It is nice to have a virtual group of friends, especially good old college friends who keep pushing us to raise our bar, especially when it comes to physical health 🙂 Sharing one of the incidents where we pushed each other to excel and ended up with knee pain and sore muscles! Thankfully, one of our friends had the remedy for it as well..! Sharing what I learned in the process..!
My college friends are a virtual group spread across the world! While we were comfortable doing our 10K steps a day, one of the newbies started doing 100 squats a day, and we were inspired. Day 1 – 5 squats, Day 2 – 25 squats.. and we ended up with sore muscles, severe knee pain, unable to move ourselves 🙂 Ended up needing to order food – yeah! feels funny now.. but only the one going through the knee pain would understand it!
One of my other friends in the group is a Yoga expert! She asked her Yoga teacher and suggested a remedy, that worked wonders for me. Sharing the same!
Heat up half a cup of mustard oil and when warm, apply it all over your knees and let it soak for 30 minutes. Follow it up with a hot water wash or bath.
For muscle soreness & fatigue, hot water bath works like a miracle!
I started doing that every day after the squats and made it to 170 squats a day within a month. My knees and joints felt much stronger! For those who are wondering how I did the 170… I used to do it 20 squats at a time, multiple times a day! While making coffee and waiting for the microwave to beep – 20 squats.
Sharing some of the foods that I avoided during the period
- Fermented foods (excessive amount) increases chances for knee pain. So, reduced it. Switched to fresh curd/yoghurt instead of sour one.
- Increase legumes and salads. Switched to salads for dinner & included boiled chickpeas and black beans. Reduced the intake of rice/flour during dinner
PS: Knee pain has multiple causes. In this post, I only focused on knee pain caused by heavy exercise (or strenous physical activity). For chronic knee pain, will share the remedies on a separate post.