5 Stationary Bike Tips To Best Help Chronic Pain After Knee Replacement Surgery

I’m going to share five stationary bike tips to best help with chronic pain after a knee replacement surgery. Let me get on the bike here and start sharing with you right away.

The first tip is whenever you’re cycling on the bike, and you go to bend your knee up like this, if you feel a stretch in your knee joint, because you haven’t quite gotten enough motion to comfortably go around without feeling like you’re going to hike your hip up, or adjust the way that you’re doing it, you should not be using the bike right now you need to first get that motion.

Because every time you do that, if you’re cycling, and you’re coming up with your knee and going “ugh!” Or kind of avoiding the stretch, my seat shifted, you see how you have to do all these accommodations to how you’re biking.

Besides that, it’s going to unnecessarily increase the pressure inside the knee joint, which will affect the surfaces of the replacement of the artificial knee. And not just the surfaces of the knee, but where the metal interfaces with the bone where they might have put cement so that the metal stays against the bone.

All those different areas of your knee replacement might be affected by this pressure that you’re repeatedly putting them through every time you force your knee to bend into a motion that it’s not prepared to take. There’s other ways to gain more motion in the knee, there’s easy stretches that you can do that aren’t as aggressive.

They’re not painful, they don’t use your muscles at the same time like you’re using when you’re on the bike. And another way is to go to a physical therapist or a manual therapist, somebody who’s experienced in gaining more knee motion bending and straightening it out without you having to work so hard and force yourself through pain.

Number two is avoiding using your quad muscles. The quad muscles right here on the front of your thighs are the muscles that people typically feel working the most whenever they’re on the bike after they’ve been on the on the bike long enough to start feeling the muscles burn here is where they feel it sometimes in the hamstrings, but where they rarely feel it is back here in the glutes.

If you’re using your quads, primarily whenever you’re doing the bike, then you’re going to be feeding into a muscle imbalance that actually adds more compression to the knee joint, and can cause some of those problems that I was talking about with messing up the knee replacement.

Besides that it can cause tendinitis, bursitis, nerve problems, strains, sprains in your knee, all kinds of issues can develop as a result of overusing your quad muscles. The problem is that nobody really talks about what muscles you should be feeling when you’re on the bike, even healthcare professionals, they just throw you on the bike, because that’s the thing to do after you have a knee replacement.

You have to eventually start to move your leg again. But it’s important for you to use the right muscles so that you can preserve your knee replacement for the long run. And make sure that this is the last surgery you ever have to have.

Tip number three is using your glutes, you got to figure out how to use your glutes instead of your quads, you can much more easily calm down your quads and not use them as much if you can activate your glutes when you’re cycling, and the way to do that is on the way down.

When you’re going to push your leg down on the downstroke of the pedal you need to think about tightening up the glute muscle. Because if you do that, it should take pressure off the thighs off the quads are here.

So every time you push down glutes should fire. And then when you push down on the other side, the other group should fire each time tighten up the glute as you’re pushing downwards on the bike. Now this is assuming that you have control of your glutes because not everybody does.

In fact, if you can’t get your glutes to fire the way that I’m describing, then you have got to get off the bicycle at this point. And you need to go back to doing some other exercises that just allow you to activate your glute muscles so that you can control them.

Because if you can’t consciously control them, tighten them on command, then you’re going to be unsuccessful on the bike. And even though you can ride the bike, it’s going to look fine, it’s going to look like everybody else riding the bike, you’re not using the right muscles, which is going to feed into the muscle imbalance. And it’s just a matter of time before you develop some problem in your freshly replaced knee.

Tip number four is to use your legs evenly. Because very often after people have a knee replacement, the side that they had the surgery on they just subconsciously don’t use it the way that they use it or either side that you’ve been favoring your good side for months now since you had the surgery, even before the surgery, you’ve probably been favoring your other side.

And you’ve been using the good leg a lot more. And so you’re just used to that. Now that you’ve had a surgery and you’re using your leg better and you can trust it more and you’re doing exercise you need to be thinking consciously, instead of subconsciously about putting equal force through each leg every time that you pedal so that you’re using each leg evenly because then you’re asking for problems on your good leg if you’re not already developing them.

Very often people already have knee arthritis issues on the other side. They’re just not that bad yet, they’re not surgical at this point. And you don’t want to hit that point. So make sure that you use your legs evenly as you’re cycling.

And tip number five is to use an upright bike like this one, instead of a reclined or recumbent bike. And here’s why. When you’re on an upright bike, when I push down with my leg here, my thigh, and my hip can go further back than if I was in a reclined bike.

If you’re seated on the bike that has the backrest, the pills are not under you like this, they’re in front of you, which means that when you go to extend your leg, you’re extending it right here and my hip is relatively bent, the glute muscles do not work nearly as good in this position.

When your hip is flexed up this way and your, your glutes are relatively stretched, they work much better, the more you can move your hip back your thigh backwards, and extend your hip because that’s the muscle that helps you to extend it.

So you just have a much better workout, you get to use your glutes a lot more, which is going to help save you from the muscle imbalance problem. If you’re in an upright bike like this one, that’s not as comfortable obviously.

But if the focus here is the health of your knee, rather than your comfort for the 20, 30, maybe 60 minutes a year on a bike, it’s an easy trade off, you need to be in an upright bike over a recumbent bike. Now I’ve got a link in the description below to an upright bike that I like, you can find it on Amazon Go check that out.

I’ve also got a bunch of videos to help people that are suffering with problems from a knee replacement is called the Knee Replacement Pain Help playlist. You can find that in the description. And I’ve got a program that’s comprehensive. It’s called the Failed Knee Replacement Recovery Program.

You can also learn more about that through the link in the description below. Hey, thanks so much for watching. Give us a thumbs up if this was helpful for you. Please share this with somebody that needs to see this and subscribe to our channel and turn on the notification bell so you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we post each and every week. I’ll see you the next video. Bye bye!