A Knee Injury After Yesterday’s Hike
We ended up hiking a good hour and a half yesterday and had a wonderful time. The forested area was the kind I love (with plenty of overhanging cedars) and I enjoyed the challenge of the roots sticking out of the ground combined with some jagged rocks sticking out from the soil.
Since I have horrible balance, in some sections I tried to only step on raised roots and rocks to get from point A to point B. I was pleased with myself because for the most part I was able to keep my balance.
Well, my body didn’t like that too much. After driving home and getting out of the car, I could feel the pain in my right knee. It only hurts when weight is on it and the pain is greatest when I move my knee backwards. I really want to go back out next weekend, so I was curious as to what exactly I did to my knee.
From what I gather, I sprained the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) in my knee. This is the ligament that prevents your knee from going backwards (About.com has a nifty picture). This ligament also prevents posterior instability. This makes sense because I’m having a hard time from keeping my knee from buckling backwards.
I do not remember doing anything specific that would have caused this injury. Overall, I know that I was probably doing too much too soon for my body. It was fun playing my little balancing game (I felt young again), but maybe next time I better pay close attention to how I am stepping.
As for my injury, it looks like the best medicine is rest and to limit my physical activity. I still want to get some exercise in, so maybe I will do some upper body strength exercises for the next few days.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No swelling. Just pain when standing or walking. It feels better this morning, which is good.
I normally do not take pain relievers unless absolutely necessary. My thought is that if I take something for the pain I won’t let my body heal like I should. As we’ve seen the last two weekends, I tend to overdo things 
[...] I am getting very frustrated. Not with my eating, but frustrated because every weekend I injure myself. The first weekend of hiking left me with a hurt calf. The weekend after was a knee injury. [...]
[...] I’ve been having troubles with my right knee, I thought it might be helpful to purchase a knee brace. Perhaps a little more support would [...]
[...] Don’t feel like merely cutting up your credit cards? Make toy boomerangs out of them. I’m tempted to give it a whirl. My luck, though…it would come back and hit my right knee (inside joke for those following Blogging Away Fat). [...]
Is there any swelling? You might want to consider icing it (I prefer using an ice massage) a few times a day for a few days. If there is really bad swelling, you can use a small amount of ibuprofen to reduce the swelling while you are icing it. It doesn’t help much with the pain, but it will reduce the swelling which allows it to heal faster. If there isn’t a lot of swelling or it stops hurting too much, I tend to avoid the ibuprofen.