My knees are still in good shape despite lots of abuse so I
must be doing something right.
Four things have hurt my knees:
1) Blunt trauma to the kneecap.
This bruises the cartilage in behind the kneecap. It's
imperative to apply RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression and
Elevation) as soon as possible for this kind of injury. Go
easy on the compression. The cartilage has a very poor blood
supply and heals slowly. DON'T do anything to stress the
kneecap (e.g., deep knee bends) until the cartilage heals
(weeks, not days). I did and the Doc said I was lucky not to
have killed it off. That would have been a real mess.
Obviously, good armor would have prevented the injury in the
first place, but at the time I was swimming in whitewater. I
didn't know the rock was there.
2) Overuse.
A rule of thumb for racing cyclists is to never raise your
milage faster than 10% per week. I don't know how that
translates to unicycling except to say that in bicycling it
seems ridiculously slow, especialy early in the season when
the weekly milage is low. Anyone capable of riding 50 miles
in a week can do 100 in a day, but DON'T! It takes a long
time to grow the cartilage, tendons and ligaments to take
the strain the muscles can dish out.
For a couple of seasons I didn't follow this advice, pushed
it early in the training season, and wound up in pain
throughout the racing season. I had to ice my knees for a
couple of hours after each ride just to keep walking. In
subsequent years I followed this rule to the letter and
never had to ice. I was faster, too.
3) Sudden bend/twist the wrong way with force.
I tore my anterior cruciate ligament playing soccer. The
details are not important - once the ACL is badly torn it
needs to be replaced. There isn't much you can do to prevent
this kind of injury other than to learn how to unweight the
leg and fall before it gets busted.
The only good side effect of this adventure in pain was to
see orthoscopic pictures of the inside of my knee. The Doc
says my cartilage is perfect - the bash healed completely,
and no lasting effects from the overuse.
If you stop
abusing them there is hope that they'll recover.
4) Muscular imbalance.
This one ended my racing career. My outer quads got so
strong that they would pull my patella out of the groove
when I walked. It was painful. The Doc says that the poor
tracking of my patella caused it to load up on only a couple
of points instead of the whole gliding surface. It was only
a matter of time before I wore through the cartilage
completely. His prescription was to stop riding and let my
thighs attrophe to a normal size.
I think a stretching program might have helped a tiny bit,
but what I really needed was selective strengthening of the
under-used muscles. The lesson I learned was to go for
variety, not focused mass. For this reason I'm not a big fan
of weight machines. Free weights are better, and
calisthenics are best.
Keep your legs strong, don't bash them a lot, and keep them
from twisting under load and you won't have any problems
with your knees. Wear armor and UPD wisely.
--
cyberbellum - Level 1.0 rider!
Optimists think the glass is half full. Pesimists think the glass is
half empty. Engineers think the glass is too big.
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