Not A Stretch
Showing off my knee flexibility.
If you’ve been following this blog you know that I am recovering from a minor meniscus tear in my left knee. This happened in 2019, but I re-aggravated it last summer and since then it’s been a major hassle to deal with. Fortunately it is healing on its own and getting close to the point that I can forget about it for parts of the day.
Three weeks ago I rolled my right ankle playing ultimate and if you’ve ever done that you know how that injury can linger for weeks. I’m taking care of it, wearing a brace when I play ultimate and trying to keep it from turning again.
So, bottom line is I have a nagging injury to each leg and that makes it difficult to train properly since I need to compensate differently for each injury.
That’s where yoga comes in. I’ve ramped up my yoga training since the ankle injury to allow me to build up strength in the legs with very little impact. I can easily modify movements to ease any strain on the injuries and since a lot of yoga is unilateral (one side at a time) I can really focus on postures that help each injury in turn.
The most surprising discovery is how strong my injured knee/leg is. I can hold bent leg postures with my injured knee just as long as my good knee. This is despite a noticeably smaller quad on my left leg that has atrophied since the injury. The knee itself rarely hurts doing this, or even after. In fact, in the hours after class I will have moments where I forget my knee is injured because there will be no pain.
The ankle is another story - when I hold postures for more than a minute, the ankle will often get “stuck” when I come out of the posture and I need to take a moment to shake it out. It isn’t actually stuck, the injury just makes it harder to rebound from not moving. But as the session goes on, this happens less.
Yesterday I found myself on a roof cleaning out gutters. For part of this, I was in a deep squat (what they call Malasana in yoga) and sidling along the edge of the roof as I leaned forward to reach the gutter below my leg. It was another moment where I realized I was doing something that I couldn’t do just a few weeks ago.
The swelling in the knee was preventing me from full flexion, meaning I couldn’t bend it as far as the good knee. Pre-injury I could stay in the full Malasana squat for several minutes, but the injury was preventing me from even going down that far for just a few seconds. The more I’ve stretched it, the more range of motion I’ve gotten back and that allowed me to clean the gutters yesterday with relative ease.
The low squat is also a favorite of weight lifters and HIIT trainers. It is a great way to open up the hips and stretch the lower back. It activates the core and has numerous positive effects on the body. I’m quite happy to be able to get back to using it.
The takeaway for me is that the low-impact flexibility-oriented approach of yoga is particularly beneficial to me right now. I plan to stay with that approach for the next few weeks and gradually add more impact as I get ready for my next big tournament in early April.
