Does Walking Help Knee Pain

Are you looking to start walking to help your knee pain? Have you been told by your doctor or some other healthcare professional that you need to start walking in order to help your knee problem? Maybe you’re suffering from knee arthritis, patellofemoral Pain Syndrome, IT band syndrome, a meniscus problem or some other cartilage issue inside your knee?

If that’s the case, then walking, you got to be careful with it. I’m going to go into detail in this video today about how walking can help and hurt your knee and how you can fix it so that you can make it help your knee all the time, instead of hurting it. Real quick, my name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist over at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy.

Here in the clinic, we see people with knee problems all the time. And we get this question so much about should I be walking for knee pain? I’m going to start walking for knee pain. Is that a good thing? And we get all kinds of variations of this question. I’m going to show you outside in a minute how to walk just right so that it’s helping your knee pain.

But first, let me just tell you a few details that you need to know so that when you go do the walking, it makes sense what we’re doing when we walk First off, there’s two main problems that happen with walking that cause more knee pain if you decide to go walking for to help your knee problem.

Number one is walking technique is not right. And the first thing that we hear from people in the clinic, whenever we tell them this, they’re walking around, they’re like, are you kidding me? I’ve been walking all my life I walked in here, how can I be walking wrong. And we’ll go into it in a second. But you know, you can walk wrong effectively. You can get places walking, but it’s kind of slowly hurting you over time.

That’s why you likely might have a knee problem. And the fact is, most people that come in here, I’d say eight to nine out of 10 people that are in here for treatment for their knee problem, whether it’s cartilage issues, osteoarthritis, a ligament attendant problem, IT band syndrome, something like that Runner’s knee is another one that we see, they’ve got a walking issue that transfers into a running issue of their runners, that is feeding into knee pain problem. And that’s why their knees hurting.

The second issue that could be the case as well is a muscle imbalance. So you can have bad walking technique that you just don’t know about, you don’t really feel it in the moment. And you don’t really think about how you walk. And then you can also have a muscle imbalance, meaning the muscles around your hips, your knees, even into your back might be thrown off, there may be too strong on one side and too weak on the other side. And it’s causing you to walk improperly without you knowing unnecessarily and you can’t really just feel this.

Then the third possibility is both of those things happening at the same time both technique is off. And there’s a muscle imbalance. And honestly, that’s the most common situation, that there’s some weak muscles in addition to the technique been off. So let’s go outside and take a look at how to walk just right. Hey, guys, thanks for coming with me outside here, I’m going to talk to you about exactly what you should be doing when you’re walking.

So big key factor here is you’ve got to get your butt muscles involved. If you can stand up right now, what I’d like you to do is just Tension up those butt muscles as hard as you can like 100% in standing, then I want you to back off to like 50% and just practice turning them on and off at about 50%. Good.

Next, what I want you to do is alternate glue contractions on each side. So just practice tensioning, the right and then the left and just at 50% squeeze each side. So we’ve got the glue contraction done, and you’re squeezing each side, you can squeeze each side independently. If you can’t watch at the end of the video, some tips on what you can do so that you can learn how to squeeze each side independently.

Next part I want you to look at my feet. I’ll back up in a second so you can see what it looks like. But if you think about your your feet and your toes, Your feet should not be pointing straight forward. Or inwards, you should be a little out to even a decent amount outwards. A lot of people say they feel like they’re walking like a penguin. And that it feels awkward for them.

But in reality, it’s just a little out, it looks normal and nobody will ever say anything to you. But the most important thing about it is it will make your butt muscles want to fire better. And you can test this out just in standing right now.

Turn your toes out and squeeze both butt muscles as hard as you can, what you’ll find is that they’ll work better than if you turn in, try turning in now. And with your toes pointed in, squeeze those butt muscles and they don’t fire as good. They’re just positioned your butt muscles better. So they can work better whenever you’re a little bit out.

So I want you to walk like that because what you’re going to be doing here in a second is every time you take a step, you’re going to contract the butt muscle of the leg that you’re standing on. Okay, so let me show you the foot position. And we’ll practice this a couple times so you can get it straight ahead. Not as good. A little bit out. That’s good. Even more out, that’s okay too. When you’re going to walk, it’s going to be like this a little out a little bit out.

Now what I want you to add in is the glute contraction. So every time we take a step, I’m going to step with my right foot, I’m leaning on my right leg, foot out of it, my glutes going to contract about 50%. Then when I take a step with my left leg, my left glute is going to contract about 50%. My right and it’s going to relax, essentially, and then you’re going to switch to the other side.

You just going to keep alternating glute contractions as you walk along. So I’m going to walk away from you here. And I’m going to exaggerate, I’m going to make you look kind of funny kind of robotic. But what you want to do over time as you practice this, is make it look more casual.

Alright, so here we go. Right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. It’s almost kind of like marching in a sense, but you’re being very intentional about using the right muscle that should be supporting your legs, supporting your body weight and driving you forward through the walking pattern.

This is how you’ve got to walk all the time, so that you can make sure to help your knee problem. Now it’s important for several reasons, I’m just going to get the camera here.

Now it’s important for several reasons, whenever you fire your glute muscles properly, if there’s a scientific thing that happens inside the body, you tend to shut off your thigh muscles, your quads, and your hip flexors, which is very important because most people have those muscles way too dominant and they want to fire right away at the beginning.

When those hip flexors and those quads fire, it pulls on the kneecap and it compresses that knee joint, it shoves the thigh bone into the shin bone, and it compresses the cartilage there, the meniscus, all the tissues, the ligaments, the tendons. And that’s how we get knee injuries from walking.

So if you’re out there, and you’ve been going for walks, and you’ve thought, Gosh, my knees just hurting worse as I walk, or if I can’t last more than a mile or two, or after 10 minutes, I just have to sit and rest for a bit.

It’s probably because you’re not firing your glutes. And I want you to go try it out. Try this walking pattern, and see if you can tolerate a bit more. And the only time you might run into problems with having more knee pain, despite you using your glutes properly is if your knees are just super irritated, you can have an overly irritated ligament or tendon, or meniscus cartilage inside your knee or even muscles. And it’s just going to hurt no matter what you do.

I mean, if it’s hurting to just walk around in the house, if it’s hurting to just bend and straighten your knee, walking is not going to help you at this point, you have to have a non-irritating knee essentially a very, very low irritated knee in order to start walking and to do this successfully, so that it helps you with your knee problem rather than hurt you.

And it’s super important that you do, do some sort of exercise like this, so that it loads your tissues because cartilage, ligaments, tendons, even muscles, especially muscles, actually, they all get healthier when you load them when you put some force through them in a gentle and expected way.

Because those tissues are supposed to be load bearing tissues are they they’re supposed to take some forces, muscles generate forces, they squeeze obviously, the tendons transfer the force from the muscles to the bones, the ligaments help keep the bones together and the cartilage cushions of bones on each other.

So their job is to take forces. So when you put the right forces through all these tissues, and it’s done in a nice way that doesn’t irritate them, you’re using the right muscles. Now it’s going to be helpful for your knees. So let’s go back into the clinic. And let’s just give you a few more tips to make sure that you get this done just right so you’re not hurting yourself. And so you can get started right away.

Okay, hope that was helpful for you. I need you to implement that whenever you go walking, make sure you’re firing your butt muscle just like I talked about, because that makes you use the right muscles whenever you walk. And then also remember we talked about the toes being pointed outwards.

Whenever you’re walking, point those toes outwards so that it positions your glutes to fire better and not make your quads or the front of your thighs and hips want to fire more during the walking pattern because that will increase the pressures in the knee.

If you’re using your quads, the front of your thighs too much. It’s going to cause excessive or too much pressure inside the knee joints. And it’s going to gradually over time wear down the cartilage cause arthritis problems.

It could irritate the tendons, the ligaments, it can definitely damage your meniscus inside your knees, and you can offload all that stuff by simply using your glutes effectively every time you go walking, and then you’re also fixing the muscle imbalance because usually the quads in the hip flexors and they are too strong, and the glutes are too weak on the back, that’s what leads to a lot of knee problems.

So by training yourself to go walk like this all the time, you’re essentially training the muscle imbalance away, you’re fixing the muscle imbalance. So you’re knocking out two birds with one stone by walking like this.

Now, I will advise you you need to go practice this, you have to kind of focus and concentrate if you the best situation is to go for a walk around the block or in a park, wherever you like to walk. If it’s indoors, it’s fine to on a treadmill.

But you have to focus on doing this technique. If you go walk with friends or family or, or you’re walking the dog or something in the you can’t control your pace as much or you’re focused on other things, it may not be as effective.

So what I would encourage you to do is give yourself a good solid at least 10 to 15 minutes, where you’re just focusing on your walking, because what’s going to happen is you’re going to drift in your thoughts, you’re going to start thinking about what’s for lunch today, or what am I going to pick up from the store, or you know, I got to make a phone call or you’re going to think about other things in life.

You can think about the chores at home random things will pop into your head. And when your attention goes to those random things, you lose the attention on how you’re supposed to walk. And then you’re taking all these bad steps unknowingly. And they may not be painful in the moment.

But if that’s how you usually walk over time, that’s how you work down the meniscus cartilage, the tendons, the ligaments, all this stuff that’s inside your knee, go give it a shot. And I want you to drop a comment here and let me know if you’ve been walking wrong and not knowing it. And try this out, drop a comment as well letting us know if this helped you. And if you can feel your glutes working right.

One other thing I need to let you know about. If you cannot fire your glutes, right, you might just need to practice in standing just stand up right now wherever you’re at both feet on the ground, don’t walk and just Tension up the butt muscles. And then what you can do to just get each one to fire independently, because you have to be able to do that some people just can’t quite do that.

And it’s not that they can’t ever do that they just haven’t practiced it; you need to lean over to one side and then tension the butt muscle on that side and then lean over the other side and tension the opposite but muscle and just go back and forth like that almost like you’re dancing and squeeze the butt muscle on each side so that you can practice firing each one independently.

Once you get a good handle on doing that once you can kind of do that a bit. Then go out and practice that whenever you go walking. And so that you can put it into your walking pattern when you’re squeezing needs but muscle alternating, give us a like please on this video. If you thought this was helpful.

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Hey, if you thought this video was helpful for you, and you’re thinking that you might need to come into the clinic to get hands on treatment, you think you want us to help you out with your knee arthritis problem, your cartilage issue, your patellofemoral Pain Syndrome, your meniscus issue, any one of those knee problems we are experts at fixing here in the clinic, we’d love to help you out, what you can do is request a discovery visit you have to apply for one, you have to go down to the bottom of this page.

And you can get a free 20-minute discovery visit but you’ve got to apply for it and make sure that you qualify. There is a button below at the bottom of this page that says request a free 20-minute visit for a discovery visit. fill in the details there and one of my staff will call you up to ask you some questions and run you through the application process. And if you qualify, we will get you in here to the clinic where you’ll get a 20-minute visit with a specialist physical therapist.

We’ll take a look at your knee problem and see if it’s a type that we can help you out with. We’ll give you a diagnosis. We’ll talk about what we should start doing and what you should avoid right now. And we’ll give you some direction on how to help you need problem. And if you choose to be our patient at that time, we’ll talk about a plan to get you treated so that you can resolve your knee problem and stay away from surgery and injections and medications and get back to being healthy, active and mobile. I hope to see you real soon.