Two Things You Must Know To Fix Knee Pain

If you’ve been struggling to fix a knee problem, and you’ve got cartilage damage, meniscus tear, ligament issue like an ACL tear an ACL sprain. Or maybe it’s more of a muscular problem like a hamstring issue, or the muscles in the front of your thighs. Any of these issues can really be difficult to fix or challenging to treat.

Especially if you’re at home on your own, not really looking to get treatment, or maybe you’ve had treatment in the past, from a from a healthcare professional, but it didn’t work out for you.

Well, I’m a physical therapist, I’m a specialist physical therapist, I help people with knee problems all the time. One of our popular videos here on YouTube is about how to heal knee cartilage. I’ve linked it here in the description below, you can go check that out if you want to look at rehabbing or treating a knee cartilage problem on your own at home.

But I’m going to talk to you today about two major factors that you need to build into your mindset so that you can fix your knee problem on your own at home without surgery, medications, or injections. Now before we get into that, I want to just be clear that in nine out of 10 cases, it is totally possible to fix any problem without a surgery.

And without having to just say I’m going to just take ibuprofen or Tylenol the rest of my life or having go get injections the doctor all the time. So in case you’re thinking, well, if they told me already, they need to go get it in surgery, I need to have a knee replacement done, or an arthroscopic procedure done.

It’s rare here in the clinic, whenever we see patients and we get them going in the right things. They it’s rare that they have to go that path, they usually will recover without surgery, and having to rely on medications and injections. So that being said, let’s get into it, there’s two major mindset things that you have to get in place. One is you need to be okay, with increasing your physical strength, you just need stronger muscles.

And also, I’ll tell you the second one right now, but I’m going to unpack them a bit, too, is you need to build your coordination, the way that you move is another way to put coordination. And they’re different from each other strength is the literal amount of force, that your muscles can generate the the amount of power that a single muscle has, or a combination of muscles all have together, you need to up that in almost all people with knee problems, their strength is too low in certain areas.

And that’s a big contributing factor to their knee problem. And the reason why I say it needs to be part of your mindset is because some people are they got an injury through exercise, you know, they were running or they were lifting weights, or they were playing a sport and it gradually led up to their knee issue. And they’re kind of traumatized by having that injury because of that thing that they did.

And so they’re averse that they want to avoid doing more exercise for fear that it’s going to make them worse. And also sometimes healthcare professionals, doctors, a lot of times will tell patients, Oh, don’t be doing that exercise, don’t be running, don’t be walking, don’t be lifting weights, because it’s going to make it worse.

And and then people get the feedback where they go do the exercise, they go try to run or they go try to lift weights, and the knee pain comes back. And in reality, it’s not.

It’s not a bad thing altogether exercise, it’s that that one exercise, or the way that that exercise was done usually was aggravating the knee problem. But if it’s tweaked and messed with, and if you can figure out a way to do the exercise correctly, or figure out a different exercise altogether, that’s going to benefit more.

It’s actually a very beneficial thing, we can find the best strengthening exercise for you for your knee problem, then you’re going to be in a much better position to strengthen your knee and get out of pain and get out of the pathway towards having a knee surgery or having some other procedure done a injection or having to take pain medication.

So you’ve got to be okay with getting stronger, you just have to work yourself up to it if you’re not there. The other part that I was telling you about the coordination needs to improve to now we here in the clinic. Oftentimes when we have people with a knee problem,

The reason why I did this video because I just finished up with a client who’s had a knee issue for several months now. And we had a cover walking, I had to re teach her how to walk here in the clinic. And she looked at me cockeyed and was like, I walk all the time I’ve been walking for exercise.

Really, you’re going to spend the next however much time talking about how to walk. And she had that comment at the beginning. But then as we went through it, she was open to learning. then by the end of it, she was like oh my gosh, I’ve been walking wrong all this time. I’ve been moving my leg this way and it’s still wonder why every time I walked more than 20 minutes might have legs hurt or hurt and it bothered my knee later on, that needs to be tweaked so that every time you take a step every time you go walk, it is not painful, it’s actually contributing to healing the knee. By offloading forces correctly.

The best way I can put it to you, if you played any kind of sport, if you say basketball, for instance, if you go to shoot a free throw, you know, with enough practice, you get good at sinking more free throws consistently, if you practice it. But if you just slightly tweak your hand positioning your placements, where you’re not thinking about, you’re distracted, then you won’t sink the Fritos as much. And walking isn’t free throws, obviously, it takes a little less coordination to walk than it takes to sink a free throw.

But if you’re not deliberate, if you’re not thinking about how you’re walking and in conscientious of which muscles you’re using, and you spend a little bit of time thinking about the timing of your walking, then you’re going to be feeding into a pattern that is potentially making you worse, right now you might be taking steps in a way, you’re going up and down stairs in a way that is feeding into the knee problem.

Oftentimes here in the clinic, the most common issue that we see with coordination is people don’t use your buttock muscles appropriately, when they’re walking, you’re going up and down steps. And if you’re not using your butt muscles, we have to ask the question, what the heck are you using to walk because you’re walking, you’re going up and down the stairs.

Now oftentimes, it’s the quads are overactive and the groin muscles, the adductors are overactive. And people will get pain in the quad muscles or the adductors, they’ll get groin pain or the polar groin, that happens sometimes. And sometimes the muscles don’t even hurt necessarily, but they feel stiff and tight. And it sets up the knee pain.

And it’s not, they haven’t necessarily worked out their muscles a whole lot, like gone to the gym and try to lift weights for their quads some have. But if you’re just taking steps like that all the time, and you clean your house like that, and you walk to work like that, or you’re if you’re on your feet a lot at work, you’re not really using your glutes ever.

So by default, you’re using your quads and your hamstrings or your other muscles, whatever it might be, then it’s going to set you up to have a problem gradually over time. So this lady, I ended up teaching her how to use your glutes, right, we talked about foot placement, and we talked about stride length, we there’s a bunch of little issues that we talked about. And she got the walking pattern. And she’s, I’m sure she’s going to come back and say, Oh, my gosh, I feel like such a weirdo walk in this way.

But it kind of works, it kind of makes me feel better. And the reality is, this, the tweaks are so small, and so subtle, that nobody’s really going to ever notice unless it’s somebody really close to her, or somebody that she’s saying that she’s walking different, but most people are probably never going to notice it.

And the benefits are she’s going to solve this knee problem, it’s got a meniscus issue, it’s going to solve any problem and it’s going to get better for the long term, as long as she’s walking with proper coordination using the right muscles, not even increasing the strength at this point, just walking differently, she’s going to resolve her problem naturally avoid a surgery not have to rely on injections, or pain medications, unless something crazy happens.

So there you have it, you need to change your mindset, you got to be okay with strengthening. And you got to be okay with moving differently with changing the way you move or changing the coordination so that you can solve any problem. Now, what you have to always consider is it’s both put together that fix problems for the long term.

Oftentimes, we get patients in here that the coordination is rarely thought of, they haven’t really considered the coordination very few have. But most people get it that you need to get stronger. And they’ll come in here with a knee problem. And they may have been told by a physical therapist or trainer or Dr. Google it on the internet and found it on YouTube, wherever they might have found it. And they said, well, they told me to strengthen the muscles around the knee.

And so they think right away of the quad muscles right here on the front. And they’ll go to the gym and get on the leg extension machine where you straighten out your legs and you tension your quads and, and the track and how big their quads look and, and they’ll get that feedback from the exercise where they feel like their quad muscles burned.

And so they’re telling them themselves. Good job, I strengthen my quads, just like my doctor said, or just like the trainer said, or just like that guy in YouTube said or whoever it was, and then he kind of hurts or maybe it doesn’t, but later on it starts to hurt because they’re feeding into the problem.

Oftentimes quads are over dominant and knee problems. And there’s other muscles like the glutes that need to get more strength so that they can counterbalance the strength on the front where the quads are at. So it’s important to be okay with strengthening but in a way that is beneficial to you.

Anyways, I just want to ask you do you have any muscle imbalances, you know, specifically the most common one for knee problems? Is, are your quads quite developed? Have you been working on your quads? And if you have, let us know, I want you to go try to work your glutes out. Go try it out.

There are tons of videos we have on our YouTube channel; you can look up exercises and see how your knees feel. And if it feels better, drop a comment here. Let us know if it’s a little better. If you feel any different. There’s little tweaks you might need to make to make it better. I’m happy to answer any questions that you put here on the comments. I’ll do my best to get back to it.

And if there’s a coordination issue, you know your coordination is off if you’re a klutz or maybe you’re not, you’d be surprised how many athletes we get here in the clinic are former athletes, and they know how to throw a ball or kick a ball or bounce a ball but they suck at proper walking you know, simple things like that.

So drop a comment on here too. You think you need to work on your on your coordination might do a video on that sometime soon. Anyways, if you thought this video was helpful for you, if you felt like you get a little bit more now, hit it like it give us a like here and hit the subscribe button right over there and hit the turn on the notification bell so that you get notified whenever release we release a new video to help you out in your journey to stay away from medications injections and surgery. I hope you have the best day.