4 Self Treatments For Baker’s Cysts In The Knee

Have you been told that you have a baker cyst, you’re getting swelling behind the knee, you probably have had a history of knee arthritis and meniscus problems as well. If this is the case, most of the time, people are left hanging with what to do about their Baker’s cyst. And they’re not really fully sure about how to get their meniscus problem or their knee arthritis problem under control.

At the very root all three of these problems Baker system and discuss problems in the Arthritis problems are cartilage related. And we’ve got tons of videos on our channel about knee cartilage problems. We’ll link a playlist to all our new videos here in the description below.

But in this video today, I’m going to cover with you a few things that you need to know specifically about Baker’s cyst so that you can begin to treat it yourself at home. I’ve got another video that talks about how Baker’s cyst develops and what the signs and symptoms are for Baker cysts in case you’re not sure if you’ve got one, go check that out. I’ve also got a link in the description here below.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is focused on helping people stay healthy, active and mobile. while avoiding unnecessary surgeries, injections and medications. Please subscribe to our channel so that you don’t miss any of the helpful videos that we upload to our channel every week.

I’m gonna go through four things that you need to be doing for treatment at home tour and exercise. And the other two are more of some concepts or approaches that you need to think about when dealing with your Baker says and make sure you watch till the end because I’m going to talk about what you absolutely should not be doing.

If you’ve got a baker cyst, you’ll be surprised because these things that you shouldn’t be doing are often recommended to do for Baker cysts by healthcare professionals. So if you’ve seen a doctor or some healthcare professional for this, you may have gotten not the best information and you might want to stop doing that thing they told you to do.

The first treatment that you need to start doing for yourself is something called tailgate swings. I’ve mentioned this in a few other videos, and I can’t stress how important it is to get movement into the knee joint very gently and get that fluid to circulate around your knee joints, all you’re doing is sitting somewhere your feet can dangle and just moving your legs back and forth, you can move them together or alternate them It does not matter.

But the point here is that you get some gentle, non-resistive non weight bearing motion in your knee joint to get the fluid to circulate around and nourish the cartilage it’ll nourish the meniscus nourish the cartilage in the back of the kneecap and on the front of the thigh bone and allow that fluid to circulate.

Now if you’ve got a baker cyst, and you can’t bend your knee all the way, just move with what you can get comfortable, you might need to put some pillows or something under your thighs, so the back of your knees don’t hit we’re where the edge of the chair is, just make sure that you can do this comfortably. The reason you need to be to be able to do it comfortably.

Because you need tons of this you need 1000s of reps don’t even count them, what you should be doing is setting a timer for a minimum of five minutes. And just doing this for five minutes. If you can go longer, 10 minutes or more as long as it’s not hurting you. To do this more, you should consider doing this as much as possible.

We tell our clients when Baker says to do this out really at the very beginning just to get the pain under control, this motion will allow the pain to go down as well as the range of motion to improve, which is super helpful when you’re trying to get up first thing in the morning. I’m going to keep tailgate swinging here.

As I talk to you about the next concept, you’ve got to think about using a bicycle. Now this isn’t 100% necessary, and you might be able to get away with just doing the tailgate swings. But if you got a stationary bike or an outdoor bike, and you can use that bicycle with little to no resistance that typically is great for the knee joint.

It gives you the same effect in the knee joint as this except you do get to exercise your muscles a bit, which helps more for the long term. We often get asked, should I use a recumbent bicycle the one that has a backrest on it, or the upright bicycle, the one that doesn’t have a backrest and it really doesn’t matter.

It’s more of a personal comfort decision for you. If you prefer the one that has a backrest that’s great. If not, then that’s fine too. And if you’re outdoors, you want to make sure that you choose a path that doesn’t have a lot of hills, whether it’s uphill or downhill so that you’re not going to suddenly have to stop or push through your knees quite a bit because that can aggravate your Baker says problem.

The third thing I’m going to recommend is doing glute muscle strengthening exercises. I’ve got a video that covers five best glute muscle exercises that you can do for knee problems, and they don’t require any equipment whatsoever.

I’m going to show you one of the exercises here that’s really good at targeting the buttock muscles, but I encourage you to go down to the description and check out that video so that you can get all five exercises and I would recommend doing them all because getting stronger in your buttock muscles is super important to calm down your quad muscles because that’s where the imbalance typically is.

Your quad muscles are too strong but muscles are too weak and every time you go to use your legs, whether it’s For walking and getting up or doing any sort of exercise, you’re feeding into the strength of this quad muscle, which compresses the knee joints, and causes those cells on the inside of the joint lining of your knee to create that excessive fluid that has now pulled in the back of your knee and cause that they persist.

So what you’re going to do here for this exercise is called a buck burner, bug blaster. In some situations, depending on how you learned it, you’re going to get on all fours like this. And if your knee hurts the one that you’re dealing with, just lean away from it, you don’t have to put pressure through it, because what you’re going to do is pick up that leg, knee a little bit bent, hold it right here, think about squeezing your butt muscle as hard as possible on that side.

And then you’re going to bring your leg out a bit, just like so make sure you don’t twist your whole body but you want to bring your knees out and hold it there for 10 seconds, you should feel your muscle tightening up quite a bit and fatiguing. After 10 seconds, you can rest it down. And then you’re going to repeat, bring the leg back a bit, make sure not to arch your back, hold above muscle tight, and then rotate your knee outwards and hold it there for 10 seconds.

Doing 10 reps like this in a row, you can rest as much as you want. That’ll get your butt muscle going. And if you feel like you can do longer time like instead of 10 seconds, you can go 15 or 20 seconds or more reps instead of 10 reps. If you can do 15 or 20 reps or more, then do so in fact, I’d encourage you to work up to doing 100 reps a day on each side. Let me just take a side note here. I’m gonna stand on my soapbox for a bit.

The biggest mistake that people make with knee problems is that they don’t strengthen their buttock muscles enough. This exercise right here is pretty good at getting some initial strength. But eventually, you’ve got to work your way into some resistance exercise, whether it’s with bands, or weights, you need to do something that really pushes your strength, it isn’t enough to just get a little burn and then expect your knee to get better, you’ve got to get significantly stronger, you got to really think about putting on muscle in those glute muscles to offset that muscle imbalance and normalize those pressures in your knee joint to get the long term relief that you’re looking for.

The fourth thing I’m going to recommend for you is using a knee brace. Now this one’s kind of questionable. Some people do benefit from the brace some don’t. If you’ve got an E brace out there and doesn’t have to be a fancy brace, you can use just the sleeve. I’ve got a video that talks all about how to choose the best braces I don’t talk about Baker cyst in that one. But for Baker says just a simple sleeve brace will work just fine.

I’ll link one in the description here that you can get at Amazon. It doesn’t have to be a pricey one. The one that I recommend on here is the basic one that we recommend for our clients. But you would just slide that knee brace on and just have it supports your knee joint. If you feel like it helps you initially and it isn’t bothering you to wear it, then it’s generally going to be a good thing to do.

The idea is that it is pushing the fluid back in very gently. You don’t want that neat phrase to be super snug. But you don’t want to rely on the brace in the future, you need to eventually wean yourself off the brace. For some people, if the swelling is quite significant the back of the knee the brace won’t work. So don’t use it, you’ll know right away, I mean, within the first 10 or 15 minutes of having the brace on bend your knees, straighten your knee, go sit down, stand up, do things that you will normally do throughout the day.

And if you find that that knee brace is hurting your knee more than helping get rid of it, don’t use it, it’s not going to be something that you’re going to benefit from in the future and stick with the first two things that I said to you tailgate swings, think about getting on a bike, and definitely work out your glute muscles. And let me tell you about two things that you definitely don’t want to do that are always recommended by healthcare professionals.

When it comes to Baker cysts. And most of the problems in general, people often tell you to go walk for exercise. Now in some cases, walking is good for knee problems. But in a baker situation. No, you don’t need to be walking for exercise. In fact, you do the opposite, you should reduce the amount of walking that you do down to a minimum, I mean, just reserve the walking that you’re going to do any given day for what you need.

Like if you need to go to the bathroom in your house, you need to go to the different rooms in your home. Or if you need to go to work or you need to go to the grocery store to get food. Those are necessities. So definitely walk when you need to. But if you are going on walks for exercise, like you’re going to the park around the block or something like that, I would cut that out.

And the reason is, if you’re at the point where you’re just starting to fix your Baker says problem or a knee arthritis or meniscus problem, you’re going to put too much pressure on that already pressurized joint, you probably haven’t fixed that muscle imbalance. And now you’re going to go work your quad muscles even more on the walk and just feed into the problem.

Now may feel okay at the beginning of the walk or maybe even the entire walk. But in the long run, you’re feeding into the muscle imbalance. If you haven’t learned how to correct your own muscle imbalance, it’s going to keep the problem there longer than it should be, and probably progress into a worse situation like one where you have to have a knee surgery.

And the second thing that you should definitely avoid is quadricep. muscle strengthening, that’s the muscles on the front of the thigh, you need to not work those out, because nine times out of 10, those are the over dominant muscles that are causing too much pressure inside the knee joint, and are causing your knee joint to create excessive fluid that’s pushing out in the back of the knee causing that popliteal cyst for that Baker cyst.

So you don’t want to strengthen your quad muscles. Oftentimes, I see physical therapists recommend patients do things like quad sets where they’re squeezing their quad muscles really hard, or they put them on a knee extension exercise where they’re with weights, pushing their legs out straight, and causing their quad muscles in the front of the thighs to get really tired and sore the next day. And it’s a deceiving feeling.

Because you might think, well, I’m working my muscles out, it’s exercise, it’s good for me, and that the healthcare professional might be telling you, great, you’re on track, you’re working out your quads, just like we set out to do. But then if your knee feels worse, or the baker says gets worse, then it’s not helping you out. And oftentimes healthcare professionals just resort to saying something like, well, it’s just because you’re getting older, there’s no cure for this problem.

So it’s just going to get worse, no matter what might as well have strong quads going into it, or might as well get some walking in before it gets really bad. And then you have to have that knee replacement. And that’s just not the case. If you don’t work your quad muscles, make sure your glute muscles are getting stronger, and avoid excessively pressurizing your knee joints, you should be in a situation where your meniscus can heal, your cartilage lining can heal. And your Baker says shouldn’t get any worse.

Hopefully, it’ll go down a bit, and haven’t had cases that completely go away where it’s back to normal. But everybody gets better as far as their ability to do things, they can stand longer, walk longer, bend their knee all the way. And they’re getting back to life as normal. And most importantly, they feel control.

They don’t feel like they’re in that situation where they’re lost because they went to the doctor’s office and didn’t get a real solution. They just got pain medication sewn out of it. And they got an aspiration where they take the fluid out, they’ll do that with a baker says, but they never really got a long term solution they’re just left with, well, we’ll drain it, but you’re probably going to need knee surgery in a few years, maybe five or 10 years.

We’ll see we’ll see you back here at the surgeon’s office for a new replacement here in the next decade. And this is not the case you can make this better. So try these exercises out. Let us know if it’s working for you drop a comments and let us know if you’ve done these before or how they’re working out for you if you’re doing this. And please give us a like if you thought this video was helpful. Thanks so much, guys, and we’ll catch you next time. Bye