Mind your knees

With the recent holidays, many people I know, including myself, spent time with family and loved ones. In the days that followed, an interesting trend emerged: quite a few women who lift weights, again including myself, were told by some well-meaning family member to be careful about our knees. It's interesting to me how widespread this caution is.

As it happens, my knees have some history.

I didn't own a car until midway into my first year in Silicon Valley. I hear there is public transportation in the valley, but other than occasionally being stuck behind a bus on El Camino I really haven't seen much evidence of it. Consequently, I cycled. Most days clocked in at 10 miles or fewer, but the occasional 30 mile day was not uncommon. My employer provided a free 24 Hour Fitness membership, so every so often I biked over to the gym to do...more cardio. Despite having discovered real west-coast burritos, tempura ice cream, and a host of other decadent new foods I could suddenly afford, and a new 10-hours-at-an-office lifestyle, I was way too active to gain weight.

The car, of course, changed all of that. I did what any good American does when she finds herself gaining weight: I started running. This was my first brush with running for exercise rather than transportation, and I tried to do everything right: I did the "couch to 5k" program, carefully programming intervals into my fancy watch. I had my gait analyzed and became jealously loyal to The Perfect Shoes. I tried to minimize pavement miles, preferring a local dirt track. Runner's World told me runners should lift weights, too, so I diligently did my 15lb dumbbell chest presses and curls. Despite my best efforts, my knees, especially the right knee, were soon in pain. By the end of the 90s, my running program was gone for good, but the pain lingered. At times I could not fully straighten my leg, or sleep without supporting the knee.

With the gorgeous hills all around me, I went through a hiking phase. 7 miles was my limit before the knee acted up. Sometimes in the last mile I'd contemplate letting the mountain lions eat me.

Years passed, and eventually I picked up lifting. Armed with instructions from The Internet, I took to Gold's with a 5 x 5 program, performing low-bar squats to parallel. The weight got heavy quickly, and to be honest my right knee did hurt before too long. I went to get it checked out...the orthopedist yelled at me to go back to jogging. I did return to lifting once the pain subsided somewhat, but I never got back to squatting the weights I reached in that first round.

Not long before I started my current program, the knee randomly got worse of its own accord. Suddenly walking down stairs was a challenge, standing for a meeting could have consequences for the rest of the day, and straightening it fully was again out of the question. Scared, I got it checked out again, but there was no obvious cause. This ultimately led in part to a very low calorie diet and 30lb weight loss: I hoped that reducing food would reduce inflammation. It seemed to work.

Today, I write all this with a bit of a sense of wonder. I'm in no pain, my leg straightens smoothly. I sleep how I choose. Sometimes I run to cross the street or a parking lot, just for the hell of it (although I'm sure I have no interest in longer distances), and nothing crunches. To be fair, I do have some soreness around the patella on both legs on squat days that I mostly notice going up stairs, but nothing significant.

I can't say for sure that full-depth squats have been the cause of this rehabilitation. It's almost equally likely that consistent foam-rolling and warmup activities have done the work, or at least a portion of it. (Incidentally, the warmup routine is a large part of why I chose Catalyst.) Maybe unrelated factors are at play. But I can say that I'm squatting more weight, through a greater range of motion, than ever before, and I am in less pain than almost any point in the last 15 years.

So...obviously every well-meaning dad and uncle in the world doesn't know me, but I still wonder about the widespread concern with women's knees. Surely the number of women lifting weights seriously with some sort of persistent knee injury is tiny compared to the number of women tolerating a running-related knee injury. In my own family, knee trouble seems to be related more closely to endurance sports or plain inactivity. The concern is meant with love, and that is how we should take it, but it is a shame if it discourages any of us from activities that promote healthy knees.