26 Feb Danny Vega – Off Season Week 7 – Back to the drawing board

I have a bum knee. It’s been an issue since December 2014 and it has recently gotten worse. The current plan is to get a diagnosis and figure out what I’m going to do next.

Powerlifting is a funny sport. A year ago, my squat and pull were climbing steadily with my bench in the gutter. Now all I can do is bench. Since a meet prep in late 2014, I have had a bad left knee. Here’s the timeline:

December 2014 – Tweaked my left knee in the final weeks of meet prep. It was around my second attempt at the time (575). I ended up squatting 606 and pulling 667 and lived to fight another day.

May 2015 – It happened again, this time at a meet with my opener. I squatted 610 and didn’t take a third attempt to save it for my pull when I hit 700.

At this point I thought wraps would fix it, so I compete at my next meet wrapped.

November 2015 – 605 opener, 645, pass out. There were other factors that day but the pain was worse than ever. Plus, I was walking my squats out in a way that put more stress on it.

Up until recently, I’ve worked around it. Took a month off, felt better, etc. This week I knew it was serious because it affected my deadlifts. I was supposed to pull a 635 double. I pulled it for a single and tried to regroup and pull a double again. I had no leg drive and the pain was terrible. I barely budged it off the ground. Not to be confused for a quitter, I tried again today to squat. I hit 55×6, 145×5, 235×5, and then didn’t even get to parallel with 325 before reracking it.

At this point, a meet seems out of the question.  I had some plans for later this year that I may move up to now. But first I need to know what’s up with my knee so I’ll get that checked out, then figure out what to do.

If surgery is the plan, I’m not mad. My right knee had a full ACL and meniscus repair and it’s perfect. So I could come back stronger. So let’s see what happens. Stay tuned.

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Danny Vega

Danny Vega is a 220lb raw powerlifter with meet bests of 640 squat in wraps (610 raw), 400 bench, and 700 deadlift. A native of Miami, Florida, Vega received his bachelor’s degree in political science from Columbia University in 2004, where he was a member of the football team and a three-time Dean’s List recipient. Vega earned his masters of science in human performance from the University of Florida, where he worked with the national championship men’s basketball team along with women’s basketball, tennis, and golf programs. He then went on to become the Strength & Conditioning coordinator for VCU basketball. The Rams were 2007 conference champions and made it to the second round of the NCAA tournament.

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