GreenSoup
Level 6 Valued Member
I had a training day that was hard but I felt fine. I felt like I put in a lot of good work. The next morning my left knee had a severely limited range of motion where it got more and more tense as I passed 90 degrees. No bruise, no swelling, no pain.
After a week I could hinge or parallel squat without the stiffness kicking in. In three weeks I could do 90% of a full squat but still felt the stiffness. At four weeks now the full squat and hack squat feel only a little tightness and yoga's Lightning Bolt pose (sharply bent knees) is where the most stiffness is noticed.
Note these were slow and gentle tests. After experiencing previous injuries my goal is not to re-injure anything. There was never pain with this stiffness unless I ran up the stairs in the first two weeks, and at that time it affected the area behind my knee.
Telemedicine suggested it could be a hamstring strain or PCL sprain, either being pretty minor due to the lack of pain, swelling, bruising, etc. I can handle the expected 12 week healing time for these using low pendulum swings, isometrics and mobility to keep my legs busy.
But what exercise from the day before caused this? Please check out the lineup of three suspects:
Hack squat: I had been doing daily low hack squat isometric holds on the idea it might make my knees bulletproof to avoid this sort of thing. Using this isometric as a warm up, I slightly lost my low hack balance for about a second so my hands just pressed the kettlebell into the floor (it is held behind the back only an inch above the floor) and I recovered my hack squat's balance without incident. This was early in the day with no noticed effect. I program hack squat isometrics as a steady state cycle, which basically means doing half my max hold time and having the isometric time add up to 180s/week for 12 weeks. The benefit of this is that it allows the joints to make all necessary structural changes before even attempting to gain more strength. At least that was the theory.
Double Kettlebell Swing: I was running Easy Muscle Schedule C with heavy swings. For my swings this meant density training. As volume and fatigue built up I noticed I was hinging less deeply so I tried to make a point of hinging deeper than my body felt like toward the end of the workout. I didn't notice any pain, but could this have caused it?
Prying Squat knee mobility: Again I did not notice any pain, but obviously that knee was moving around a lot. I did this last.
So those are the suspects. Is there something I can do to guard against future injury? Do any of these suspected exercises look problematic for this kind of thing to happen?
I can just use low pendulum swings (basically waves of isometric tension in the hinge of the swing without rising) without moving the joint or causing any trouble. That will give me time even to use a complete program and heal up until I would be confident nothing will make it worse.
After a week I could hinge or parallel squat without the stiffness kicking in. In three weeks I could do 90% of a full squat but still felt the stiffness. At four weeks now the full squat and hack squat feel only a little tightness and yoga's Lightning Bolt pose (sharply bent knees) is where the most stiffness is noticed.
Note these were slow and gentle tests. After experiencing previous injuries my goal is not to re-injure anything. There was never pain with this stiffness unless I ran up the stairs in the first two weeks, and at that time it affected the area behind my knee.
Telemedicine suggested it could be a hamstring strain or PCL sprain, either being pretty minor due to the lack of pain, swelling, bruising, etc. I can handle the expected 12 week healing time for these using low pendulum swings, isometrics and mobility to keep my legs busy.
But what exercise from the day before caused this? Please check out the lineup of three suspects:
Hack squat: I had been doing daily low hack squat isometric holds on the idea it might make my knees bulletproof to avoid this sort of thing. Using this isometric as a warm up, I slightly lost my low hack balance for about a second so my hands just pressed the kettlebell into the floor (it is held behind the back only an inch above the floor) and I recovered my hack squat's balance without incident. This was early in the day with no noticed effect. I program hack squat isometrics as a steady state cycle, which basically means doing half my max hold time and having the isometric time add up to 180s/week for 12 weeks. The benefit of this is that it allows the joints to make all necessary structural changes before even attempting to gain more strength. At least that was the theory.
Double Kettlebell Swing: I was running Easy Muscle Schedule C with heavy swings. For my swings this meant density training. As volume and fatigue built up I noticed I was hinging less deeply so I tried to make a point of hinging deeper than my body felt like toward the end of the workout. I didn't notice any pain, but could this have caused it?
Prying Squat knee mobility: Again I did not notice any pain, but obviously that knee was moving around a lot. I did this last.
So those are the suspects. Is there something I can do to guard against future injury? Do any of these suspected exercises look problematic for this kind of thing to happen?
I can just use low pendulum swings (basically waves of isometric tension in the hinge of the swing without rising) without moving the joint or causing any trouble. That will give me time even to use a complete program and heal up until I would be confident nothing will make it worse.
