This is a guest post from my friend Roselie Rasmussun over at One Health Massage. I know Roselie through my volunteering with the Pacific Crest Trail. She is an amazing crosscut sawyer and patient instructor. We chatted last year about supporting each other’s passion for getting others outdoors in healthy ways and I encouraged her to write up a post for you here on Must Hike Must Eat. Please enjoy her thoughts on getting back out on the trail (especially for those of us with a little bit more squeak in the joints) and visit her website to learn more about her and what she does!
It’s Hiking Season Again
It’s hiking season again. Time to reach far back into the wild areas of the world where our souls can be renewed by contact with beauty. Time to air out the gear that’s gotten a little bit musty. It’s also time for a bit of physical challenge and self exploration, for hiking up steep hills with something in our backpacks, and planning how many miles feel reasonable for a multi-day trip.
It can be hard to get going. The ease of sitting on the sofa has a certain amount of inertia. Getting in hiking trim can be uncomfortable. And what about those discouraging aches and pains that get woken up? Those ones that might be familiar from last year? What do we do about those?
Motion is lotion.
Movement is good for every body tissue. So if we’re moving, and it’s hurting we have to strategize, because movement is healthy and essential for life.
The first thing to know is that just because something hurts, it doesn’t mean that there is any harm done. The purpose of pain is as an alarm to get you to change course. This alarm often goes off before tissue damage occurs, as a protective mechanism. Around old injuries, or in areas where pain tends to recur, this alarm goes off well before the point of damage. Sometimes far too early.
If movement is healthy for all tissues, and if someone has an alarm going off so early in a movement that they can’t get through a full range of motion…then something must be done about that. To have pain that’s preventing one from pursuing their activities means that not only do we miss out on fun stuff, but that our body tissues don’t get the movement they need.
What’s to be done?
The idea is to reset the pain alarm so that the area of concern can go through greater ranges of motion for longer periods of time with no sense of threat (threat = alarm going off). You do that by stressing the area…gradually and in creative ways. By gradually increasing the amount and type of stress we normalize movement so that it transitions from being potentially threatening to being normal.
In order to gradually increase stress to an area it helps to know what the full range of motion looks like. If you think about knees for example, their range of motion goes from having the leg straight to having the heel hit the butt…or thereabouts. It also has a range of motion in rotation which is primarily available when the knee is bent. So the lower leg rotates outward about 20 degrees and inward about 45 degrees.
Let’s forget about the rotation for a minute and just think about the forward and back movement. We all know knees do that. But how much load does your knee ordinarily have on it while it’s going through that full range of motion?
I may be sitting at my desk for a good bit of time with my knee flexed to a 90 degree angle, but it’s not bearing any load during that time. While its bearing the load of my body weight it’s generally only being asked to go from perfectly straight to about 15 degrees of flexion. So there are about 120 degrees of motion that my knee can do but is simply never asked to do in a way that challenges it by adding resistance or load bearing. If I squat down and stand up repeatedly then I am starting to add more of my potential range and increasing the knees exposure to stress…and therefore its resiliency.
Is it any wonder that knees get to be painful when we take them out and put a pack on and hike down a hill for miles?
I don’t think you have to have an anatomy background to figure out some creative ways to add stress to your knees. I think the thing that stops people is the fear that there is a wrong thing you can do. You know…some motions are health promoting and some motions are going to wear away our cartilage or maybe spontaneously sprain our ACL or something.
The thing is, if you’re trying to add stress to your knees with the idea of increasing your resilience, you’re going to do this as a gradual exploration. You’re not going to drop 10 feet out of a tree and land on a slanted surface on one leg. You could start with squatting and standing up again a dozen times. If that hurts in a way that goes beyond muscle soreness you might want to try something less challenging, like doing the same motion but laying on your back and using leg weights.
If it doesn’t do much for you then you might want to increase the amount or increase the range of knee motion or increase the load by only using one leg or explosively hopping from a squat, up into the air and landing gently back into a squat.
Increase The Dose
I think we’re starting to get the idea with the front and back motion. Let’s consider some other ways to add stress to the knee. There’s that rotational motion. There’s also torsional stress. Torsional stress is a common source of acute injury. It happens a lot to soccer players. If you stand on one leg with your knee bent and twist, you’ll be adding torsion. If you jump up twist in the air and land on one leg you’ll be adding torsion. It’s not a bad thing to do, you just want to do it in a dose your knees can handle.
If you’re able to increase the dose your knees can handle then when something unexpected happens, or when you start to do more taxing activities then you’ll be able to remain pain (remember, sense of threat) and injury (tissue damage) free.
About Roselie:
I’m a fourth generation wholistic health care provider. My father, both grandparents and great grandfather were all Chiropractors – so the integrative, body-mind approach to health care is in my blood and was part of my upbringing. But when I really became interested in helping people get past pain to achieve their dreams was after a prolonged period of severe back pain. It helped me understand the frustration and fear that people with pain are facing.
There’s so many experiences available to us, we just can’t have pain getting in our way. Pain can also keep us from being our best self with our friends and family and prevent us from sharing our beauty and our gifts with a world that needs those things. I believe increasing our own health increases the total health of our community. You can find out more about Roselie and what she does on One Health Massage.
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