I’ve discovered that you really can’t do many exercises with a sprained MCL. Last week my plan was to stay fit with the awesome Naked Warrior workout. Unfortunately, I can’t even do a pistol on my good leg because I can’t keep the lame leg straight as I squat down.

Then I tried to do some one-arm pushups but unless you can keep your body completely tight and rigid from head to toe you won’t budge from the down position. I could literally feel power leaking out of my bad knee when I tried to do one-arm pushups and eventually I just gave up.

I have figured out a few exercises that put no strain on my knee. First and most obvious is the situp. I’ve been doing a lot of cross-choke situps. Basically this involves reaching far between your legs with the blades of your wrists turned in as though your are cross-grabbing the lapels of an opponent’s kimono. On the negative I try to touch my elbows to my belt-line, just as I would with a real cross choke.

The other exercise I’ve been doing is the kettlebell press from a seated position. I just sit on the ground with my legs stretched out in a V in front of me. Then I crush-grip the handle of a 45lb kettlebell and do a strict military-press overhead. This is an awesome workout for your core because your obliques and abs have to be flexed tight during the press or the kettlebell will just pull you backwards and you’ll smash your head. I can only do about five reps on each side. By comparison, when I do a regular clean-and-press I can generally do 10-12 reps with a 53lb kettlebell because of the additional power from my legs. By eliminating the legs you amplify the difficulty of the press and recruit different muscles.

A hellish variation of the seated press is the seated curl. From the same position as before, you just crush-grip a kettlebell by the horns and hold it in curl position in front of you for as long as you can. This drill engages the back muscles more. If you don’t keep your back tight, the weight of the bell will just pull you forward.

You don’t really need to crush-grip the bell in either of these exercises but I’m doing so because I want to improve my grip strength and frankly it’s the only exercise I’m going to get for a while.

When my knee is rehabbed a little more I’m going to try to get back to my Naked Warrior training and I hope to blog about it more in the coming weeks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 3:10 am and is filed under conditioning, kettlebells. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.