Knee Rehabilitation: Rediscovery

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:

1. Allowing tissues to slide and glide will remove pain, its not the scar that is the issue, it is when it sticks
2. Building up strength in muscles help protect against injury even with weak tendons and ligaments by absorbing shock
3. Building up tendons and ligaments will protect cartilage and bones by absorbing shock
4. Increasing range of motion help make muscles and tendons more efficient