Friday, June 26, 2009

11 weeks or so into the knee recovery thing - honestly, if someone were not really motivated to get help it would be well nigh impossible to get through all of the hurdles put up by all of the various medical entities - just to get a few sessions of physical therapy.

All during this time, I've been doing my knee strengthening exercises, that I found mostly from this book: Healing Your Knees, and doing an upper body only weightlifting program. By the time I finally got my first physical therapy appointment, ol' Leftie the Knee was feeling not too bad. The physical therapist I'm working with is great, though, and is showing me all sorts of perfect strengthening exercises and really guiding me through what I need to do. Evidently, I need to really work the foam roller for the iliotibial band and also do lots of hip strengthening, specifically hip abduction.

What I still need to figure out is how to tell when I'm overdoing things. For example, yesterday, I had a great workout - some weights, a little walking, but the knee was really talking, as in sore, during the afternoon. I've promised her a complete day of rest today, but during the workout, I wasn't getting any cries, I guess because the endorphins kicked in and masked it? The New York Times had a great article recently about this: Link.

The photo is called "Crow on a Stick"; I know it's not a stick, but anyway.