So late last year I did this little shop project:
It's a massive DVD holder. I made it out of a cabinet (top part) and the base for a swivel chair (bottom part). It's part of my new movement to "creatively recycle old things instead of buying new things." It can hold about 440 DVDs. It swivels around, with DVDs facing outward on both sides.
The project was more or less successful. As you might expect, my DVD holder is a little unsteady, because the cabinet top is much broader than the swivel chair base. But the base is well-attached, thanks to these:
And these things are what got me thinking about bad knees, and the mistakes we make when trying to fix them.
What are these things? They're actually rather clever in design. They are anchored to the wood of the chair seat. You can screw a metal bolt through them, connecting the seat to the metal swivel base.
Now, it goes without saying, if you're going to attach a chair seat to a base, you better make sure to do it well. It has to be able to withstand the weight of light people, heavy people, people who are leaning back in their chairs, etc.
That's what this hardware, let's call it a bolt sleeve, accomplishes. It fits into a wooden hole drilled into the seat of the chair. However, it doesn't just slide into a predrilled hole. Those pointy fangs must be hammered into the wood (thus ensuring the bolt sleeve doesn't rotate and also giving the attachment more stability).
When I disassembled the swivel chair, in the early stages of this project, I immediately spied these sleeves and said, "Got to reuse those!" I could see how they would be essential to making my DVD holder as sturdy as possible. If they're good enough to support a 300-lb.'er on a chair seat, they would work perfectly for my purposes, I surmised.
Only one problem: at the time, I wasn't aware of the pointy fangs that had been hammered into the wood. From what I could see of the bolt sleeves, all I had to do was somehow dislodge them and pop them free. So what tool did I choose for this? The great chewer-upper of wood (and even metal): the reciprocating saw.
I put the chair seat into a vise and sawed into it, toward the first bolt sleeve. I figured I'd cut into it from a few different directions, enough to free up up the sleeves. But, in doing so, I sometimes managed to damage them. It was harder to extract the sleeves than expected.
Then I started looking at the pointy fangs that had been hammered into the wood of the chair seat and I realized: "I'm using the wrong tool. I'm trying to cut these free. I should be using the claw of a hammer to pull them out, because what's mainly holding them in place are the prongs."
So I did, and the job went much faster, and I didn't create as much damage along the way.
Okay, that's a long walk, admittedly. So what does that have to do with healing bad knees?
One thing I noticed on my knee journey, when I was suffering a decade and a half ago: bad knees can be improved in a number of ways, and that can confuse people. I dealt with that topic in this blog post 10 years ago.
The problem is, various "tools" can do the job to some degree, and there are studies that show this, compounding all the confusion. For instance, one study might say hip strengthening is needed, based on an experiment with some subjects, and another might advocate quad strengthening. Both types of exercises can be shown to be better than doing nothing.
What we might find, at the end of the day, is quad strengthening > hip strengthening > doing nothing.
So some people might wander off to strengthen their quads, while others focus on their hips.
But what if there's an even better "tool" for the job, a "tool" that directly addresses what's wrong (the knees) instead of stuff that's in the immediate area (quads, hips).
That's what I realized I should focus on: simple, light exercises that tried to improve the health of my knee joints. I fashioned a program with this emphasis, which became necessary after the program that my therapist proposed, strengthening my quads, turned out to be a dismal failure.
It took numerous months, but I managed to heal my knees. Today I attribute my success to using the right "tool," if you will.
Are you using the right "tool" as you try to heal your knees?
