Bone-On-Bone Knee Pain: Can Walking Provide Relief?

In this video I’m going to answer the question is walking a good exercise while recovering from a knee replacement. Most people are told to get back to walking as soon as possible after having knee replacements. And in fact, surgeons greatly encourage people get up on their feet and get to walking ASAP. And sometimes they’re even promising that there’ll be walking plenty without any problems afterwards.

But that’s not always the case. And it really depends on your specific situation. If you have knee pain when walking, whether or not you’ve had a knee replacement, so we’re catching you before having knee replacement, and you’re having knee pain.

Or if you’ve already had knee replacement, and you’re having knee pain now after the knee replacements, if you’ve had knee pain when walking, whether or not you’ve had a knee replacements, you’ll want to watch this video all the ways that you’ll know what to do to begin to improve your walking.

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

So let’s ask this question, when is walking, not good for you. And I’ll tell you, if you don’t have enough strength in certain muscles in your legs, you’re going to compensate with other muscles that do have strength. In order to achieve walking. Most people that have the ability to walk are using a combination of muscles between their hips, their thighs, their calves and their feet in order to achieve walking.

But if you’ve lost strength in a certain muscle group, the most common is your glutes and your foot muscles, then you’re going to be compensating with your thigh muscles. And possibly some of the calf muscles. This is called a muscle imbalance, it means there’s certain muscles on one side of the body that are stronger, and another side of the body on another side of the body, they’re relatively weaker.

Now even if you’re a decently strong person, or maybe you’re very strong, you can still have a muscle imbalance because of the relative strength from one side to the other, you might be very strong on one side and still strong on the other side. But because of the relative weakness, it’s going to cause your joints and your hip and knee, foot and ankle to move in appropriately and set you up for pain.

Walking may also not be good for you if you’re overdoing it. Some people will walk through pain, they’ll walk just because they were told the walking was a good thing. It’s been burned into their minds by healthcare professionals or by fitness professionals out there that walking is a good thing. And generally it is especially for your cardiovascular health, you may have had a cardiologist or some heart doctor that told you that you need to walk or get some sort of exercise for your heart.

But if you’re getting knee problems related to the walking, then you’ve got to find a workaround so that you can make walking good for you. But in this situation, if you don’t have enough glute strength and put strength or you’re overdoing it, walking is not good for you right now. So the next question would be when is walking good for you? Well, if you’ve got muscle balance, they’re not out of balance, but they’re in balance.

Now, that means you’re using your glutes and your feet appropriately. In fact, when you go to take steps, those are the two muscle groups, the muscle groups in your butt, and in your foot. We’re the ones that help you to grab with your toes. Those are the ones that you should feel getting tired.

The feeling of tiredness in your butt muscles and your foot muscles is great feedback. It’s great information for you to catch and process to determine if this walking is helpful for you. Because if you’re getting tired in those muscles, then you can have more certainty that you’re using the correct muscle groups to progress you forward while walking.

Versus if you’re having tiredness and your quads, your hamstrings or just your calf muscles, then you’re likely not using your muscles properly, and you’re probably feeding into an imbalance this imbalance will cause excessive pressure and the knee joints and the hip joint or ankle and foot. And that’s what can set you up to begin to walk differently, unknowingly many times and begin to cause excess pressure in certain joints.

One of those could be your knee. And you also know that walking is helpful for you if you just feel tired afterwards, not necessarily in pain. And also if you can progress over time, like in other words, you feel like you can go a little bit longer a little farther without any sort of pain or discomfort, then you’re good.

You know, besides the discomfort of feeling tired that can be uncomfortable for some people, especially if you haven’t exercised in a long time. It can be kind of painful to feel muscle fatigue, but if it doesn’t last more than a day or two, if your muscle soreness goes away, normally like within a few days, then it should be fine.

Now realize that there isn’t really any muscle in the knee joint itself. The muscles are up in the thigh I am down in the calf. So you’re getting pain in the knee, where the where the knee bends. That’s not a good sign, that’s feedback that there’s too much pressure in the area. And either you’re overdoing it or you’ve got a muscle imbalance.

So if you’re in a situation where walking has not been helpful for you, then you’ve got to ask a question of how do I prepare to walk better. And based on what I’ve been telling you, you probably guessed it, you need to get stronger in your glutes and your butt muscles and in your foot muscles.

Now, we’ve got a ton of videos in our channel that talk about glute exercises, and foot exercises as well. So we’ll link them in the description below. Go check those out and begin to do those so that you can prepare yourself to walk better, it may take you a week, it may take us several weeks of doing these exercises, you might go try to walk a bit and see if you feel better as you get stronger.

And it’s not just about getting stronger in the muscles themselves. But you’ve got to make sure that you use that muscle strength during the walking pattern, which we’ll talk about in a video that I’ll link in the description below. It’s called does walking help knee pain, you’ve got to make sure that you walk appropriately using the right muscles.

You got to use your glutes and your foot muscles properly, so that you know that you’re getting the right muscles involved in the walking pattern, then the next question that we talked about is, do you really need walking for exercise if you’ve had a knee replacement, or if you’re going to get any replacement?

The answer to this simply is no. You don’t need to walk. Now what I will say you need is you need to exercise, everyone in the world should do some form of exercise. And it’s going to look different from person to person. And if we just give a broad definition of exercise, exercise is just movement.

If you think about it, it’s relative to the individual. If you’ve had some serious shoulder injuries or you’ve got some serious shoulder weakness, simply raising your arm up overhead can be exercise, it can be very tiring to do just this simple motion.

But if you’re a more fit individual and you have no trouble picking the arm up overhead, then you might need to pick some weights up overhead and do it a lot of times in order to get enough exercise to progress something in your shoulder.

Whether it’s your strength, the range of motion or your endurance when it comes to your knee health, if you’ve had any replacements and you’re looking to take care of that knee replacement, so that you don’t have to have another Sunday, and you can be healthy overall, you don’t need to walk to do that.

 There’s many other options to get exercise including cycling, elliptical weightlifting, playing some sort of organized sport that is safe for you, you want to make sure that you’re safe of course, you know, especially there’s no contact you don’t want to have you don’t be playing a contact sport. If you got any replacement that’s just not a smart thing to do.

But you might consider playing some light tennis, some light volleyball, or even take up jogging really lightly. You don’t need to just walk because for some people they’ve they’re not used to walking in this may be you walking is slow for you, you might be okay with jogging, if you have a knee replacement, consult your surgeon of course and ask them if that’s appropriate for you talk with your physical therapist.

And make sure you do your due diligence and preparing your the right muscles and using the right muscles to go into jogging effectively. The point with exercise for a knee problem if you’re you’ve already had any replacement, or if you’re looking to get any replacements is to get movement in in your joints and your body.

Also the muscles, tendons, ligaments, everything in there needs to move because our bodies are built for movement. That’s why we have joints and muscles and tendons, they make our bodies move in space. So you need to use it or you lose it that really is true. And then the secondary effect of it is working your heart in a good way making sure that your blood flow systems are working properly.

Walking is just a simple basic way to get your heart rate up, get the blood pumping, use your muscles and joints and everything that I’ve talked about. But it doesn’t have to be walking you could do some other version of movements that challenges you enough to get exercise.

So if your doctors telling you need to walk and you’re not liking walking, because you’re having some pain, or it’s just not your thing, find some other alternative that achieves the same goal of getting you moving, getting your heart rate up and making you sweat a little bit.

Now a great alternative that I want to recommend to you is our 28 Day knee health and wellness boosts program. It’s a 100% online and on demand program that you can access anywhere you’ve got the internet at anytime you choose. And it’s guidance from me taking you through exercises that help you to correct these muscle imbalances that I’m talking about.

It focuses on your glutes, getting your foot muscles stronger and it teaches you to move properly so that you can be confident that when you go do any sort of activity, you’re going to move properly and have the strength to back it up so that you can be as healthy as possible moving into your next two years you can find more details about this program in the description below.

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