(?)
Rehabbing my knee is going well, sort of. The funny thing about rehab is that, like working out in general, pain and exhaustion are the way to health. Every two weeks my rehab regimen changes, getting increasingly more difficult. I made sizable gains in the first few weeks but things have plateaued since—which my rehab guy is just the way it always goes.

Happily, the sharp pain in my knee has disappeared for most of my daily activities. Stairs, carrying heavy things, etc. no longer bother me, and now we’re trying to get back to full athletic health, which involves more explosive movements and sudden stops.

What I find absolutely crazy is how my muscles adjusted to compensate for the injury. What I’m doing at this point is retraining my muscles to behave the way they should. Most of my current exercises deal with doing squats with resistance and I have to keep my bum knee from rotating inward. Those bad mechanics cause the scraping of bone on bone and produce the pain I feel when I’m coming out of the squat.

Just for kicks, I tried doing the same exercises with my good knee. No problem. My knee doesn’t want to dip inside at all. My right knee however rotates inward like its the most natural thing in the world. Concentrating on keeping it steady—which is the correct way it should function—causes discomfort and fatigue.

I wish I could reason with it. To explain that I understand that it had pain in the past but together we can make it go away, but we need to cooperate, to work together on this. To say all this stubborn resistance doesn’t help either of us, and now that the weather’s finally nice, wouldn’t it be better to be playing soccer and hiking?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.

Current Mood: Hard at Work |