Is It Better To Rest, Stretch, Or Exercise An Arthritic Knee?

In this video, I’m going to answer the question, is it better to rest, exercise or stretch in arthritic knee joint? I get asked this question all the time. And there’s so much confusion in the healthcare field with advice given to patients that are suffering from the arthritis.

Some recommend just stretching, some tell you to just rest, take pain medications, and others recommend exercises like walking using a stationary bike, or even weight training exercises, it is confusing to know when to do what and the reality is all of them are important at certain times, depending on where you’re at in your knee arthritis situation. So let me tell you, number one, when to rest in arthritic knee joint, if you’re in an active flare up, meaning your knee joint is swollen, it’s hot, it does not like to be stood on, you don’t like to put pressure through your leg too much.

You can’t tolerate standing or walking for very long, you’re having pain at night like you wait, you wake up in the middle of the night because of knee pain or you’re having trouble falling asleep because it’s so uncomfortable when you get to bed. And then of course you wake up with tons of stiffness in the morning. That is a flare up. And the thought of doing any exercises does not sound very good to you. Don’t exercise you should not be exercising during that time.

If you’re in an active flare up right now, you need to just rest for a bit. Now resting indefinitely is not a good idea, there needs to come a time where your flare up, comes down, you flare down, and you start to feel better than you do need to get more active. I’ll tell you more about that here in just a second. But just to finish up the thought about resting. If you think about your knee joint, you have an inflammation inside your knee joint.

That’s the very definition of osteoarthritis. And just a side note here I’m talking about osteoarthritis, not psoriatic arthritis, or rheumatoid arthritis. And there’s other types of arthritis as well. I’m talking about classic good old osteoarthritis the type that affects people once they hit their 50s 60s and 70s. And beyond the one that people get knee replacements for this type of arthritis, osteoarthritis, there’s inflammation that happens at the joint, and it’s because of too much pressure to the area.

So that being said, too much pressure, then it makes sense. Get off your feet rest, don’t do anything aggressive. Don’t do any stretching or exercise, just let it calm down. During this time, if you feel like you need to be taking pain medications, using any sort of creams, ointments to make it feel better putting on a brace using ice or heat using things like that can be helpful, it’s not going to solve the long term problem, it’s just going to allow you to feel better for a little while, while your knee joint inflammation begins to decrease so that you can get onto the other stuff that makes your knee arthritis better for the long term.

This period might last a week, it might last several weeks, or even several months, depending on how long you’ve been inflamed and how much irritation you’ve been putting your knee through. There’s other factors as well, like root muscle imbalances that feed into knee arthritis flare ups, and those might need to be addressed as well, so that you can get some relief. And those might need to be addressed as well. So you can get to relief faster.

But if you’re in an active flare up, your priority should be to rest for a time. So when should you be stretching an arthritic knee, as you come out of that knee flare up, and you’re feeling better you feel like you can tolerate being on your feet a bit more, your motion might already be coming back.

If you feel like your knee is just a little stiff. Like if you sit down and you try to check your good knee your knee that doesn’t bother you and see how much it bends and how much it straightens out as well and compare it to your other knee. And if it doesn’t go equal to the other side, you’re different. You can’t straighten them out the same like this one stays bent a bit compared to that one. As long as it doesn’t hurt you to stretch, then you should be stretching it out just a bit.

I’ve got videos and advice on how to stretch it out and what exercises to do. I’ll mention more about that. Just watch to the end of the video. So you catch all those details. Let me just tell you a bit more about the stretching though. You ideally want to stretch first thing in the morning because with knee osteoarthritis, that’s when people tend to be stiffest because they’ve been sleeping all night have not been moving very much.

And then they wake up in the morning and the cartilage inside their knee joint just isn’t as lubricated as it is if you’re more active. So that’s why people experienced tons of stiffness in the morning. And that is the ideal time to be stretching out your knee joints in a safe comfortable way so that you can get over that stiffness that people have in their knee in the morning and get back to being active again and be more mobile throughout the day.

If you feel like you’re losing motion because you’re flaring up you’re relatively more flared up day to day, then stretching might be something that you need to back off of because if you’re aggressively stretching your knee joints It compresses the knee joint and puts pressure on it. And that might actually feed into the flare up.

So in order to get the most out of stretching, you need to catch yourself on the flare down part of a knee arthritis flare up. Because if you’re flaring up and you’re trying to stretch, you’re just going to make it worse, you need to back off on anything intense, anything that adds pressure to the knee joints, to make sure that you cut that flare up as short as possible, and you make it as least intense as possible.

In some cases, your motion may not come back, especially if you had a loss of motion for a long time, like months, it could be that the changes inside of your knee joint might be enough to that so that you don’t gain much more motion. In chronic knee arthritis, the smooth surfaces of the joint right here can become irregular, you might wear down cartilage as well. And that may limit how far you can bend or straighten out your knee joints.

So if you’re early on in your knee arthritis problem, like it’s only been going on for weeks, maybe a couple of months. And that’s when you have the best chance at regaining your full range of motion in your knee joints. And this has been going on for months, maybe even years or decades. Don’t be too surprised if you don’t gain your full range of motion. But that’s okay, you can actually function pretty well and you probably won’t need a knee replacements.

If your motion is pretty close to what it was before what your other knees like if you’re within about 90% Then you can probably get away with never having knee surgery and being pain free even and functioning just fine in your everyday activities. Now, let me tell you when to exercise in arthritic knee joints, now you have to realize that there’s different levels of exercise. And some exercises might be really, really easy and not that much pressure for your knee joints.

Those are probably going to be okay to do at the beginning phases when you’re still kind of in the flare up even your flaring down like you would when you’re stretching. And if your knee is completely fine, like it’s not bothering you anymore, but you know that you have arthritis, you know that you just don’t trust your knee. If you start to be more accurate. If you start to do more, you spend more time on your feet, and is probably going to want to flare up again.

That’s the perfect time when you need to be strengthening your muscles that help take pressure off your knee joints. Now that concept that I just said right there, strengthen the muscles that help take pressure off your knee joints. That’s a complicated concept that is not quite for this video. I’ve unpacked it in some of the videos here on YouTube. And I’ve got more information.

But I just want to highlight that piece to you, it’s important to understand that to effectively treat your knee arthritis naturally, so that you can avoid having surgery like a knee replacement surgery in the long term, it makes sure that your knee arthritis is not bothering you on a consistent basis, fixing the root imbalance, there’s muscles to get weaker and stronger.

That’s where it’s at. That’s where you effectively cure your knee arthritis problem. Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to have an x ray that looks like when you were 20 years old, it just means that it’s not going to slow you down, it’s not going to be stiffening up as much in your knee joint, it’s going to allow you to be active and use your knee just fine for the rest of your life.

Hopefully, now when you notice that you can be on your feet for longer periods of time. It’s not bothering you at night anymore, you feel like you can sleep the whole night and your knees fine. You might have some stiffness in the morning. That’s okay, as long as it’s not an incredible amount of stiffness, it’s better than what it has been in the past.

Then doing exercises where you actually load your body in the correct way when it doesn’t overload the knee joint is helpful for stimulating growth of cartilage that you get better integrity. In other words, the tissues of the cartilage actual cells and all the stuff around it. We call it the collagen matrix. All the tissues that are inside the knee joint right here where the cartilage is, and the meniscus as well can be stimulated to thicken and to get better to improve in health.

If you exercise the right way. This is critical for the long term. This is something that physicians don’t usually tell you about orthopedic surgeons don’t really know about because they’re focused on medications, injections, and surgery, of course, not naturally rehabilitating the knee joint. And we know there’s tons of research studies out there showing that exercise is beneficial for knee arthritis.

What gets confusing is what kinds of exercise and when and that’s why I told you lighter exercises if you’re relatively more flared up or fresh off of flare up and you’re flaring down, and then more aggressive exercises focused on treating the root of the problem are more important as you feel better. Now there are exercises especially quadricep exercises like the muscles that are in front of the thigh here.

If you are aggressive on strengthening your quadriceps the front of the thigh muscles that tends to flare up the knee joint, it tends to put a lot of pressure through the knee joints, and it leads to more frequent and more painful knee flare ups. And over the long term, it just deteriorates your knee to focus on quad muscles. And I have to warn you, many people in the medical field actually tell you to strengthen your quad muscles.

But the idea of strengthening quad muscles is an old way of thinking, it really isn’t the best way to do things. We have research to back it up, it tends to be glute exercises, but muscle exercises up here in the hip, that tend to take pressure off the knee joints, you might also need to look at your foot muscles. And there’s other muscles to address as well.

That’s just a teaser of what I’m talking about with the muscle imbalance stuff. I hope this video was helpful for you and breaking down when you should do what if you’re looking for more help with knee arthritis problems. We’ve got a playlist of all our new arthritis videos that we put on YouTube here, it’s down in the description below. If you’re looking for a more structured program for dealing with your knee arthritis, then you’ll want to learn more about our Knee Arthritis Recovery Program.

You can find the link in the description below as well. If you have any questions, drop a comment below. Let us know if this was helpful for you. If you have any specific questions, put them in there below. We’ll get to them as fast as we can. I do run a clinic here in El Paso, Texas. And so I’m busy with that and some back and forth between YouTube and the clinic and patients and all that but I love to get the comments.

I’d love to hear if you improve from our videos. If you have specific questions we might be able to help you out with or at least point you in the right direction. It always makes our day to help you out. Thanks so much and we’ll catch you in the next video friends. Bye