Knee Pain
Do your knees ache?
Willing to try some things to ease your pain?
Read on.
The knee is a stable hinge joint between two mobile joints, the ankle and the hip. The knee is classically a joint where pain from these mobile joints above and below can manifest. This is due to the great compensatory effort by the knees to make up for poor ankle or hip mobility.
·
If you are having pain on the outside of the knee, follow it up the leg and consider stretching and strengthening the IT band and glutes. Vice versa, if you’re having pain on the inside of your knee, follow it up the leg and consider stretching and strengthening the groin muscles aka the hip adductors.
·
However, the knee can also have pain stemming directly from its own issues - go figure! If we suffer a blow to the knee from any direction and are in a great amount of pain and swelling, this is obviously a more serious issue most likely involving one or more of the ligaments and/or menisci.
·
For the purposes of this blog post, we are considering knee pain from overuse, wear and tear, and possibly some arthritis. Knee pain can be located all around the knee - without knowing exactly how YOURS presents, we are going to give you some great general exercises to keep the knee moving in a healthy way and prevent pain.
·
First I want to get the muscles around the knee stretched. So we go over the standing quad stretch, standing hamstring stretch, kneeling groin stretch, and roll out the IT band. All of these muscles connect to the knee in some way, and their tone has a great effect on the knee. Therefore, keeping all the muscles that connect to the joint in question moving and loose is a great start to fixing your pain.
·
Then we go over some knee mobilizations. Moving the patella itself is a great way to unlock and lubricate it if it’s being bogged down by scar tissue, arthritis, etc. With a straight leg, slowly move your kneecap, aka your patella, side to side, then up and down.
·
Then we go into knee extensions. If you can imagine, our knees are normally bent throughout the day. There aren’t many times where our legs are completely straight because we sit a lot. Similar to poor posture with the back and neck and how rehabbing it usually involves getting them into the extension it craves all day, we do the same thing with the knees. We can start doing this seated and pushing above the knee straight backwards. We can progress to doing this while standing, and then adding a load with a resistance band.
·
We add in tibial rotations with knee extensions. Sitting down, turn your foot inward, and kick your leg out straight. Then turn your foot outward and do the same thing. Sometimes your kneecap doesn’t track well as your leg flexes and extends throughout the day. This exercise gets your kneecap moving well within the groove in sits in and lubricates the joint.
·
Finally, many people get pain while walking up or down steps. This exercise is to help with that in a very controlled manner. Start on a stool and step down backwards without putting any weight on the moving foot. Do this over and over on each leg. Once this becomes a pain free range of motion, progress to stepping down in front of you.
·
There are many causes of knee pain. If you are someone that has it day to day, make these exercises part of your daily routine to improve your knee health. If it’s still not enough, we’d love to get you in for a more in depth assessment to get you on the right track for a pain-free knee.
