How I Healed A Chronic Knee Injury That Lasted Two Years

I went from having a chronic knee injury where I couldn’t even walk a mile to being able to do Crossfit again. In this article, I’m going to share the details of how I finally healed my knee.

My injury lasted about two and a half years, and anybody who has had an injury that lasts that long, you know how demoralizing it can be. Just when you think it’s getting better, it gets worse, constantly reminding you that you may never return to the lifestyle you enjoyed pre-injury.

How I Injured My Knee

I’ve always been prone to repetitive stress injuries, dating back to as early as high school basketball when I developed a case of “jumper’s knee.” At my worst I had tendonitis in both wrists, both ankles, and both shoulders.

My knee injury was a similar situation. I had been doing Crossfit for about 4 years consistently and I have always stayed in good shape. But what injured my knee was actually taking a break from Crossfit. I took about six weeks off to landscape my backyard. I did a ton of digging, and a lot of repetitively bending over and even putting weight on my knee while I built a stone patio.

Immediately after finishing my backyard, I jumped right back into Crossfit, working out five days per week at high intensity and lifting the same weights I was before taking a break. It didn’t take long before I started having problems. The problems started as a popping in my knee when doing squats. It was slightly painful, but not enough to keep me from trying to work out.

But, over time it got worse. My knee felt loose when I was walking, like the joint wasn’t sitting properly. I took a week or two off and lowered my intensity, but as soon as I would try to work out, I would aggravate the knee. It was never a major injury, just something that wasn’t going away.

For the next few months it would get a little better, then I would go too hard on it and the pain would come back.

Then one day after playing volleyball my knee started to really hurt. It hurt so bad that I had to cut a walk with my dog short and take a few days off. And that is when it officially started sucking.

After that day I couldn’t do Crossfit at all.

I couldn’t play volleyball.

I couldn’t run.

I couldn’t hike.

I couldn’t bike.

I couldn’t even walk my dog without it aggravating my knee.

For an active person like myself who loves the outdoors, this was a serious bummer. Being active is a major part of my identity, and suddenly I couldn’t do anything I enjoyed.

Since my knee sounded pretty crunchy, and I had some weird pain going on, I decided to see an orthopedic surgeon to see what he said. He did some x-rays and told me to that it was just minor damage to the cartilage and that I could keep working out.

So, I tried working out. It made my knee hurt. I tried going on walks with my dog. It hurt. I got to the point where I couldn’t even do some basic yard work without my knee hurting. It was one of the worst and most depressing situations of my life.

Then Things Got Worse

After a few months of being inactive, my health started to decline. I should also probably mention that at this same time my wife and I just had our first baby boy.

So, not only was I not able to work out, I wasn’t getting good sleep either. And since I work from home, I wasn’t getting any social engagement. It’s like the perfect storm for a downward spiral in health.

My first sign of poor health was eczema on my eyelid. Most doctors will just give you steroids and pretend like it’s not a big deal, but I knew this was just a symptom of an underlying issue. My body was messed up, and this is how it was telling me.

Then, a few months later, I started having joint pain in my fingers. The joint pain slowly got worse over time and it’s something I’m still trying to figure out, although it has improved recently.

And finally, I started having energy problems. I would have zero motivation or energy throughout the day, and I would usually crash in the afternoon and be totally worthless when it came to work.

As I learned later, my knee injury was a catalyst for some auto-immunity flaring up in body. Basically, my body was attacking itself. Damn.

Physical Therapy

After going to the orthopedic surgeon and getting zero help, I decided to try physical therapy. I found a pretty good therapist that worked at the University and started going to him twice each week.

Since it had been a while since I had really worked out, this actually felt amazing to push myself again, even though the exercising was minimal.

The physical therapy did help, too. But, I had to be extremely careful on my knee. Every once in a while I would do something like walk to far and it would hurt for three days, making me feel like I was starting from scratch all over again.

But I kept at this for about a full year, and I think it was an important part of my knee finally healing. However, I don’t think this alone could solve it. In fact, relying on any kind of Dr. or therapist solely is a huge mistake when healing a chronic injury like this. When it comes to your health, there is nobody that cares as much as you do. Nobody is as interested in healing you as you are. And often times just one type of therapy isn’t enough. You need to look at the body holistically.

So that’s what I did.

Diet

About a year and a half into my knee injury, I started to get desperate. I was seriously doubting that my knee would ever heal and that I’d have to eventually get knee surgery. I’m not a fan of most doctors, so surgery was my last resort.

Since I was having other health issues (eczema, joint pain, fatigue, cold intolerance), I decided to get more serious about my diet. I was already eating a paleo diet and had eliminated most problem foods like grains and dairy, but maybe there was something else I should do?

I tried the Ketogenic Diet. I tried intermittent fasting. I tried eating less meat. I tried eating more meat. I tried the Auto-Immune Paleo diet. I tried testing all kinds of different supplements. I was grasping at anything I could to try and solve my problems which now went beyond a knee injury. I even went on a 3 and a half day water fast thinking that might help me. But nothing seemed to work. Not only was my knee not healing, but my other symptoms weren’t improving either.

Functional Medicine

After a while of trying things on my own, I decided that it was time to go see somebody else. So, I went into a functional medicine practitioner and hired him. This was not cheap. Seeing this doctor over the next 8 months ended up costing me over $12,000.

I went at least 6 months without touching one ounce of gluten and being on a very restrictive diet. I stopped drinking alcohol. I tried about a hundred different supplements. I spent thousands in blood tests, stool tests, and urine tests.

Through this process, I found a few things that helped me feel better and slowly, while still continuing my physical therapy exercises and being extremely careful on my knee, it started to get better. But, I still wasn’t at 100% so I kept on searching for more information. During my search I found a few key insights that helped me to finally get back to 100% (or at least 90%).

Stress Management – Turning off Your “Fight or Flight” Response

When your body is in a state of stress, your sympathetic nervous system is activated. When that is the case, your body does not devote resources to healing and recovery. This is known as being in a state of “fight or flight.” Your body doesn’t heal in this state because it’s devoting all resources towards surviving the perceived “battle” that is right in front of it – whether or not there really is a life threatening situation going on. That so-called battle could be as simple as some tension in a close relationship. It could be from anxiety about work. It could be from worrying about your financial future. It could be from getting fired from a job. It could even be from having a low level of status in society or simply being lonely.

It doesn’t matter if your body is actually in danger, if your brain perceives you are in danger, which is often the case in our overworked, over-stimulated modern lives, your brain shuts down all repairs to save energy for keeping you on high alert. This is very effective when being chased by a lion because it allows you to react quickly and with massive energy. But, when you are in this state chronically, your body starts to break down and rarely has a chance to heal itself. This limits your ability to heal.

So, if you want to get better, you must try to spend as much time with your body in parasympathetic mode – which is known as “rest and recovery” mode. This is the mode your body goes into when there is no perceived threat it needs to be aware of. This is when you are totally present in the moment, unafraid, unstressed, and just at ease with life. This mode can be accessed through meditation, breathing exercises, Yoga, good sleep, or simply taking a vacation.

For me, I found that my body was in a state of constant stress. I had a new baby, new financial pressures that come with a new baby, a near non existent social life, relationship tension with my wife, constant knee pain, and my usual outlets of physical activity were off limits for me. As a result, I was constantly stuck in my head thinking, planning, and strategizing how fix this situation. Basically, I was stressed. But, I didn’t realize that this was a barrier to actually healing. What I really needed was to just chill out, go outside more often and find more reasons to laugh.

I think this is something that most people with a chronic injury fail to do, which is probably what led to the chronic injury in the first place. Our modern environment is not ideal for our primitive brains. We are constantly stimulated with emotionally draining information and constantly pressured to be better, make more money, and be super-human. Our bosses, spouses, kids, family, and friends all need something from us. Plus, we are addicted to constantly checking our cell phones, reading our emails, or finding some other reason to distract us even further. We no longer just sit and relax our bodies. Meaningful social interactions are more rare. A simple walk in the sun enjoying the feeling of heat on your skin and the sounds of birds chirping rarely happens.

It doesn’t matter what you are doing that causes you to relax, but turning your focus toward relaxation is essential to healing.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve learned to manage my stress a bit better. Here’s what has been impactful for me…

• I work less. I’m an ambitious person, but I had to tame that ambition and let some things go in order to chill out.
• I meditate. Meditation has been shown to reduce the size and activity of the amygdala – the part of the your brain that activates when you are in a state of fight or flight. There are lots of ways to meditate, but a good place to start is with “Stress Less, Accomplish More” by Emily Fletcher.
• I try to laugh. Instead of being serious when talking to people, try to find a reason to make a joke or inject some humor.
• Let go. It’s very easy to be so worried about getting what you want, whether that is watching what you want on TV, going to the restaurant you want to eat at, or even making sure whatever work you create is perfect. I’ve found that just going with the flow takes this pressure off of me and makes me more easy going. When I turn my perfectionism toward trying to relax, then I find ways to chill out instead of being tense.
• Go outside. Every day I try to spend at least 30 minutes outside in the middle of the day and expose as much of my skin as possible to the sun. Sometimes that means chilling in my backyard in my underwear.
• Deep breathing. Box breathing is a great strategy to start with. Inhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4, hold the exhale for a count of four. Repeat at least six times. For more details on how the breathe effects your health, check out the book “Breathe” by James Nestor.

I could keep going on, but the point is to relax in whatever way works for you. Don’t expect instant results from this, and don’t expect this to be easy. This is actually one of the hardest things to do, but learning how to relax will improve every aspect of your life for the rest of your life.

Physical Activity That Helped Heal My Knee

Ok, so let’s talk about the things I did specifically for my knee that allowed me to heal.

1. Consistent Physical Therapy – It takes 6 months for your connective tissue to regenerate. Unlike muscle that only takes a couple of weeks, ligaments and tendons take a long time to heal. So, you must do consistent therapy to give those ligament and tendons the right amount of stress so they heal strong. I would recommend going to a good physical therapist and have them create a workout protocol for you. This was very helpful to me even though I already knew a lot about fitness.
2. Manage Your Volume – I’m talking about the volume of work you do on your injury. This is the hardest part to understand and implement. Your tendency is likely going to take a few days off to heal, start feeling better, and then jump right back into the same activity level you were at before. However, this just prolongs the healing process. Once you injure yourself, you need to significantly drop the volume of work you are putting on the injury. Then, as you heal, you need to SLOWLY build back up. When you’re dealing with a chronic injury, then that build up stage may take six months or a year before you’re back at your normal activity level. Any time you have a significant jump in the amount of volume of exercise you are putting on an injury, you have a significant chance of re-injury. This means you have to take it way slower than you want to. Patience is key here, but very few people have the patience to stick with a rehab strategy for long enough to really heal. You also may need to avoid certain situations like a volleyball game at your work party, a pickup basketball with friends, or even a long hike that you’re invited to (unless you’ve built up to it).
3. Find Other Ways To Exercise – If you can’t run, bike, or lift, it can be difficult to get your heart pumping. But, it’s essential that you find a way to be active for your physical and emotional well-being. Maybe that’s swimming. Maybe it’s rowing. Maybe it’s using a Ski-Erg. Maybe it means you need to hire a personal trainer to create an exercise plan you can actually do with your injury. A drop in physical activity is terrible for healing your body. This is one of the mistakes I made. I should have started swimming or something, but it wasn’t convenient for me so I didn’t. As a result, the rest of my health suffered as well. So find some way to get your heart rate up and sweat. At a minimum start doing a couple of sauna’s a few times a week as that put your body in a similar state as doing cardio.

Optimize Your Sleep

Sleep is when the majority of healing and recovery is done so you’ll want to get serious about optimizing your sleep (just not too serious or you can make it even harder to sleep.)

Sleep is one of the biggest performance enhancing things you can possibly do. Good sleep can make you smarter, healthier, more emotionally stable, happier, more energetic, and even prolong your life. Yet, most people treat it like an inconvenience that they just squeeze in between other activities. Don’t do that.

Here are a few quick tips for optimizing your sleep.

1. Blackout all lights in your room. Get blackout curtains, cover all LED lights, and try to get it as dark as possible in your room.
2. Sleep in a cool room. The recommendations I’ve found are to sleep in a room that is roughly 64 degrees Fahrenheit, but this is a matter of preference.
3. Eliminate artificial light at night. If you must watch TV or read, then utilize blue light blocking glasses since blue light is the type of light that controls your circadian rhythm and production of melatonin.
4. Go outside in the morning for a few minutes without sunglasses. This helps to set your circadian rhythm.
5. Finish eating 3-4 hours before going to bed. This ensures digestion doesn’t disrupt your sleep.
6. Consider supplementing with magnesium. Magnesium is important to help your muscles relax (among pretty much every other process in your body) and helps many people fall sleep.
7. Don’t take sleeping pills. These can actually hurt your ability to sleep long term.

Conclusion

As much as we want a quick fix to a chronic injury, it just doesn’t work that way. The reason the injury became chronic in the first place is likely because your body doesn’t have what it needs to heal. You’re not going to find one magic supplement, a magic exercise, or the perfect Dr. that will immediately solve your issues. That rarely happens.

If you really want to heal yourself, you must look at your health holistically. You’ll probably have to make some permanent changes to how you live your life. This takes a lot of work and it requires a shift in mindset – but the results can be profound, improving nearly every aspect of your life.

For me, the journey to heal my body has lead me to understand myself more and to live a healthier life. I’m sure it will do the same for you as long as you keep working at it.

To start this journey, the first place I would focus is making sure you are relaxed. Start right now by closing your eyes, taking a few deep breaths, and accepting where you are at. Being in a hurry isn’t going to help you, so just methodically take it one step at a time.