Dense Backgrounder / Disclaimer: I’m not hurt again; since I was a pre-teen I’d always had joint issues which was eventually attributed to “Congenital Ligament Laxity” causing hypermobility. Basically I sprain my ankles a lot, my knees hurt from bending too far or tracking improperly, it’s likely the root-cause of my wrist injury in 2009, and so on. It affects every joint, some more than others, especially the load-bearing ones (ankles, knees, hips, SIJ…)
Ligaments are the tissues that connect bones to bones. Tendons connect muscles to bone. Muscles move it all around. Cartilage are the low-friction surface for bone-to-bone contact.
Think of ligaments as rubber (elastic) bands holding a skeleton together. And cartilage like a smooth ice or glass like surface.
My tendons are fine, and my muscles are particularly strong from having to make up for the ligaments being too loose to be useful. But there’s only so many muscles, and they only work in so many directions/axes. For example, there’s no muscles that align your knees/legs laterally – that’s just a side effect of your foot-position vs the width of your hips. When joints don’t move properly, be it a twist, unaligned, or most commonly: too far, bad things happen.
Here’s a bad kinesiology lesson to explain: when you stand and lock your knees, your femur (thigh bone) twists a little to prevent the knees from bending with a notch in the cartilage. I do that too, but I can keep bending my knees – usually further backwards. Or side to side. Or twist the whole joint. This is because my knee ligaments (ACL/MCL/LCL/PCL) are all loose. Now all that’s not great, but none of it is directly painful – until it happens every time you take a step, and your bones aren’t riding on the smooth parts of cartilage anymore, or are going over the edges, or catching.
Do that a few million times, and eventually your cartilage won’t be smooth, it’ll be fraying at the edges and getting cracked. That hurts.
When that damage happens, and can’t heal/be fixed, nor prevented – you become a candidate for knee replacement… I hit that point in my mid 20s. Except that surgeons & sports docs don’t like replacing the knees of people under the age of 60 because the artificial ones only last about 10 years and then they need to be replaced again (ironically, that’s about the age at which ligaments start to natually stiffen.)
So about the time I turned 19, my sports doc precribed custom knee braces, primarily to prevent rotation and “hyperextention” – aka: bending too far backwards. I got a pair of Innovation Sports’ CTi2, and they definitely make long active days better. I’ll note that there’s very few photos of me wearing them; I used to be extremely insecure and self-conscious about showing ’em while wearing shorts, eventually I got over it. You can see a photo from my ski wrap-up post this year.
A couple years later (2003), as I was losing health insurance/coverage, I picked up a pair of Breg X2Ks. They’re a bit less intense/rigid than the CTi2s, but I actually broke the aircraft aluminum frames three times. At $1600 each, that wasn’t good. Incidentally – the 3rd break happened about 2 hours before I broke my wrist. Was that a bad omen or what?
Since then, nothing much exciting has happened on this file – other than a few hundred inversion & eversion sprained ankles, a couple kilograms of Celebrex, and a persistently dislocating right shoulder – until now. I’ve once again got a health plan/insurance, and I’m still using my 14 year old CTi2s, spending $300 on new straps every couple years. And even though they got me through a great winter of skiing just fine, it seemed like a good time update. (Or have backups!)
So how do you shop for custom ligament knee braces? Well if you go back to the shop where you got all your previous ones, you earn a dubious ‘Best Customer Ever’ crown.
(3 Donjoys on the left, one of my CTi2s in the middle, a Breg Fusion XT, and lastly my surviving Breg X2K
Most people get these braces after a traumatic injury; they don’t do much research or even know what they’re getting into.
But I do.
That actually made the decision harder, since I know I’m stuck with these for a while, and know what I’ve already got. The big question was to just get new CTi2s? or try something new (to me) like the Donjoys or risk getting another Breg. Also, since they’re all custom fit, it’s not like I could just try on the display models for feel & comfort.
By far the Donjoy braces are the most popular, but I’ve never been impressed with the design of having the rigid frame on squishy gastroc muscle at the back of the leg, and a soft strap on the shin bone in front. (It’s probably easier to kneel with ’em on, but I’m not supposed to be doing that anyway!) Similarly, the PCL protection comes from just adding another strap above the knee.
Breg still has the X2Ks, but the shop didn’t like selling them because, surprise surprise – they break a lot.
After a lot of discussion, I settled on the new Breg Fusion XT, since my CTi2s will probably last forever (they’re made from titanium and carbon fibre!), replacing them just didn’t seem like good enough bang for the buck.
Fast forward a couple weeks, and I get a E-Mail from the shop, “They’re in… look pretty darn good :-)”
Look good?
Oh yeah, I may have paid up to get custom artwork on ’em 🙂
My rationale: I’m probably never going to get any tattoos, and if people are going to stare at my exoskeleton anyway – might as well make it look really cool to look at 🙂
I might also being trying to make my wardrobe work with the blue…
The Fusions surprised me by being much more comfortable that I expected. I’m pretty happy with that decision. I’ll still use the CTi2s for skiing since they’re a much more comprehensive and controlling design, but for day-to-day, the Fusions are quite awesome.
And I think they look really cool. Nyah!
