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Originally Posted by
MuscleScience
Awesome, I started this a little late into rehab but just a little context of how out of shape my knee was.
Last July I started doing body weight squats. I could only do 3-4 in a row before I had to rest. And I couldn't get all the way to parallel. I would do a set of 100. At first it would take me an entire day to get all 100 in. It actually was some days I couldn't get 100 in. The first time I did get 100 in about 2 weeks into that. My knee was sore for almost a week. I got back to it and eventually I could do 10-15-20 in a row and so on. My right thigh was half the size of my left, it was disgusting. My calf was probably about that small too.
I kept doing that air squat routine until I could do my 100 a day and not be sore. That's when I decided to get back into a formal gym. At about that time, I joined Orange Theory Fitness (OTF) to get my cardio in. Let me tell you, it was so frustrating at first. They have 3 levels for cardio that you base your resistances and such off of. At first I was a very slow power walker, then got to a very slow jogging level to now in at the runner level of starting intensity.
The nice thing about OTF is their Treads have shock absorbers built into them which helped tremendously, I had heard this and was one reason I joined. Still every single step at first felt like someone stabbing me in the knee, especially when I would try to run. I fought through it, and took it easy at first. The running was the best thing to actually do for my knee since the stress caused my ligaments to tighten up over time and helped resurface the articulator parts of the knee, at least that's my theory. I'm at a point know where I'm really airing out my legs to see how far I can push them, within reason.
I will say having all this extra endurance capacity from all the running has helped me tremendously with my weights, especially with all the high intensity stuff. I can pretty much go to failure on every exercise, do a superset on another body part to failure and go right back to the first without losing my breath or stopping.