Things I learned about my knees

Getting studied on Wednesday, they measured the strength of my knees and my grips. That way if I go on the experimental calorie reduction I can come back in a year and see how much I've wasted away. Right now, I think I'm pretty strong. I learned I can exert 160 Newton-meters of torque at the knee kicking forward through the quads, and 130 Newton-meters of torque pulling back through the hamstrings. The grip device reported "44", which I'm going to guess is linear Newtons of force.
The interesting thing about my knees is that a couple years ago when I was in physical therapy for knee trouble, one of the things they told me was that I needed to strengthen my quads, which didn't make much sense to me as I thought they were pretty strong from biking and other things. What they told me on Wednesday was that the normal ratio of strength on that joint is closer to 2:1 and they were surprised how strong my hamstrings were. They said that this imbalance sometimes causes knee pain. Aha! Now the comment about my quads from years ago made sense.
So, there are a few exercises from the old PT routine that I may resume, and I've been thinking about my bicycling technique and whether I can change the way I use my muscles to pedal. But I shouldn't do too much. It might throw off the study.

How to clean up

I was organizing and cleaning this morning, in this place I moved into at the start of August that is still littered with boxes, and made some decent progress in one room. I made the most progress in the space I spend the most time in (where the computer is). It was directly valuable improvement to me. That room over there, the dining room, was still full of boxes. Chatting with a friend she made the off hand suggestion to move the boxes into the computer room. beat. beat. Yeah! My dining room is now almost empty of boxes and things have been moved to where I should be more likely to deal with them. Hopefully I'll be able to report in a week or two that this little trick I play on myself will have had positive results.