My Journey With Weight Loss – Knowing When Something Isn’t Right

I’m a bit late today as I amgoing through yet another family health crisis which distracted me. Unfortunately my sister is currently in the emergency room at the local hospital. Not really sure what is going on yet but since I have been in this scenario before with both siblings being in hospital I am a bit concerned.

I started to realize that whenever I did the 1 mile walk up the dreaded Oxford hill my bad knee would begin to bother me within a few hours, doesn’t bother me when I run or do my Stayte hill intervals just when I do the huge steep hill. It didn’t feel like joint pain but instead I felt it was a muscular issue. So I decided to contact my physio therapist who I have seen for nearly 30 years since I first blew out my knee to see if he could give me some muscle training exercises.

The first thing he said when he realized who I was, HOLY SHIT! Of course we went through my weight loss and the physical work I was doing. I actually thought he would give me shit because running would be hard on my arthritic knee but I was surprised when he told me it is a good thing. Studies have now shown that moving and working arthritic joints hard helps them. He feels if I can keep this up for as long as possible it will help stave off the knee replacement they told me 14 years ago that I was going to need.

My knee was fully checked (it is strong though as it has been for nearly 3 decades is limited in mobility). Then it was on to checking things like my gait, balance and strength in my leg. Turns out that this is not a problem with my knee but rather in the quad and hip muscles in my bad leg. I knew my anti-limp walking had impact my leg but was stunned at the difference in the hip muscle compared to my good leg. He walked me through a massive amount of different exercises to do and I panicked a bit and asked if I had to add all of them daily because seriously it would be a full time job. He laughed and said no, rotate a few of them into my strength exercises each day. At the end of our session he thanked me and said he would be going home to his wife to tell her he had the best day ever after seeing what I had accomplished.

The point to this post is I recognized something wasn’t right and I reached out to my amazing community for help. I never would have known it wasn’t my knee but other supporting structures. As my coach says, listen to your body and I did just that.