After my knee injury, my quad seems to have gone to sleep. I realized this earlier when I was looking at my slumped in muscle there and saggy skin where the muscle used to be. I also realized that this is what was causing my gait to be awkward – I have been using my hip flexors to heave my leg forward rather than lifting with the quad muscle.
I did a Google search for how to deal with this and saw some quad exercises. I did those this morning and the muscle seemed to start to re-engage a bit. I also am trying to get more flexibility in the knee. Currently I can bend it to about a 30 degree angle or so.
I did not do anything that caused pain, just some discomfort / soreness / stretch.
The exercises I did:
- Stand and hold onto a fixed table with my left hand and my crutch with my right. Try to lift my straight leg in front of me. I only get about 30 degrees on this.
- Stand against a wall and try to do a wall squat. Mostly I used my good leg, but I tried hard to activate the quad on the bad leg.
- Walked a little over a mile around my neighborhood with my crutches.. took around an hour.