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Re: Knees & Shoulder Pain
As both a damaged aikidoka (major injuries, surgery, rehab) and an experienced RN, I'd say please take ANYthing said here with many grains of salt. Every joint in the body and esp knees and shoulders comprise so many different muscles, tendons, and ligaments that anecdotal reporting may have nothing to do with what is happening to your body. You need a sports medicine doctor or PT or athletic trainer to look at you, touch you, and watch you in movement to be able to say what it is that is actually going on with your body. Having said that, a few comments:
1. If soft tissue is damaged, there is no shortcut around resting. Without a chance to heal, acute injuries become chronic injuries.
2. Very often, pain above the knee is due to trigger points in the quads, in which case strength training alone won't help: any tense trigger points need to be dealt with before the muscle can either stretch OR contract properly.
3. The best way to protect any loose joint is indeed strength training for the support muscles; for knees this means not only quads but hamstrings. For shoulders it includes the core trunk muscles which is good for aikido as well since much of our "extending ki" or "unbendable arm" stuff in terms of body use should mean using the lats to originate arm movement.
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