Ok, it's time to get serious. Being in my field of study it's kind of ridiculous that it's taken me this long to get with it, but my body is broken and I need to fix it. Or else when I'm old, it's going to be baaad.
In grade 12 I sprained my knee quite significantly playing soccer. I did the usual go to physio to get some functionality back and to get back to playing, but by this time I was so done with the whole routine of the home exercises (I've sprained so many ankles and other ailments that required physio) so I didn't really do it at all. Now here I am, 4 years later, and my knee hyperextends like crazy and sometimes it'll even get stuck/locked in hyperextension when I walk and it feels like I will break my knee. It's a really scary feeling and I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often, especially being that I still play soccer...
So there's that. BUT I also experienced another quite significant injury, about a year ago now, with a re-occurrence last July. I honestly have no idea what/how it happened, but I was in a bowling tournament and all of a sudden my left quad gets pulled and it kills. Like I could not walk. I couldn't stretch it out. After a bit it finally went away and then I was seemingly fine.. until July. This time, all I was doing was jogging. I was playing ball with two friends and I was jogging to get the ball and I pulled it again. This time it did not go away and had to do physio for it for quite some time. This time I followed through on the regimen, having learnt my lesson from my knee. But about a week ago I was in physiology lab, and we were doing velocity force stuff. In short, this machine tests your power and torque for your quads and hamstrings. The relationship between the muscles is supposed to be 3:2 (quads:hamstrings). I was the subject and I did it on my left leg, not thinking much of it. After the TA reads the data he asks if I've ever injured my knee. So of course I was like uh yeah, and a quad strain. The data collected was totally funky and basically my ratio was 1:1. Then a few days ago at the gym I was on the quad machine and there was a noticeable difference in the strength in my right and left quads. Usually those are pretty similar, but I just couldn't keep going with my left one.
That leads me to this. I have less than a month left of having "free" gym membership since we're done at the end of the month. I really want to change these issues I have. So it's going to be a lot strength training for my quads and hamstrings, and my calves (for the knee). I'm pretty sure what happened with my knee is that I tore the posterior cruciate ligament, but of course physio's don't use this language because they assume their clients won't understand, but being in physed I think I can kind of tell what most likely the injury was. And he probably didn't mention it either because the PCL is actually not too necessary. You don't need surgery because you can just strengthen the muscles around it to offset it (or at least that's what I am remembering from my sports injuries class, but don't take my word for it). So simply, I just need to get some more strength going on on my left side. Hopefully I can get enough going before I lose my gym privileges, because there's only so much you can do with just your body as equipment.. I'm game with just a little improvement, then just keep in good cardio shape and then get back in September to get to where I want to be. After that it'll be maintenance of those muscles.
Day to day these injuries don't affect me too much, except for the random knee incidences, but if I want to keep playing sports until I have grey hair, I really need to start taking care of my body.
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