How Is Stretching Actually Good For Painful Knee Arthritis?

In this video, I’m going to answer the question how is stretching actually good for painful knee arthritis, stretching a stiff knee joint just seems to kind of make sense, because the knee doesn’t move as much as it should. And so you think bending it or straightening it all the way, forcefully wouldn’t be helpful.

But there’s actually a right time to do it in a right way to do nice stretching. Because if it’s done incorrectly, or it’s done at the wrong time, it might actually be a bad thing for you, and could slow you down and getting better from your knee arthritis, and even progressing your arthritis into a worse situation. I’ll explain more in this video. So let me tell you, when stretching can be helpful for knee arthritis, there’s three situations you’re looking for.

The first one is that you’re not very irritated in your knee arthritis situation right now. Now, what I mean by that is that it’s not real swollen, you can do quite a bit of stuff, still, you can get around, you can move and you’re not having a bunch of pain at night, you can tolerate doing a decent amount of activity, it may still hurt at the end of the day, it may still be very stiff in the morning. And you might have some motion limitations, obviously, because you’re looking at getting more flexibility out of your knee.

Another important factor is that if you’ve tried a little bit of stretching, and you’ve noticed that it’s helped out, then that’s excellent evidence that it’s a good time to stretch right now. I’ll give you some ideas on how to stretch out your knee joint in just a moment. But first, let me tell you when stretching your knee, arthritis might actually make things worse. So if your knee joint is hurting a lot right now, like it’s pretty flared up, it’s maybe the worst it’s ever been, or near the worst it’s ever been.

It’s painful to be on your feet for too long, it’s hurting you at night, waking you up from your sleep or maybe not letting you get to sleep as quickly as you would like that is a situation where the inside of your knee joint is actively inflamed. And stretching the joint now right now may apply more pressure to the irritated tissues inside your knee joints, which could actually make the knee irritation even worse, it’s definitely going to get worse if you’re being very aggressive with your stretching.

Now, the other end of the spectrum, another situation where you could get worse from stretching your knee arthritis is if you’re feeling completely fine. If you’re 100%, you’ve been diagnosed with arthritis in the past, but your knees have kind of normalized you feel good overall, you don’t really have any complications at this point your motions pretty good, then don’t stretch.

If your motion is 100%, you should not be stretching your knee joints, you have no need to stretch your knee joints. And if you forcefully stretch your knee joints, when you have full range of motion, you’re going to irritate the joint, you’re going to be compressing the surfaces, because just by bending the knee joint, all the tissues around the knee joint begin to add more pressure to the actual joint the cartilage surfaces themselves. And they can begin to set off in irritation that could drive you back into a flare up.

So if you’re not missing any motion, avoid stretching. Now let me give you some ideas on how to stretch your arthritic knee. The easiest ones are if you can find somewhere where you where you’re sitting a little bit higher, just like this, a barstool route works really well. Or if you get a computer chair and just lift it up so that you’re a little higher up and then just pull your knee in towards your chest like this to get some bending.

Now, this is a simple technique, but it can be done wrong. What you need to think about is how intense or stretching, no, but on a scale of zero to 10 zero meaning you feel no stretch at all. And 10 means it’s the most intense stretch you’ve ever had, you’re going to get hurt. If you keep going any further, you want to stay in about a one two or a three, don’t pass up three.

Another way of saying that is you should be doing a mild stretch, rather than a moderate or intense stretch. If you’re doing a moderate to intense stretch, you’re going to compress those surfaces, the cartilage surfaces inside your knee. And if you’re doing this aggressively, more aggressively than that, and consistently you’re doing it very often, you’re going to irritate your knee joints and send it off into a worse arthritis situation.

But if you keep the stretch mild like a one, two or three intensity, and just hold it there for about 30 seconds to 60 seconds, no more than a minute and then let it go. You should notice that your knee gradually bends a little more and a little more. Now, like I said earlier, make sure that you’re not in a severe flare up. You need to be just mildly flaring up right now you need to be coming off a flare up.

If you’re flaring up by the way. There’s other things for you to do besides stretching, you need to get off your feet first off and kind of baby your knee you should be probably resting your knee. There’s a ton of other things that you could be doing. You could learn more about that in our other videos. If you’re having trouble straightening out your knee.

Then what you’re going to want to do is put your foot out somewhere like this, put it under the chair If you’re sitting on a couch or a sofa at home, you can just bring your leg up on the other end of the couch. And of course, it’ll be spent like this. And then you’re just going to very gently put pressure on your thigh on the end of your thigh, not directly on the kneecap you want, you don’t want to push here, because that can compress the kneecap cartilage against the thigh bone.

So you want to push on the thigh real gentle. And if you don’t have a situation like this, you could just put your foot on the floor. And if you don’t have a couch or a chair to put your foot up, that’s totally fine, you could just put your foot on the floor like this, your knee would be bent like so you just put it out as much as you comfortably can and put your hands in the same spot on the end of your thigh.

And give yourself some nice, easy pressure, just a one, two or three intensity, don’t get to a four, because that’s going to begin to give it too much pressure and set the knee joints and set off that irritation that I’m telling you about. Again, hold it 30 to 60 seconds, just like that. And you can repeat each of these stretches about three to four times.

Let me give you another idea for how to stretch your knee by laying down on your stomach, you with this technique that I’m going to show you it’s a little more aggressive. So this would be for somebody who’s on the more flexible and like you’re, you might still have some knee stiffness, but you’re straightening out, it’s been working for you that other stretch that I showed you, and you want to do something that’s a little bit more intense, because you can take it now and it’s not irritating your knee and you’re gaining motion as a result of stretching you’ve been doing.

And you do need a piece of equipment for this and you probably have one at home, a belt helps out really, really well for this, I’m going to take my belt off, so I can show you what I mean. Got my belts right here, and I’m going to do is loop the belt to make a hole like this ain’t going to put that on your foots. Just like so. Now, a longer belt works better and is actually a great tool that I’ll show you in just a moment for doing this hold on to the end so that you don’t drop it and have a hard time getting it again, and then lay down your stomach. Just like so.

Now you’re going to pull the belt up in this direction to force your knee to bend. Now, same rules apply here, you want to make sure you’re not passing a three out of 10 intensity. And you would hold it for just 30 seconds to 60 seconds and do about three or four rounds. Doing this shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to stretch this way. You can see this is fairly comfortable for me.

But some people find it real awkward, especially that shoulder problems. And there’s a better way to do this with a tool that you’d have to purchase. Physical therapy clinics often have these things called stretch out straps, and they look just like this. I’ve got this green band and it’s got a bunch of different loops in it, it’s really long so that you can reach it pretty easily. And you would just put your foot in the loop the same way that I did with my belts lie down the same way.

And what I like about this as you can go over your head, just like so and it’s a lot easier to pull in the you can also get your hand in one of the loops. So it’s just better handles for you to stretch out with. If you’ve got knee arthritis, this would probably be a good investment for you to make. These don’t cost very much in the last few a long time, you can get as much flexibility as you need out of your knee.

As long as you’re not overdoing it, don’t pass it three out of 10. And it’s very tempting to do so over here because you have good leverage, you can just take that knee and use your hands very well to get there. But you have to be careful not to overdo it because you’re going to make your knee arthritis worse. Now from the same position.

If you hadn’t trouble with straightening your knee, you can also get some pretty good leverage on it. You wouldn’t need to stretch out strap for this one. But let’s just say your knee stays bent like so. Then what you can do is put your other toe right on your heel and start to push down real gentle. And hold it for 30 to 60 seconds, do three or four rounds as well.

You could just put your foot all the way over doesn’t matter how you cross your legs, you just have to put some weight from your leg and you’re pushing down with your other leg to apply some force. Again, gentle make sure you’re not overdoing it. And this one can be kind of aggressive on the kneecap because your knee is on the surface that you’re lying on.

If it’s a harder surface, it might be a little uncomfortable. So you still make sure it’s put a pillow under there. Or you might do it on your bed where it’s softer and you can tolerate it just fine.

Now I can’t stress enough how awkward it is for you to not overdo the stretch and you cannot pass the three out of 10 I see way too many people get really aggressive with stretching and this is how they mess it up. They start to get more irritated, because their knee joints just getting super compressed from all that pressure that they’re putting through their joint when they’re bending their knee or straightening their knee.

Often, when people start stretching out, they start to get results immediately. And because of that, they think well, more is better. But in this situation, more is not better, more intensity anyway, is not better. The way that you add more to this is by doing it more frequently, you need to stay light of three out of 10.

But this actually needs to be done hourly, if you’re having a lot of stiffness in your knee. And it’s especially important to do it in the morning, when you have the most stiffness. Most people will get tons of stiffness when they wake up in the morning and it takes them anywhere from 1520 30 minutes or more to loosen up their knee by just walking around their house.

So they can feel normal or at least more mobile. Yet, when it comes to gaining more motion in an arthritic knee, you really have to be persistent, by stretching out frequently. And you have to be patient, you can’t overdo it. And you have to stick with it. And as long as you’re gaining motion gradually keep going.

Once you feel like you’re plateauing, your motion that you need to stop, it might be the end of the motion that you’re going to gain at this time. And there’s one more point I want to make on this video about stretching, I get the question all the time will stretching solve my knee arthritis. My answer to this is no.

Stretching alone is just a part of the entire process of addressing a knee arthritis problem. There’s so many other components that need to be addressed. And I would argue that the most important part of fixing an arthritis problem is addressing the underlying muscle imbalance that is not addressed by surgery medications or injections.

That means getting stronger in the weakest muscles and is very commonly the glute muscles, the foot muscles. And it could even be the abdominal muscles addressing strength, there tends to give you the longest term benefit. While stretching only gives you short term benefit. Although stretching has a place, I’m not saying that you should never do it.

I’m just saying that you should do it strategically and only have certain expectations about stretching, you can’t stretch and expect for the gains in motion to be there forever without strengthening properly stretching and strengthening go hand in hand. Because if you don’t strengthen the weaker muscles than the muscles that are compensating for those weak muscles tend to shorten and get stiff. And that’s what leads to stiffness in the joints.

So the common problem that we see in knee arthritis is when the glute muscles are weak, but quad muscles in the front of the thigh right here tend to get over dominant. And that’s what adds a lot of compression to the knee joints. So it makes sense that stretching the thigh muscles in the front of the thigh is helpful, especially when you’re doing that knee bend, stretch or using the stretch out strap over your head to pull the knee into bending, you’ll probably feel a big stretch on the front of your thigh and you can get the perception that your quads are stiff and tight as well as your knee joint.

But stretching it out alone is not going to solve the long term problem. You’ve got to strengthen the muscle that’s not doing his job and making the quads work too much. And strengthening these weak muscles is also a process you can’t just do one exercise that you keep doing in the poll problem resolves. You’ve got to progress in exercises over time, cardiovascular exercises all of the problem like doing walking treadmill work, that kind of thing is important as well.

 And we’ve gotten videos all over this channel answering many questions you might have about knee arthritis. And if you’re looking for a more comprehensive structured program for addressing your knee arthritis problem, then you’ve got to learn more about our Knee Arthritis Recovery Program. We’re going to link to that program here in the description below as well as a link to the playlist of all our knee arthritis videos that are free to you here on this channel.

I hope this video was helpful for you if it was drop a comment let us know where you’re at in your near arthritis recovery right now. If you haven’t already subscribed to this channel, give this video a like give it a thumbs up share with somebody that you think needs to know this and I hope to see you in the next video. Bye