Does anyone have joint healing tips?

From time to time I've gotten an injury or two and wished it would just heal up faster. In this most recent case I tried squatting more weight than I should have and my knees were cracking and painful for 4 weeks. Adding weight too fast isn't good, right? I should stick with bodyweight for a while. Six weeks later I'm at 90% to normal but I want to be safe AND learn how to heal faster.

I know Coach Sommers planned "Elastic Steel" as his book to do that, but it isn't out yet. Are there any tips for now, especially for the knees? The thread and this link suggest high rep eccentric work:

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=6460

http://www.powerballs.com/forum/showthr ... -explained

Are there other tips or just to hit the high reps with an eccentric focus? Thank you.

froggy said:

From time to time I've gotten an injury or two and wished it would just heal up faster. In this most recent case I tried squatting more weight than I should have and my knees were cracking and painful for 4 weeks. Adding weight too fast isn't good, right? I should stick with bodyweight for a while. Six weeks later I'm at 90% to normal but I want to be safe AND learn how to heal faster.

As far as I'm concerned you can't injure your knees with heavy squats. You can however injure your knees with poorly executed squats. Whether your doing them weighted or bw, if you don't address the issue at the source, you'll never fully heal.

This depends on the injury. If it's an acute injury the good old rest, ice, relax treatment is plenty add to that slow mobility work through a pain free range of motion and you are on your way to recovery (unless you tore a ligament/tendon then most like surgery is required). If it's a chronic injury then this is a very good place to start: http://www.eatmoveimprove.com/2009/08/on-tendonitis/

But all that information is pretty useless if you are hurting your knees from squatting. Yes it's possible that a chronic injury might result from too much squatting and not enough balancing exercises but yours just sounds like bad form. Like Randomhavoc said if you are hurting your knees badly enough to have to take a 4 week break after a squatting session, where the weight went up, your technique is probably poor and needs more work.

Hey Froggy, don't know whether you've come across Pavels book 'Superjoints'. Doing the drills daily I have definitely seen overall improvements and it only takes half an hour in the morning to run through them. There are also some active flexibility drills in there. You may not want something general on the topic but I thought I'd mention it as its working for me, Mobilitywod is also worth a look, there's lots of stuff there on improving your squat and hip mobility.

I'm looking forward to the release of Liquid Steel™ though! :-)

I think the Intu-Flow routines on youtube would be a good thing to do daily. Here's Part 1 of the beginners:

There's 6 beginner parts, (part 1 and 2 are just explanations, and 3,4,5 and 6 go through mobility drills for the whole body) and I think he also has an intermediate series up as well. You have to buy his program for the advanced and master series I think. It's probably good if you're starting out or rehabbing.

froggy said:

From time to time I've gotten an injury or two and wished it would just heal up faster. In this most recent case I tried squatting more weight than I should have and my knees were cracking and painful for 4 weeks. Are there other tips or just to hit the high reps with an eccentric focus? Thank you.

Do you do any running? That was the straw on the camel's back for mine. Only a good 3 months off healed them for me.

Thank you for the responses over the weekend.

To clarify the problem, here is the full story:

I don't do any running, did bodyweight squats for a bit, tried using extra weight like I had five years ago, kept checking to see how much more weight I could add, and heard some crunching sounds. All of that was six weeks ago and felt uncomfortable during full bodyweight squatting so I had my arms helping out.

Today, six weeks after the incident, my knee usually feels fine but about four or five times a day it feels pain for no reason.

Richie79: I actually got the idea to try doing 100 bodyweight arm-assisted squats daily from the Super Joints. I actually didn't give that joint time to rest (maybe a day after the initial problem), which may be stupid. Which leads me to...

AlexX: I checked the site on tendonitis/tendonosis. Thank you

Madknight: I will try Intui-flow if I can get past the goofy reverb on the guy's voice I did not have time to see the actual knee video part

I guess it sounds like, since it has been getting better, the high-rep road is the right track. I wish I'd given it rest after reading about the RICE method though.

Often, the cause of the symptoms (your knee) are sourced from joints directly above (hips) or below (ankles) the problem. Only doing knee rehab and discarding the others would be erroneous.

I've got a copy of intuflow and it's pretty good if you can get past the reverb . When I first started using it I hadn't done much exercise for a long time and was having joint pain but my body felt great after starting to use it!

I haven't had much experience with joint mobility stuff, but the intuflow program seems pretty good, I'm up to the intermediate version now and it only takes about 10-12 minutes to work through all the joints in the body; neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, fingers, thoracic, spine, pelvis, hips, knees and ankles.

I've regained a fair bit of ROM that I never knew I had from using it

There is some other stuff in there as well like quad squats etc. which I don't like the look of so much, so I just stick to the joint mobility stuff

Randomhavoc: As I tried a few workouts I can see what you mean. The ankle can do anything I ask of it; the hip however is distinctly less flexible and I should definitely work on the hip mobility too to keep the whole chain working properly.

Davidg: I can see how Intuiflow can be pretty useful. I was surprised to see how many moves he had for the knee since it was just a hinge joint but considering my hip flexibility/mobility I'll definitely be working this into the rehab as well. I feel optimistic that my knee will be back to 100% in a month or so but now that I have more tools to fix things I want it better than my "old 100%"

Thanks!

froggy said:

Randomhavoc: As I tried a few workouts I can see what you mean. The ankle can do anything I ask of it; the hip however is distinctly less flexible and I should definitely work on the hip mobility too to keep the whole chain working properly.

Davidg: I can see how Intuiflow can be pretty useful. I was surprised to see how many moves he had for the knee since it was just a hinge joint but considering my hip flexibility/mobility I'll definitely be working this into the rehab as well. I feel optimistic that my knee will be back to 100% in a month or so but now that I have more tools to fix things I want it better than my "old 100%"

Thanks!

I wish you all the best in recovery. Take it slow. Taking an extra month or two before getting into heavy training is better than re-injuring yourself