Book: Todd Hargrove’s ‘A Guide to Better Movement: : The Science and Practice of Moving With More Skill And Less Pain’’ – “I am turning thirty next week, and I just want to go home, and grow oranges.”

I am still trying to finish Todd Hargrove’s book on moving better, it is a good book and I think it will be useful – but I am having to concentrate to take it all in and then work out how to apply it to my knee.

Buying the book was a side effect of my ex-yoga teacher pointing out the Better Movement website to me, I liked the website – although I am still trying to read it all and the one that really struck home was the article on Fatigue is an emotion

It mentions an article by Tim Noakes where the basic idea “is that human exercise capacity is not limited by a failure of the body, but is instead regulated by the brain to ensure that such a failure does not occur.”

So when you get tired and feel like stopping it is your brain telling you to because it doesn’t want you to hurt yourself, this same brain trigger can make your brain scream “PAIN” without there actually being pain – at least not pain pain.

I have a strong feeling that this is me, my brain knows how trashed my knee was (is) and how much it hurt when it was bad, so it shouts immediately that I start doing something. And on things which I know have resulted in my being really hurt (aka running, leg press machines) I listen to my brain and stop.

One things that the website comments on this article mentioned Charles A. Garfield’s 1984 book ‘Peak Performance: Mental Training Techniques of the World’s Greatest Athletes’ which looks at the Soviet and East German sports training programs and the mental conditioning tactics – specifically the visualization stuff.

I am unsure if I am open minded to weird stuff, I find it interesting but I don’t really believe. So I wasn’t too hopeful when I tried the visualization of running a kilometre whilst staying (relatively) relaxed and without my knee screaming. I focused on the distance increasing by 0.1 until I got to 1K and it was ok – not great but ok.

The next challenge is to try running a little further with visualization and to find the book!

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Knee VS Brooks Addiction – Seriously addicted to avoiding knee pain

I may have officially found a brand of trainers that my knee doesn’t hate.

Given I am 92% sure that it was a pair of Nikes that finally helped me REALLY screw up my knee I am avoiding that brand like the plague forever more.

Skechers are ok for walking around shoes but lack the support and structure for me to use as serious workout shoes.

However I am now on my second pair of Brooks – both of which have been sale purchases, and I do like them – although I am wondering if getting a whole size bigger wouldn’t have been smarter than a mere half size… however I will try to remember that for next time.

Copyright © WhereEvilThoughts 2014 – excluding pictures! Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to WhereEvilThoughts with appropriate and specific direction to the original content

Knee: Helpful muscles that I should know – “the knee bone connects to the wrist bone”?!

Off the back of the throwaway comment from the NHS ‘Specialist’ I decided to look up how my leg muscles actually work. However I don’t like gross pictures of the inside of legs and have a short attention span when it comes to medical names for stuff.

Which means that even before my knee failure, back when I could still run, I wasn’t overly into the mechanics of it, I wasn’t overly fussed what muscle connected to which other thingies, I just wanted them to work and for my IT band (aka Iliotibial band) to not get so darn tight!

However the internet tells me that the IT band is not simply one big muscle that happens to get tight and get annoying all by itself. It transpires to be made up for several muscles which join the party at various different points along the leg.

(Picture from collectpeanuts.com/)

For the purposes of my limited attention span there are two key leg muscles towards the top of the IT band: the Gluteus Maximus (GM), aka the Butt, and Tensor Fascia Latae (TFL).

There is also one somewhere around/below the knee, the Tibialis Anterior (TA).

The Tensor Fascia Latae is the front (anterior) muscle on the thigh part of the leg and it joins the IT band from the hip along with the Butt – except the Butt joins from behind (weird that).

I then got very confused by the internet and concluded that basically the TFL and the Butt need to work against each other (but in a collaborative way) in order for the hip to be stable and reliable.

Then the Tibialis Anterior (TA) links into the IT band from the front and is a big muscle near the shin and is apparently used by pretty much every leg movement ever.

My yoga teacher, the ‘Funny Bones’ books by Janet & Allan Ahlberg and the ‘Dem Bones’ song, tell me that everything is interconnected, therefore a stable hip must be good for the knee. A stable TA feeding into the IT band, which has also got the hip muscles linking in from the TFL and the Butt, must have some positive influence on what happens around the knee.

I did finally look up what the difference between hip adduction and hip abduction. Adduction is squeezing together motions, abduction is away. Abducting seems to tighten the IT band so is not my friend.

Really not sure how much of that actually went into my brain and I didn’t really find any exercises which is a shame as I probably need to search the internet some more now… plus there was that other throwaway comment about the correlation between core strength and knees.

Maybe another day.

Copyright © WhereEvilThoughts 2014 – excluding pictures! Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to WhereEvilThoughts with appropriate and specific direction to the original content