Last year I slacked off on working out for various reasons. In October I was chasing my nephew around at his birthday party and having a blast, but the next day I woke up and my knee was killing me. I attributed it to the under use for months followed by an overly strenuous day. From then on my knee would occasionally start to hurt for no reason. It felt okay at some times, but at others it felt like a rock was stuck behind my patella. When the pain didn’t go away after a week I started looking for a solution. I knew that knee pain is common and thus I would come across a million bad ideas (like weight loss), so I turned to a source I trust: Stronglifts.com. The two most relevant articles were this one and this one. So I set out trying to get rid of my knee pain. In the beginning of December 2011.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k4VK4gFbMk
Me squatting 215 lbf on a light day in mid 2011
At first I tried squatting around 185 lbf to 200 lbf, but it hurt more than I felt was “okay pain” so I looked into trigger point therapy. I didn’t have the discipline to self massage 6x a day and thus didn’t experience any great progress. Instead, starting a week before new years, I started squatting really light at 135 lbf for 3 sets of 5, working up at 5 added pounds per workout. The video above shows me squatting 80 lbf heavier on a light day and gives you an idea of how light 135 lbf is for me. I also started doing Pavel’s morning “Recharge!” exercises which work the joints in the morning. Now it’s the end of January and my knee is no longer giving me pain!
Can I say for certain what helped the pain go away the most? No. Do I care? No. The pain is gone from one or more of the things I tried and that’s what matters.
Um…would that be our son that caused the knee pain?