Do Leg Extensions
That might be blasphemy to the Starting Strength and Westside styled low bar back squatters out there, but I’ve found leg extensions on a machine necessary to heal an injury as well as train my knee joints and quadriceps. Powerful as my legs and knees may be in squatting over 400 pounds and deadlifting up near 5, I’m not sure they’re all that strong or healthy all the way through their range of motion.
A quick aside: I’m between writing projects, not that they’re not piling up on my desk, and our new life at this small college has been wonderful. I’ve been coaching weight lifting, with a pretty humble start; only a few kids were interested, but now others, seeing these first kids succeed, are asking for help.
When I was a high school and collegiate squatting stud, I had quadriceps that looked to be hacked from granite. I did high bar back squats back then, which might be part of it, but youth’s surging hormones and capacity for growth were probably the real reasons.
Nowadays, despite hamstrings the size of bridge cables, my quadriceps aren’t much. They’re enough to handle my squats and deads, but particularly down by my knees they’re not the big, meaty things they used to be.
For years my right knee has been tight. I cannot, for example, drop down to my haunches, my rear end on my heels, as if to examine something. However, when I’m on a rowing machine and cruising along with a few hundred meters behind me, the blood flow is enough to allow my rear end to slide to my heels. I don’t believe my joint is damaged or gummed up. It’s just old age, wickedness, and tight muscles.
I’ve kept up playing hockey on Wednesdays, but two weeks ago, the President’s Day vacation schedule canceled our session. I chose to do some runs on our nice, new turf field to satisfy my aerobic action quota.
Something in my right leg became very unhappy, so everybody else tying into that knee stiffened up to protect it.
You know these lingering muscle pulls: time and healing slow to a snail’s pace while your thoughts run wild. This friggin’ hurt, too, like the bones were grinding, especially when I got up from sitting or out of a car. I’ve wrecked it, I thought. The sooner I get a shiny, new titanium joint, the better. I should have taken better care of it when it was stiff, I admonished myself.
On YouTube, there’s a fitness dude known as KneesOverToesGuy who is always bounding around and lunging into deep knee flexion before leaping over tall buildings or dunking basketballs to prove that bullet proof knees are the key to elite performance. He’s right: being able to activate your strength from complete flexion, your rear against your heel, is a muscular and neurological trick that requires specific training.
That’s compelled me to hit the leg extension machine - not with anything heavy, but enough to remind my knees and quads of the old days. They felt dramatically better even after the first time around, at the end of a workout of squats and deads. The squats, by the way, were special, too; they were box squats with my feet set widely apart, the better to attack an adductor muscle who seemed to be the prime suspect behind all that pain.
The bones are no longer grinding; the tight muscles have been sprung loose. Luckily, there are very few injuries that cannot be addressed by some weight and the right leverage.
