Philosophical Meditations on My Knee By Brian Simpson

Thanks for all the cards and letters from my adoring readers, who have sympathised with my plight over the last few months regarding my destroyed knee/leg/quadriceps muscle, surgically repaired, but as stiff as a corpse in the Arctic. I am getting physio from the local uni, who have supervised students who experiment on you. It is cheap, and you get what you pay for as the saying goes. I have a young Chinese girl who is most unfriendly, and I think that she would prefer for me to die than turn up each week. I have to do exercises with a thin yellow rubber thingy, leg extensions of three sets of 10, as my homework. Apart from that there are exercises and stretches for my calf muscles, which are fine; yesterday, I did 5,000 calf raises on the front steps (100 in a set), just to see what I am made of. Really, the focus should be on my quads, and hamstrings, but she has a “holistic” view that takes in the whole leg, but only one leg.  But, the rest of the body must be neglected. Just focus on your leg, nothing else. Yes, too bad if I die of cardiovascular disease in the meantime, ending up, as the corpse with the strongest quad in the morgue!

 Even at my advanced state of decay, I can do at least 100 yellow rubber leg extensions in a set, but she is not impressed with that. No, number 10 is the magic number. I can do partial squats, but since these are not technically perfect, they must be dropped. Of course, I ignore all this, and as Bruce Lee, who recovered from a severe back injury by ignoring his quacks (who said he would never do martial arts again) and training on, said: “take what is useful and abandon the rest.” Anyway, the magic of YouTube is a great comfort and I discovered Bob and Brad, “the most famous physical therapists on the internet,” “in our opinion, of course,” Bob, who are enormously helpful. There are some useful videos, much better than watching soap operas:

https://www.youtube.com/user/physicaltherapyvideo  

If you have an injury, after getting permission from your doctor of course, doctors being the source of all wisdom, (disclaimer alert) it might be worth doing some of your own health/exercised research. I have found that there is more controversy in the field of physical rehabilitation than even in nutrition, so the more you knee, I mean know, the better.