How To More Easily Get Out Of Chairs If You Have Knee Pain

In this video, I’m going to show you how to more easily get up out of chairs. If you’ve got knee pain, this could apply to you for a variety of reasons of knee pain, it could be that you just had a recent surgery like in the replacements, an ACL repair of meniscus surgery.

You may have also just sprained your knee, or you may be dealing with some chronic knee problems like a meniscus tear, knee arthritis, tons of other reasons for knee pain, a baker cyst, you may have a ligament injury, if your knee is irritated right now and painful, and it just hurts to bend it all the way or to bend it at all. And put pressure through when you stand up.

Getting out of chairs is tough, especially lower chairs, places like toilet seats, or cars that are really low, those can be especially difficult. So I’m going to walk you through ways to make this much easier for yourself. So the first thing is to make sure you scoot to the edge of the chair always. So if you’re say at home in a recliner in your favorite chair, and you’re sitting like this, most people don’t think let me scoot to the edge to the front of the seats, and then get up.

That gives you more space to get your feet under you to put your arms in a position where you can use them to get off the chair to put them on your on your knees. But if your legs are out here, and then you’re trying to get up like that, it’s just not as easy.

Versus if you can get your feet under you a little bit better, which means you need to scoot to the edge of the seat so we can get your feet under you, it’s just much easier to get up this way, rather than having to throw your weight over your feet because your feet are out in front of you like that.

The other thing is leaning forward enough. So once you get your feet under you properly, making sure you lean your body forward enough to get your weight over your feet is a big deal. So people try to stand up from back here and there. They’re leaning backwards and their weights not over their feet that might be the way you think to do it.

If it hurts to bend your knee, because you’re leaning forward like this, you can kick out a leg and lean on your good side on the side that doesn’t bother you and try to put more pressure to that but you see on my weights over my foot here, my foots under my body not out ahead of me. And I can use that leg a lot easier. They’ve already talked about using your hands, use your hands is really important because it’ll take some pressure off your leg.

The best places to put your hands are going to be on the armrest. If you’ve got armrests on your chair. Or even if you’re on a couch, you’re not near an armrest just pushing off the seat right here can be quite helpful. If you’ve got a walker or a cane nearby, put it in front of you grab that cane right here, put it between your legs in front of you and push off the cane.

Right here are the lockers long as the walker sturdy, you might pull on it like a rolling Walker, one of those big walkers that has wheels on it, the small ones that don’t have wheels might tip over. So don’t rely on that one. You can always test it out a bit to see if it’s going to hold you up. Maybe he gets your bodyweight over it enough to help you with standing up.

And then of course, you’ve always got this far, you’re just putting your hands on your knees as a way to offload some of your muscles that helps you to stand up as well. And if one knee is bothering you, you can’t quite put pressure on it that way. Put two hands on one knee, the good knee the one that doesn’t bother you, you might kick out this leg and still push up like that. And let’s talk about the way you’re using your muscles.

Ideally, right before you go to stand up, you should be thinking about tightening your butt muscles into the butt muscles back here should be the main muscle driving you up. What most people do is use their quad muscles in the front here. And if you’ve got a knee problem, when you use your quad muscles, it’s going to aggravate your knee problem.

That’s the main reason why people get more knee pain when standing and they look to avoid trying to stand up because just hurts your knee. But if you can switch over to using your glute muscles, that’s really the right way to be standing and it offloads your knee you’re not using the muscles that compress your knee joint more. So the way this looks because you might be able to stand up just like I am right now if your knee isn’t too terribly bad, of course scoot to the edge.

Get your feet under you. Open your knees up like this here, Lady be modest and make sure you’re covered up or ideally you’re alone it doesn’t matter. And get your feet angled out. Turned out just a little bit like this. So toes out, attorneys out wide, scoot your bottom to the edge feed cut out of your body and then slowly shift your weight over your body than already you should be thinking about squeezing your butt muscles and use those butt muscles to stand up.

So when you’re coming, if you’re sitting down like this, you should be already tightening and then tightening them as you come up. That should decrease the knee pain a notch or two or maybe even completely if you can do it effectively. Now this does require that you have some glute strength. If you don’t feel like you have any good strengthen, this may not work very well for you.

And you may need to go be working on your glute strength, so that you can get your knee pain better when standing up from a chair. If you don’t have glute strength, it’s going to cause you many, many problems going forward. So you got to go back and get that that’s often the root problem of many knee problems.

Now what if you can’t bend your knee, right, you don’t have good mobility in the knee, it could be that you’re suffering from arthritis, or you just had a surgery of some sort, and your mobility just isn’t great. You need to be able to kick out that leg, it’s incredibly important that you just offload that leg because you’re not going to work on that leg in that moment, you’re not going to you don’t have to worry about putting pressure through it.

If your knee is stuck, and you can’t bend it, and it’s just the way it’s going to be right now. You need to be working on your knee mobility some other time likely going to go stand up, like if you have to go to the bathroom, and you can have to hurry over there. That’s not the time to be working on your knee. Once you have 90% plus of the motion you’re supposed to get in your knee, then I’d be okay with you putting some pressure on it to make sure that you’re working that knee that you’re using it.

But if right now, say you’re just you know, a few weeks out of having a knee replacement or some knee surgery, your knees just not going to bend, be relying on doing this kind of motion right here, when you get up off the toilet when you get in a car when you just go stand up from any chair. And another tip that can help you out tremendously if you’ve got a knee that doesn’t bend very well is raised to see if you are able to I’ve got this computer chair here on purpose.

Because a computer might be the best place for you to be sitting. If you have an ear placement, you might put this in front of the television or wherever you like to be. And this one’s got nice, adjustable armrests. So whatever computer chair works for you, as long as you can elevate it up at home, what you can do if you are sitting in a couch or your favorite chair, and it doesn’t have the ability to go up and down like this, is sit on pillows, go get pillows from your bed.

If you have throw pillows on your couch, get blankets, put something soft under your bottom to elevate you up from the normal level of the couch or the seat so that when you go to stand up, now your knees aren’t bent as much, you’re starting from a higher place. So it’ll be a lot easier for you to get up rather than it being way low here. And you’re having a harder time. Now I always get the question, What about cars? And what about toilet seats, because cars vehicles might be really low.

Those are tough to deal with. The nice thing about cars is usually there’s places for you to hang on to and hold on to your car might have a handle on the on the frame of the car. Your best bet is if you’re let’s say you’re in the either the passenger seat or the driver’s seat of the car, you need to turn before you get up out of the car.

So let’s say that this is the front of the car, you need to turn your body off you open the door of course, and get your legs right here and then grab the frame of the car to pull yourself up out of the car. If you’re in the passenger seat, you might be this way depending on what country you’re in. And what you don’t want to do is get out like you normally would where you stick one leg out.

And then you’re trying to stand on one leg as you’re standing up out of the car, you need to turn both feet out of the car. So scoot over, and then get ready to hold the edge of the car, scoot your bottom to the edge. Think about opening up your legs and firing your glute muscles as you stand up.

You might just have to modify the to this whenever you’re getting in and out of the cars for a short time. And toilet seats. They might be a little bit tricky because depending on your bathroom setup, ideally you have a sink nearby or some structure nearby that you can grab onto and hold on to help push yourself above toilet seat. Sometimes toilet seats are very low as well.

But there are devices out there that are well worth it, especially if you just had a surgery. Or if you’ve got more permanent knee problems like knee arthritis, and you’re just having trouble just with the toilet. There are things called toilet risers. These are devices that go over your toilet seat, and they’ll add an extra few inches sometimes six inches or more of height to your toilet seat so you can still sell the commode and do your business.

But you’re sitting higher and it’s much easier to get up off the toilet. There’s also a version has handles on the side so you can press off the handles and they’re very much like these armrests right here. I’ve linked in the description below toilet seat risers that might benefit you in case you need that at home. I hope this video was helpful for you. If you thought it was, give us a thumbs up drop a comment below if you have any questions. We try to get back to those as fast as possible. And I’ll catch you in the next video. Bye