How to Recover from Your Knee Injury Before Your Trek

In the second part of the series on knee injury, I am going to talk about how to handle your recovery. Read the first part of the article here. 

In my journey of understanding the recovery process, I have a lot of interesting information to share with you.

The process of recovery starts when you understand your body. While I will give you a general set of exercises for recovery, you need to get some specific set of exercises depending on what part of the knee you have injured. More than all of that, it is important to understand how your body works.

When you have injured your knee, you have to strengthen the rest of the muscles that support your knee. That is your quadriceps, glutes, hamstrings, calf muscles and your core.

Strengthening these muscles is what would help stabilise your knee.

Says Shwetha Warke, Centre Head of Heal with PhysioQinesis, “If you have injured one of your joints, we work on strengthening the joint close to it. Say if you have injured your ankle, we strengthen the knee. If you have injured your knee, we focus on hip/core. We call this the kinetic chain concept. The idea is that everything is connected.”

What Kind of Exercises Can You Do?

I have asked Shwetha to share a set of exercises you can do.  The exercises I am sharing here are basic and are applicable for most types of knee injuries. Shwetha has designed it as such. Shwetha’s clinic are pioneers of Sports Science in India.

| Here is the list of Basic Exercises She Recommends

There are intermediate and advanced set of exercises as well. They are best done after a visit to a good physiotherapist who can show you how to do them.

The reason you need to know how to do your exercises correctly is to correct your body alignment. Alignment, in the most simple terms, is posture that puts the least amount of stress on your spine. Having the correct alignment will prevent injuries, give the most efficient movement with least stress, and prevent progressive deformities.

As I had mentioned, everything is interconnected. Says Shwetha, “If you have injured one part of your body, you may unconsciously compensate for that injury with the rest of your body. This creates incorrect body alignment. Which is something that needs to be corrected in the recovery process. Often, an injury recurs because you have been maintaining incorrect body alignment.”

How Do You Deal With the Recovery on a Trek?

I spoke to our trekker, Suresh Srinivasan, who did the Goechala trek in 2016 with a recovering knee.

A month before the trek, Suresh Srinivasan got injured. For first few weeks, he did not take it seriously. Until the pain started interfering with his life. This put him at a dilemma: Should he still go for a strenuous trek like Goechala?

He did his knee strengthening exercises before the trek religiously. He went swimming– A cardiovascular activity that has low impact on an injured knee. Like running, swimming is a good way to build cardiovascular endurance required for a high altitude trek. The added bonus is that it has low impact on injured joints.

At the end of each day’s trek, I did knee strengthening exercises. I also had my pain killers and knee brace, just in case,” he adds.

“I started feeling the strain when we were descending from Tshoka. It was all steep descent. I used the support of not just one trek pole but a bamboo stick as well. I wore my knee brace too. All of these helped maintain my knee,” Suresh says.

It’s extremely important to know the right technique of descending. It’s said that the force your knee endures while descending is three to four times that when you’re level-walking. So watch this video to learn how to descend.

Now, Goechala is a special trek for Suresh. The trek did wonders for him — especially when he thought he wouldn’t be able to do it in the first place.

“One moment especially stood out for me. The trek to Dzongri Top. The sunrise from there was mesmerizing — the light fell so beautifully on such big mountains! It was an out-of-the-world experience. The sense of accomplishment I had after this trek was so high that I went for a marathon a month after!”

Conclusion

So there you go. A knee injury cannot stop you from trekking!

Prepare well, take support and do not take any issue with your body lightly. Drop in a comment if you have questions.