The 11 Worst Activities That Make Knee Arthritis More Painful

In this video, I’m going to tell you the 11 worst activities that make knee arthritis more painful. A key theme that you’re going to find throughout these activities is that there’s a muscle imbalance that over pressurizes, knee arthritis or the knee joints. And that’s what makes these activities more painful. I’ll tell you more about it. As we go along through these activities.

The first four activities are going to be more cardio based activities, then we’ll go through some strength based activities, and then some stretching activities. And these are often recommended by doctors, physical therapists, and other people that help treat knee problems. So you’ve got to watch out not all of these activities are that obvious.

And not all healthcare providers really know that these activities can cause more pain, especially if they’ve never gone through knee arthritis themselves or aren’t specialists in treating the arthritis. So watch out for that in case you’re getting treatment right now, for a knee arthritis problem. Some of these activities are actually good at certain times for the right person. And many of these activities obviously are bad when done at the wrong time.

And for the wrong individual. I’ll explain more as we dive into them, the first activity is walking. Now walking can be good, it can definitely be good. At the right time. Under the right circumstances. Walking is like the number one activity that is recommended by doctors, surgeons, physical therapists, though I’m a physical therapist myself, they’ll often make you go walk on the treadmill in physical therapy, if you’re coming in for knee arthritis problem.

Now, here’s the problem. If you aren’t actively using your glutes, and you’re getting your glutes tired during walking, then by default, you’re probably using your quad muscles, the quad muscles are the ones that are on the front of your thighs right here and the glutes are the ones that are back here, the butt muscles.

If you’re using more the quads than the glutes during walking, and you feel like your quads are getting more of a workout, then what’s happening is you’re getting your quads stronger, and they’re going to pressurize the knee joints.

Those quad muscles attach to the kneecap right here. And then from the kneecap, there’s a ligament that attaches from the kneecap to the shin bone. And if your quad muscles are getting stronger, it is compressing the knee joints, little by little gradually over time and making it worse.

Now walking is good if you’re using your glutes. But if you haven’t really figured out how to use your glutes if you don’t really know about what I’m talking about, because I talk about that a lot on this channel, then you need to go look at the videos where we talk about walking, you’ll find some in the description below.

You need to talk with your therapist or your healthcare provider about that they may not know what I’m talking about either guide them to these videos if you want to educate them about it. But it is massively important that you use your glutes while you’re walking. Otherwise, walking is going to be harmful for you. I see it all the time.

I’m going to rant here because I get patients that come into my office and grit through pain with walking. They say my doctor told me my physical therapist told me my best pal, my husband, my wife told me to go walk because that’s what it says on the internet. And all these people show that they actually get better when they’re walking.

But I go walking, and after 15 minutes, my knee is just tired, done painful, swollen. And I can’t walk again for the next few days because my knees so bad. And then they’ll force themselves through it and their knees just getting worse and worse over time. And it’s because you’re not using their muscles properly. And they may not be ready to do it right now.

Because you’re very flared up. That’s another part of this is if you’re just so flared up that you can’t bear being on your feet for more than 510 minutes at a time. Walking is not for you right now. Don’t do it. Wait, we’ll get to it, you can get to it eventually. But you’ve got to flare your knee down, it’s going to be bad for you to do it if you’re flared up.

And number two is going to be the elliptical. And it’s the same concepts. As with walking the elliptical machine is that machine you’ll often see in gyms, people buy them for home. And there the theory with this is that it’s less impact on your knee joints than it is with walking because you’re not your foot isn’t ever leaving the surface that it’s on and you’re not stomping on the ground.

I mean, you shouldn’t be stopping when you’re walking anyway, but some people do it. But on an elliptical, it’s kind of like a cross between the treadmill and a bike in that it’s got pedals that you move your feet, but they’re way down here and you’re upright. And sometimes they have handles that you use to move forward like that. But it’s less resistance. And you can actually pick up some speed on there.

And you could put some resistance on but there’s not very much impact. You’re not hitting your foot on the ground every single time. You’re on a pedal that’s gliding as you’re moving your feet. So at face value, like when you first look at this exercise, it seems like it makes sense and a lot of healthcare providers look at it with that lens.

But the same thing applies that I just talked about and walking if you’re using your quads, because you’re not using your glutes you don’t really ever feel your glutes get a workout on the elliptical. You should feel like your glutes work hard lighter than any other muscle on the elliptical in order for you to actually make it help your knees. Otherwise it’s hurting your knees.

The elliptical machine can be helpful for you only if you’re using your glutes properly. But if you’re not using your glutes if you don’t feel like you have confidence that you leave the machine and your glutes are tired more than any other muscle in your legs and hips, then you’re hurting yourself, you’re making your arthritis worse, gradually, over time, you should stop doing it and go figure out how to do the elliptical properly, which may mean you need to go do some basic exercises for your glutes to just get them to turn on.

 Number three is swimming. Swimming is often recommended for people with a variety of arthritis problems because the idea was swimming is the water takes pressure off your body and depressurizes your joints. This makes a lot of sense. And swimming can be good. Certain parts of swimming can be good for knee arthritis.

Now when we talk about swimming for exercise, the number one thing people do when swimming is they go swim laps, they go to the pool, and they do in freestyle swimming like where they’re moving their arms like this. And they’re kicking their legs behind them, just like so well guess what? If you’re kicking your legs in a way that makes your knee extend aggressively like this, and you feel like you’re using your quads more.

So same problem, you’re feeding into the imbalance where your quads are getting stronger, and it’s pressurizing your knee joint. What you should do instead to make swimming work better for you is instead of focusing on the kicking down part and straightening out your knee, think about kicking this way and tightening up your glute. And don’t emphasize the straightening out part.

That way you work your glute muscle every time you kick up that way, and you’re not really aggressively working your thigh muscles of the quads during the kicking motion, then it can become helpful for you. But you still got to make sure that you don’t overdo it on your quads because you can make your knees feel worse.

So far with any of these activities walking elliptical, and using your swimming, you should feel like your knees don’t hurt during these activities. And there’s other pool exercises that can be beneficial for you and many physical therapy clinics have what an underwater treadmill where they put you in the pool, and it’s actually got a treadmill underwater for you to walk underwater with the weight lifted off.

That is the same thing. If you’re using your quads too much, it’s not going to be beneficial for you, you’ve got to use your glutes, it will tend to feel good because you’re in the water. You’re unweighted, especially if you’re a heavier person who just feels awesome be able to walk a little bit longer.

But if you’re working out your quads, even underwater on a treadmill, that’s making your knee problem worse in the long run, you’re not going to get true long term relief from your knee arthritis problem, you’ve got to figure out how to use your glutes more. Number four is cycling, cycling is often recommended a lot because almost no pressure, you’re just moving your feet through pedals kind of like with the elliptical, and you’re not really impacting your knees at all.

But what happens all the time on cycling, whether it’s an outdoor bike, a stationary bike, like one of those upright bikes, like a spinning class type of bike, or even a recumbent bike, those are the ones that have the backrest and the pedals are more out here, your cycling like this, biking tends to use your quads more. And you’ve got to figure out how to make you use your glutes because it is possible to use your glutes more.

But if you just can’t get through a biking workout without your quads being the primary muscle that you tire out, you should not be doing biking. What you should consider doing when you’re cycling is open your knees out a bit more and think about tightening up your glutes every time that you push the pedal away from you.

When you push one pedal away the other pills and come up. So if I’m pushing my right leg out for me, then this glutes should be contracting. And it’ll contract better if your knee is slightly angled out. And you need to ride your bike like this with your knees way out. But you might be more like this. When you’re riding a bike, you need to just slightly move out a few degrees in your hips, move your knees out just a bit as you’re cycling. And then you still have to think about tightening up your glutes.

So when you push this one out, this glute should tighten up and then when you push this one out, this Bucha tighten up. If you’re not using your glutes properly on the bike, same problem, you’re going to feed into that imbalance you’re going to make your quads stronger, and it’s only going to feed into the pressure in your knee joint. This makes your knee arthritis worse over time. Number five worst activity is knee extensions.

This exercise is often done in the gym with the machine. There’s typically a machine that has a stack of plates. They’ll have this like at a Gold’s Gym, a planet fitness type of gym anywhere where they have a bunch of machines. You’ll put the pin in the plate that you want sometimes you have to actually get the circular plates and put them on a on one of those pipes of sticks out where the plate sits on.

And then you sit down and it’s got a pad that goes over your lower legs, your shins right here. Maybe some handles right here and then you do this motion, you push your knees out like this your feet out, and it straightens out your knees. And it makes these muscles work. And you do that repeatedly against the weight, the weights are going to go up and down as you straighten out your legs.

And that is supposed to strengthen your quad muscles, which is exactly what I’m telling you not to do, because it over pressurizes, your knee joints. This directly feeds into muscle imbalances. Now, I think this machine, the knee extension machine, should be eradicated from gyms all over the world, there’s very few instances where I think it’s a good machine. And it’s really very, very, very few instances, really just after a surgery.

If you’re dealing with like a traumatic knee injury, like you were in an accident and you had a broken bone or a really bad sprain, then it would be a good exercise to consider doing. But if you’ve got more of a chronic knee problem, you didn’t have an accident that set this off. It was something that developed over time, chances are your quad muscles are already relatively strong. And you don’t need to be working on that.

Now where it can be misleading is if you’re a weaker person, like you don’t really ever work out, you don’t go to the gym. And now that you’ve got this near arthritis problem, you’re thinking I should go work out, I should probably get stronger, which is a good thought. Kudos to you for having that.

But don’t start on that one. And even if you can’t lift a lot of weight on that one, you’re imbalanced, it’s such that you should start in the glutes First, there’s other exercises to start with as well. And going straight to the knee extension exercise is going to be disastrous for you in the long term. It may not hurt right away, oftentimes it does.

But for some people, it really doesn’t hurt them to do that exercise. And they don’t understand later on why they’re getting pain, they’ll go through that exercise feel fantastic, they’ll feel the pump, you know the muscle get getting nice and worked out after doing that exercise, it’s very self gratifying to do that exercise.

It’s a very visually appealing exercise as well, because you’ll feel like your muscles are getting thicker. And it’s nice to you know, pull up your shorts and look at your well defined quads in the mirror and look at your progress. But it is not a good exercise for your knee joints. For your knee arthritis in the long run, it’s going to over pressurize that joint and make you feel worse, more stiffness, more swelling, as time goes on.

Number six is kind of related to the number five the knee extensions. But this one’s a light version, a very light version of it. And this is often done in physical therapy clinics, especially when people are very flared up like when your knees bad, it’s very swollen, they’ll tell you to do something called a quad set. So all this looks like is your legs going to be up like so.

And then they’ll tell you to activate your quads to tighten up your quad muscle. Another way they might say it is they’ll put a pillow or a towel behind your knee. And they’ll tell you to push your knee down against that pillow or towel to fully extend your knee. And part of the goal here might be to get your knee to straighten out better part of the goal might also be to get the quad to activate more.

Now, if you’re truly lacking some knee extension, like your knee stays bent, and it has the ability to go down. Because he might be stiff like that and doesn’t have much ability to go down. But if it does go down like that, then this might be an okay exercise for you to do temporarily. Once you get that full range of motion. And you can easily get there, you don’t need to be doing this exercise very much at all.

The problem the reason why I included this exercise is one of the worst you can do is because you’re tightening up your quads, which is making the muscle imbalance worse and adding more pressure to the knee joint over time. It’s okay to do that for a short time to get that remaining motion. But once you’re done with that, you don’t need to do this exercise anymore. And that’s where the problem happens.

People go to physical therapy, or they pick up this exercise from the internet somewhere. And they think that it’s doing good because you’re using the muscle that directly connects to their knee joints. But it doesn’t need to be done long term, you just need to do it for the time that you need it and then move on.

In fact, the best time to do this exercise is if you just had a knee surgery of some sort a knee replacement and ACL surgery, a meniscus surgery, because consistently when there’s an operation on the knee joint, these muscles do shut down, they will get weaker, and you need to activate them to wake them up. And this is a good exercise at that point.

That’s why it’s recommended in physical therapy clinics because physical therapy clinics are often seen people that have had knee surgeries, but if you’ve never had a knee surgery, you’re dealing with arthritis, you don’t really have a problem was treating out your knee. This is not an exercise to be doing. Or if you have if you have had knee arthritis, you did have a little problem straightening out your knee.

But now it’s gotten better. You can get all the way straight. Stop doing this exercise, it’s going to feed into the problem. The nice thing is it’s not super aggressive, so it’s not going to feed into the problem very fast. But you don’t want to be doing anything that’s feeding into the problem at all. When you can be spending your time and effort on working out the glutes which directly change the problem.

They will truly help your knee arthritis for long-term number eight is squats. Squats are often recommended because they work out your knees, right, they bend your knees, it works out the muscles around your knees. But if you’re squatting with your knees forward like this, you’re probably feeling your quad muscles working quite a bit. So it is not a good idea to be doing squats.

Now there are times to be doing squats when you can activate your glutes properly. And we talked about that at length here on our channel, you can go into our playlist and find more about squats, I’ve got a playlist just about squats, because it’s so important to do them correctly using the correct muscles. Using your quads in squats is really not a good idea.

A lot of people think that that’s how it’s supposed to be because that’s just what fires when you do it. But there needs to be more thought into what muscles you’re using when you squat and what joints what position your joints are in what position your spine is in so that you can get the right muscles working in pressurize joints appropriately rather than inappropriately so that they’re healthier for the long term.

Number nine is lunges, it’s related to squats, if you’re aggressively putting pressure to your knee joint and bending it, and then you’re using your quads on top of that it’s a bad idea is just going to over pressurize your knee joints, you should not force your way through squats or lunges, it should feel good to do these activities. Now I do tell people that are in later phases of knee arthritis, where they’re feeling fantastic.

They don’t really have any knee swelling problems. They don’t have any pain. They had any arthritis problem and they’ve rehabilitated themselves to feeling normal again. Only in that part should they be doing squats and lunges aggressively. And the requirement for getting to there. The prerequisite is that you understand how to use your glute muscles properly. During those exercises.

If you cannot use your glute muscles properly during those exercises, you should not be doing them, it’s going to make you worse. And if you’re actively in pain right now, you also should not be doing these. It’s going to make your knee arthritis even worse, it’s going to make it swell more be stiff more in the mornings. Avoid them right now.

All right number 10 is going to be aggressive stretching any sort of aggressive stretching to your knee joint is a bad idea. The reason for this is there’s cells little cells that live inside your muscles and inside the tendons that are around the joints where the muscles connect to the bones. These cells are called Golgi tendon organs and muscle spindle cells.

One of them is in the muscle, the muscle spindle and the Golgi tendon organ is in the tendon. These cells connect to the rest of the body to the spine. They are part of a reflex system in your body that detect when the muscles and tendons are being overstretched when the muscle and tendon are being overstretched, it causes the muscle to want to contract to protect itself from being torn.

If you aggressively stretch, you will set off the muscle spindle cells and the Golgi tendon cells. And that will make the muscle tighten up while you’re trying to stretch it, it’s a bad thing, because then you’re actually going to be strengthening the muscle when you’re trying to stretch it. If that’s not your goal, it’s going to make things worse over time.

The other thing with aggressively stretching the knee joint, like if you’re bending your knee joint, especially, especially doing this type of stretch right here, stretching the hamstrings adds compression to the joint. And number 11 is a quad stretch. This is the most common stretch done.

This is one where people will pull their foot towards their heel like this, they may pin it down on something or they’ll just pull it with your hand. If you’re aggressively stretching and you’re feeling a massive stretch right here, it’s going to compress the knee joint quite a bit and add to some irritation in the knee joint, there’s a certain way to do stretching that is beneficial. And it’s really only necessary if you have a lack of motion.

Oftentimes, if you don’t really have a big lack of motion, stretching is not necessary. And it would be better to actually strengthen the muscle imbalance before you go stretch because that’s going to give you more long term benefit. Doing a quad stretch, doing a hamstring stretch doing a hip flexor stretch, aggressively are all a bad idea anytime doing a light stretch of each of those could be beneficial at certain times.

And just to give you an idea of what’s light and what’s aggressive if you put them on a scale of zero to 10 zero meaning you feel no stretch at all and 10 meaning it’s a very intense stretch, you’re probably going to hurt yourself if you go to an 11 You don’t want to hang out anything above three or four. If you’re at 3, 4, 5 and beyond all the way to 10.

You’re probably going to be setting off those muscle spindles and those Golgi tendon organs. But if you stay down low at a one or two, maybe a three and that’s it, then your risk of setting them off is a lot lower and you’re probably going to actually get the lengthening that you need in the muscle to achieve more flexibility. Also, you got to watch out for that compression the knee joint make sure not to over compress your knee joint.

I hope this list was helpful for you, if you found that you’re doing any of these things, stop doing them right away, go learn about our knee arthritis recovery program that will give you exact guidance on what you need. It’s a very exhaustive program. It tells you everything about how to progress yourself through all the different phases of knee arthritis tells you what to do, what not to do, and exactly when to do it so that you know that it’s helpful for you.

You can find out more information about that in the link in the description below. Leave us a comment. If you have any questions, give us a thumbs up and I’ll see in the next video friends. Bye