So I'm not a huge product-placement guy.  It's a slippery slope; start endorsing products and pretty soon your website starts to become like Greg Kinnear's character in Mystery Men--vapid, and covered with endorsements.

But here's one I really like:  a knee wrap with a built-in icing system.  You wrap it snugly around your gimpy leg and, bango!  You've taken care of the icing-compression healing combo that makes up the elusive I and the C in R.I.C.E. (that would be Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation--the standard mnemonic for the best treatment of minor strains).     

As luck would have it, I got one of these puppies in the mail just a day or two after I torqued up my knee but good trying to get fancy with my exercise program.  Prior to that I'd been trying to do the Ace-bandage-plus-bags-of-ice-trick. 

If you've never tried that particular fun-day extravaganzy, I'm here to tell you that Ace bandages and bags of ice just don't get along well at all.  Ice tends to melt, see, and when it does, it gets smaller.  When that happens, the Ace bandage that you wrapped firmly around your knee gets loose and soggy and pretty soon you've got a sloppy, drippy Ace bandage around your ankle and a wife wondering why her husband keeps peeing on her floor.  Not a pretty picture, Freckles!

But then my saving grace came in the mail.  It's called the Moji, and it looks like this:

I like this product:  it feels great, it actually LOOKS good.  It's comfortable, it isn't bulky, and after about 20-30 minutes--the optimal time to ice a joint--the cooling unit gradually heats up to room temperature or so, so no worries about frostbite (though the enclosed instructions tell you to take it off after 20 minutes just to be safe).  

My one complaint--perhaps because I like cold things REALLY COLD--is that it might not QUITE be cold enough for long enough.  Out of the freezer, it's nice and frosty, but when the warm air hits it, it loses its mojo (moji-o?).  Ice doesn't; it melts, sure, but the ice that remains still cold, so you get that super-numb feeling, frostbitten feeling which some of us, perversely, like. 

But that's a small complaint, because now that I have my Moji I'll never go back to ice plus Ace. 

You should probably have one around just in case; they say to put the cooling unit in the freezer for four hours before use, so it probably makes sense to just have it in the freezer waiting for you and your overzealous joints.  It's small, so don't worry about it taking up too much space.  It's at least as compact as those boxes of Frosted Frozen Waffles you keep in there, anyway.