It is about high time that I create a syllabus around my knee challenge like I did for Valorant and my Sova Art Competition. I want to increase strength and mobility in my right knee that got injured twice (torn ACL, meniscus and reconstructive surgery). Specifically I want to make it so I can hike in Zion National Park on the week of March 20th.
I have the following symptoms in the knee:
Feeling of discomfort standing and walking for long periods of time
Pain when trying to bend fully
Feeling of instability and fear of overextending the knee
Pain when sleeping on my side
I did have a lot of initial success in reducing scar tissues using a lot of gua sha, massage and scar gel. I do believe a lot of my pain in my knee is from the sticky scar tissue that is reducing mobility. These initial efforts actually made it easier for me to sleep on my side without lots and lots of pain.
As per usual. I will design this class with one mentality. Make it so its hard for me to fail.
Incredibly interesting podcast about reaching for the goal of never dying, even if you cannto get there and not worrying about whether or not it is true.
Huge emphasis against the grind culture and for sleep and exercise
Because I was traveling and these exercises relaxed me immensely, I fell asleep very quickly after this. I ended up doing more of these exercises in the morning after. Myofascial release seems to target ligaments, muscles, and fascial which kinda makes sense, but today (13th). Today I will switch over to increasing mobility in the tendons and ligaments, so I wonder what will happen today that will be different.
“When you look at things that are far away, muscles in your eye relax and your lens looks like a slim disc.
When you look at things that are close, muscles in your eye contract and make your lens thicker.”
So the key is to relax right? Well, yes and no. Muscles always work in groups. If certain muscles are constantly too tense, then there are certain muscles that must be weak (since if one set of muscles never relaxes, the other set must always be weak).
After researching further, I found the muscle responsible for focusing the lens of the eye. It’s called the ciliary muscle and it looks like it doesn’t actually work in pairs but is like smooth muscle tissue of the stomach.
An interesting article is here and I signed up for the guys course to see what was up.
Today I woke up feeling pretty awful from going to bed at 4AM last night.
I was feeling super overwhelmed with many many things in my life.
Today, I chose to wake up slowly, get to work slowly, and here are some of the mentalities that helped me:
Cleaning is incredibly healing. Any time of cleaning, cleaning your workspace, your body, your clothes, it all is very therapeutic.
What can I do for future Jack. This is the Matthew McConnehey’s idea of leaving breadcrumbs. Instead of the common idea of letting your future self deal with a problem (let future Jack deal with the dishes, let future Jack deal with talking to this person) think about what you can do now to make your future self happier. This can look like everything from cleaning, to setting up a super nice workspace, cooking yourself a really good meal.
Focus on challenge and growth. I think oftentimes I get overwhelmed because I think about how hard things are. What helps me is thinking about everything in terms of challenge and growth. How can I challenge myself? What can I do to grow?
Live in the hierarchy of being true to oneself. I was talking to a friend the other day about hierarchies and choosing the right one (don’t compete in a hierarchy you don’t believe in such as money). I want to compete and live in a hierarchy of being honest and true to myself.
I still feel a quite a bit of stress of the difficult conversations I’m anticipating, and the difficult tasks I have in front of me.
As I look at my jiujitsu challenge, I realize that knee rehabilitation must be an essential component to my strategy because strengthening my knee, healing it, and making it less prone to injury will probably be the most important factor for how successful the challenge is.
In looking into it further, I also realized that I completely forgot about my last post about my knee in which I outlined three goals:
1 month goal – be able to sleep, walk, stand and light exercise with zero discomfort. I will call this goal little freedom.
1 year goal – to get back to preinjury levels
2 year goal – the ability to practice martial arts, parkour gymnastics and skiing. My goal isn’t to go too hard in any of these areas, just to be able to do them safely.
It’s funny because it’s been 5 months since that last post and I pretty much immediately dived into the 2 year goal because I lost motivation for the 1 month goal.
I also realized that my first post with two exercises for massaging the knee are extremely effective, especially the one that lifts and relaxes the knee joint.
I also rediscovered this video about tendon strength:
With these key takeaways:
do concentric-focused movements, a lot of volume with lower weight, do them explosively, fast eccentric
reversing the direction very fast (eccentric to concentric), challenges the tendon
if you lower the weight slowly you will favour the muscle, if you jerk it you will favour the tendon
larger range of motion challenges the tendon, but you can train them with short range and high weight and high speed
progress all of these slowly: weight, range of motion, speed
Bottom line though, I don’t really know what to do next.
My main blocker is just this feeling that in order to achieve the level of strength in my knee that I want. I will have to literally work out every day for a significant period of time and I don’t have the strength and the interest in doing that. It also seems really hard to get that done while also juggling work, jiujitsu and sleep.
However, now that I write that out, maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong. Maybe I don’t need to work out every day at all. Maybe I just need to work out once a week intensely. I know that even that low frequency over a long period of time will be at least enough to sustain strength in my knee. I might even be able to get away with once every other week!
I also really want my workouts to help with one very important thing for me, stress relief. I have so many mentally rigorous tasks from doing work at my job, thinking about youtube, and playing Valorant that I need an outlet for my stress. I guess I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet, how to integrate it into my day that doesn’t feel like it is going to take a huge amount of time.
Perhaps it isn’t about taking a huge amount of time. Maybe it is like my posture challenge. Since I had some very simple exercises for that, maybe I need to simplify my workouts to be much more simple. I tried my warmup playlists, but they feel a little too slow and stagnant. This playlist seems really good to stop and start at any time:
I think what will be most effective is to slowly work through the video, only doing it for as long as I want to, for short periods of time. So always pick up where I left off, but never feel the need to go for a certain period of time. Hell, I could do 10 second intervals throughout the day. I can handle 10 seconds no?
Also, in the meantime, I think I need to find a way to do more of the knee over toes workout every single day, except the weekends.
The months I am not doing jiujitsu, I will need to organize my own conditioning and physical therapy workouts.
I think overall, I work too hard when I’m already exercising and too little when I’m not. For instance, right now I’m doing jiujitsu at least 3 times per week so I don’t need so many conditioning exercises, probably just more soothing massage, warmth, meditation etc.
When I take time off of jiujitsu though, I would like to go a bit harder.
Finally, I want to remind myself of a couple of truths when it comes to my knee:
Allowing tissues to slide and glide will remove pain, its not the scar that is the issue, it is when it sticks
Building up strength in muscles help protect against injury even with weak tendons and ligaments by absorbing shock
Building up tendons and ligaments will protect cartilage and bones by absorbing shock
Increasing range of motion help make muscles and tendons more efficient
