitter.com/pwbpPnCvVx — Jakob Chychrun (@j_chychrun7) May 16, 2018

After two months, he posted this.

Start of 9 weeks post knee surgey. Movement/gymnastics day today. pic.twitter.com/gPosVUpnco — Jakob Chychrun (@j_chychrun7) June 14, 2018

“I give a lot of lectures and talks around the world, and in order to deliver a good message, you need to make things as simple as possible so I use images because they say a picture is worth a thousand words,” said Knowles, who has lectured for the past seven years at the Isokinetic Medical Group Conference at various European locations. “If I can quote Plato, ‘Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being,’ That’s the gist of the first slide I showed [the Chychruns] when they came to see me.

“Slide 2 is people with every kind of brace there is: knee, back, hip, shoulder. How is it that in one moment, movement is medicine for the body and then the narrative changes after surgery where it’s ‘stop moving, shut it down, protect it?’ How did the message change that rapidly where it will no longer be healthy if you keep moving? It’s not about justification here; it’s about the rationale behind that thinking. The body does well with motion and movement. It finds its way.”

Chychrun returned to Arizona in early August. He has been skating three times per week, ramping up the workouts each week. While Chayka projected at the end of last season that Chychrun would be ready for the start of training camp on Sept. 14, he is not setting any deadlines right now.

“We’re not going to take on risk when it comes to returning to play,” Chayka said. “He’s back skating now and he will continue to progress along that timeline, but at the same time, there is no rush. It is going to go as quickly or slowly as it’s going to go.”

At the core of Chychrun’s decision is recent data that suggests nine months is the optimal recovery time from ACL surgery. In the instances where athletes return at the six-month mark, which would be the start of the regular NHL season for Chychrun, the incidences of re-injury rise. The problem with that data, Knowles and Chayka noted, is that it is not specific to professional athletes and it is not specific to hockey.

“The timeframe is not a strong conversation. It’s still a gut instinct other than the data saying the longer you wait, the less your risk,” Knowles said. “None of this data has anything specifically to do with ice hockey. It has to do with ground-based cutting sports; mainly soccer and some football. And none of that data describes the rehab or reconditioning process that the athlete went through. You can have a shitty process and wait nine months and you’re still at risk because you had a shitty rehab.

“Doctors will say it has a significant amount to do with the biology and the way the ligament heals. I care less about the biology. I care about the neuromuscular control that is stabilizing the knee. That is the best way to protect it. Guys are at higher risk because of poorer neuromuscular control. If we have high neuromuscular control and strength re-established at the six-month mark, he could have a low risk. He could be ready.”

With Chychrun already on the ice, Chayka is confident the Coyotes will be able to make that determination.

“When he has a lot of experience and reps with contact in practice and we have tested his knee in as many ways as we can, the answer will be obvious at that point,” Chayka said. “There’s no date in my mind. If I set a date, either he’s going to continue to blow past it as he has his whole life with this stuff, or there might be a small setback, or we might get together as a group and say it’s progressing well but let’s hold him back in this area or that area to avoid risk.”

Chychrun admits he is weighing the data and the impossibility of knowing if the knee is fully healed against his own desire and the sense that nobody knows his body better than him.

“I feel awesome,” he said, noting that the knee isn’t going anywhere because of the titanium screws in it. “I’m ready to go. It’s just a matter of when the team is comfortable with me being ready to go, but I’m not going to be upset with them taking their time.”

Chayka knows Chychrun wants to play in the season opener Oct. 4 at Dallas. That desire doesn’t bother or sway him.

“He’s a Type-A personality,” Chayka said. “He’s unbelievable in terms of his work ethic and mindset and that’s a big part of the reason I jumped up in the [2016] draft to get him. It wasn’t just because he’s a talented player. If I didn’t have to hold him back, he wouldn’t be the player I think he is.”

Note: The Athletic sought comment from LaPrade but had received no response as of publication time.