My hips and knees are still not ready to be back in action, after my last day-hike.
Three days after hiking, I walked around the block anyway, during a brief period of clear weather. In part, I was trying to figure out what makes my joints hurt, and what doesn’t.
Pain can be your body’s way of telling you to pay attention.
By that metric, it was an instructive morning.
Lesson 1: Don’t walk stiff-legged.
It’s an efficient way to walk, but probably not a good way to minimize impact on your leg joints.
Now that I’ve gotten used to using trekking poles, I realize I often use my (aligned) leg bones in the exact same fashion — as a temporary, rigid, weight-bearing pole, transmitting force from the ground to my torso.
As I stride, I tend to start each stride with a straight leg — with the knee tensed. This lets the leg bones and joints hold my weight, for just an instant, with little or no use of muscle, to support my weight.
That, as opposed to walking with a bent knee throughout, resulting in a “bouncier” stride as the knee flexes, just a bit, acting as a shock absorber of sorts.
Mechanically, I think this temporarily-straight-kneed stride is an efficient way to walk. A least-effort stride. No wasting energy in a soft suspension (the flex of the knee), if nothing else. But also, possibly an artifact of my days of being obese.
But I’m pretty sure this is a bad thing, from my leg joints’ point of view. You will see all kinds of warnings about merely holding a static locked-knee position. I can’t imagine that this issue somehow goes away when you walk.
This was particularly noticeable today when walking downhill. I take my weight on my rigidly-aligned leg bones, just for an instant, to slow my descent down the hill. Kind of jolt my way down the hill, ever so slightly. Just as I would have used trekking poles, to slow my descent, but with bigger muscles and more force involved.
I shamble. Like a zombie, but faster. I shamble noticeably, walking downhill. And that morning, my hips let me know that.
Worse, even if my stride were super-smooth, so that there was no jarring when my foot hits the sidewalk, there’s now enough looseness in my joints (maybe from age, maybe it’s always been that way) that, among other things, I can feel movement within the hip ball-and-socket. Just a little bit. When I do that.
Basically, those weight-bearing, lock-kneed moments are ever-so-slightly pounding the crap out of my hip joints with every stride.
But guess what? If I try to do the opposite — make sure my knee is never fully straightened, letting the flex of the knee absorb the shock of foot hitting ground, putting a “spring” in my step — then my knees hurt. Starting with, but hardly limited to, the patellar tendon/ligament — the big sinew just below your kneecap, that touches the ground when you kneel.
The pain never goes away. It just moves around.
Lesson 2: Joints have a lot of different parts.
Source: https://drpeterwalker.com.au/hip-anatomy/
And all of them can hurt.
Seriously, the big one that that old people worry about is the articular cartilage, as shown above. That’s what bears your weight, and once that wears out, the joint is toast.
But I’m sure that a lot of my joint pain is from bursa, tendons, ligaments, and other miscellanous musculo-skeletal parts.
For example, after this last hike, I recognized mild symptoms of baker’s cysts, that is, knee bursa that are so swollen they puff out the backs of the knee joints. That makes the knees feel “stiff” or “full” when bent. (The treatment and prevention is to wear an elastic knee brace. Nothing exotic. Just a fabric knee brace of the type for sale at your local drug store.)
Separately, a lot of the pain at my ball-and-socket hip joints seems to have nothing to do with the weight-bearing parts of the ball or the socket themselves. It’s now all the other stuff around hip joint that hurts. During flexion and after straightening up. Whatever it is that gets flexed, in the hip, as you bring your knee up to your chest — that’s sore. Bending over to time my shoes is a chore.
If nothing else, this an an excellent excuse not to weed the garden. Bent-over weeding stretches those same ligaments.
As I noted in the last post, I’m going to start eating a lot of gelatin, or, more properly, hydrolyzed collagen. The idea is as crude as this: I’m eating the concentrated, purified extract of animal-sinew proteins, in the hopes of healing my own sinews.
Edit: And that’s showing some promise, as whey protein — what I’ve been eating to keep up my muscle mass as I lost weight — is almost completely deficient in some of the amino acids that are key to building collagen and connective tissue. Plausibly, by relying on whey for about half my protein, I’ve been skimping, for an extended period, on some amino acids that are required for building joint tissues. If lack of that key amino acid has been slowing my body’s joint repairs, then substituting hydrolyzed collagen for half the whey should resolve the problem.
Source: https://swolverine.com/blogs/blog/whey-vs-beef-protein?srsltid=AfmBOoqBdkyF6MHbkEmPtHoLpWL_K6ROO9C_I_-VV3PJUda-SnUQiHn1
Be that as it may, not every pain in the joints is from wear-and-tear on the cartilage. There’s wear-and-tear on a whole host of items.
And every damned one of them can hurt.
Lesson 3: Hops, skips, and jumps.
Hurt like hell this morning. Takeoff is fine. The landing is what hurts. It sent a clear message, written in pain: Please don’t do that.
But mountain hiking, on rocky trails, necessarily involves a lot of that. In the heat of the (hiking) moment, that hardly registers. But with already-sore joints, there is no pain-free way to do anything of the nature of rock-hopping across a creek. Anything with “hop” in the name is going to hurt.
I need to find a better way to stick my landings, without the pain. No idea how.
But, at the least, walking on sore joints tells me I should avoid those sorts of jumps and hops when I am hiking, whenever I can.
Conclusion
At my age, it’s not clear that anything is going to make my joints happy.
But I’m going to try. Try to walk with soft knees. Amp up my consumption of (plausibly) joint-friendly protein. Try to stick my landings without jolting anything.
Turns out, I like mountain hiking a lot.
Now I need to find a way to make it sustainable. If that’s possible.
