I used to love leg day above all else. I had minuscule, acl, cartridge done on left knee 15 years ago. This past year it has been extremely rough preventing me from even having a leg day.
Lately slowly started working legs back in and once again my life is limited due to my left knee protesting.
Just recently had the idea that maybe I could get some type of leg day back by just using my right leg.
Clearly this would cause my legs to look extremely uneven but is that the only con I am looking at here?
Not meant to be a pissing contest at all, because injuries and recovery certainly differ, but I’ve had those. What does your leg day look like now? Why do you feel like you can’t train that leg at all? I feel like the arthritis can only get worse if we stop doing anything
Never put it through physical therapy. Was a much different person back then. I can’t bend my knee past 90 degrees and I also don’t have full extension.
The surgeries was a result of being struck and drug by a car while sitting at a bus bench.
It’s not the pain that’s an issue, there becomes an inability to walk if I push it too hard.
It’s considerably smaller than my right leg already due to 15+ years of not bending past 90 degrees and not being able to straighten all the way.
When I began working out I would do the most range of motion I could possibly handle and still was able to get a rather nice leg workout in considering.
I recently had MRI’s done and the doctors advice was to not exercise it but rest it. A month of resting resulted in it getting worse.
I began jogging again, anything between 1-3 miles 5x a week seems to keep it happy and pain free.
As soon as I began weight training it again it started deteriorating. Currently laid up in bed with ice and compression sleeves.
Have had success with RDL and hip abduction but it’s just not giving me the amazing feeling I would have after a leg day. I loved how my legs would feel after an intense leg day and have never understood those that don’t like DOMS because I loved that as well ans quite frankly miss it deeply.
As far as what my leg day looks like now I don’t have one. I have been incorporating one or two leg exercises into my other push/pull days with the hopes of working back up to having a leg day once again. RDL and hip abduction were fine, as soon as I picked up squats and extensions walking is starting to become difficult and after years of dealing with this I know if I push it further I will be stuck in bed.
Just some random thoughts what I think I would examine/approach in your situation:
Do what works (keep on jogging).
Train the working leg (and other bodyparts) as hard as possible (studies indicate the other leg will also grow).
Try to incorporate negative/eccentric emphasized excercises for the injured leg (you are 40% stronger in the eccentric movement, which may make it easier to lower the weight, read up on it on Dr Darden’s board here on Tnation).
Apply bodyweight excercises.
Use resistance bands.
Seek out an interested physio to construct a balanced training program.
Supplement with creatine, omega 3 and multitype collagen as ergogenic aids.
Assuming you don’t have any vascular or cardiac issues, blood flow restriction training may be your best bet for training both legs effectively, without pissing off the knee
Just starting to look into BFR training. The first thing that pops into my head is using cialis preworkout yet BFR gets a better workout with a lower load and less blood?
Really need to sit down and research this. Thank you so much for the suggestion
Also, tried “A Leg Day” and the emotional and mental benefit it provided alone makes it extremely valuable to me. Can’t believe I didn’t try it sooner.
Still did very low load stuff with bad knee but god that numb strong feeling after is like dope. Really missed that.
Pleasure mate! BFR is very cool, and I’ve started using with more and more joint-compromised clients (arthritis, post-surgery)
These podcasts are all very “physio-y” but I think give some great info:
This one is a nice 11min “bite” of info:
The main trouble is calculating the correct occlusion pressure. You can just do “tight enough” pressure and go from there, or you can try and use one of the variety of regression equations that exist.
Once on, the 30-15-15-15 protocol is most popular, but you can basically just do anything that gives you a nice pump