The 3 Important Exercise Tips When Repairing Knee Cartilage
Knee cartilage problems that cause achiness, pain, crunching and grinding in the knee, are possible to fix naturally. Most people in the medical field don’t even believe it’s possible, and sadly often are recommending patients take medications, have injections and have unnecessary surgeries.
Surgeons that do procedures to clean up a knee cartilage problem often do so because they’re just not medically trained to do anything else. They’re trained to do surgery. And many times, they’re telling their patients after they do that surgery, we’ll probably be seeing you in a few years for a knee replacement surgery. And patients just hate hearing that, because they don’t want to have any surgery to begin with.
Ideally, most people want to know, how do I fix this problem naturally? Well, I’m going to cover with you today the three most important exercise tips for repairing knee cartilage naturally. But just keep in mind that there is no one exercise that fixes knee cartilage. It truly is a process. It takes time and many exercises that change over time, depending on several factors in order to repair cartilage in the knee.
So here are the three most important tips for exercise when repairing knee cartilage problems.
Number One, Take Pressure Off.
Specifically take pressure off the kneecap. Knee cartilage problems often happen when the kneecap is pressing way too hard against the end of the thigh bone where the joint is, where the surfaces of the bones meet. Oftentimes, it’s the quad muscles, the quadricep muscles, the muscles in the front of the thigh that are too stiff, too tight, too strong, and yank that kneecap up against the end of the thigh bone way too hard.
Over time, that begins to degenerate the cartilage on the back of the kneecap or on the front of the thigh bone, and cause there to be too much pressure, too much bad forces. And that’s how the knee cartilage problem develops.
If you feel like that’s your situation, then what you need to do is just lay off, do less walking, do lower intensity activities. A lot of people that we talked to that have knee problems, they try walking for exercises, to fix their knee problem, stop doing that. You need to do things that are not aggravating to your knees so that you can take off the pressures from your knee.
In fact, if you’ve been actively exercising your quadricep muscles, those thigh muscles in the front of your thigh, stop doing that because it’s likely putting too much pressure on the kneecap. So take pressure off your kneecaps.
Number Two, Lots Of Light Reps.
What I mean by that is, cartilage is stimulated to heal by taking on light pressures. Now think about this, if your skin can take pressure. For instance, if you think about calluses, if you go lift weights or you do some housework or yard work, and you are using a broom or some tool with handles on it, you start to get callus on your hands.
That’s your skin’s response to doing an activity that puts a lot of pressure on the skin. And of course, if you do it in the right way, your skin gets a nice callus that allows you to be able to do that job over and over again, without messing up your skin. Well cartilage has to do the same thing.
So, you need to put the appropriate amount of force on the cartilage so that it thickens and gets denser so that it can take on the forces that you need to put it away for your everyday normal activities. But if your cartilage is very irritated right now, it’s just like if you have irritated skin, you just can’t put a lot of pressure on it. In fact, you have to put way lighter than normal pressures on it to accommodate it.
If you have a lot of pressure on your kneecap right now, and you want to put some light reps through it, you got to do super-duper light stuff, like biking with zero resistance, like a stationary bike that might be an option. Walking is probably going to be too much. Tailgate swinging is an exercise that I’ve talked about in other videos, you can go check out our playlist of videos on our YouTube channel if you want and find what I mean by tailgate swings, and shameless plug.
We’ve got a program called the 28 Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program where I talk all about tailgate swings, and other exercises that help to heal knee cartilage problems.
But back to what I was saying. It depends on the intensity or the irritation level of the cartilage. So if your cartilage is actually not that irritated, then maybe walking can be a high repetition, low intensity or light exercise that you can do. Now we’re looking at doing reps in the hundreds at this point, so if you are able to do light reps, you got to do hundreds of reps. I’d say 2, 3, 4 hundred or more reps, which you might not be counting the reps, you might be more so count the time.
That might mean walking for 20 minutes or cycling for 20 minutes or tailgates waiting for 20 minutes or more. And you can spread this out throughout the day, if it’s a lot to do all at once. But it should not hurt you to do this activity, it should just kind of warm up your knees. It shouldn’t make it painful at all. And if you do that, if you give your knee cartilage light reps over time, you should put it in a position where it’s going to stimulate healing. And it can make the cartilage more dense so that you can take on more aggressive activities and it’s a good thing for your knees. Not a harmful thing.
Number Three Get Strong.
If you’ve been able to take the rotation off, if you’ve been able to control the flare ups or the inflammation that you have initially with a severe cartilage problem in the knee, and then you’ve done light reps on your knee exercise that just puts a light pressure through the knee joints. And if that worked out for you, then the next step is to progress your strength in muscles that influence good movement in the knee joint.
Specifically, you’re going to want to work out your glute muscles way more than your quads in just about 99% of cases, so that you don’t put more pressure through your kneecaps. But you do need to get strong. Just think about being able to get up and down from chairs easily. If you’re the type that needs a few chances to swing your body weight back and forward and then get up out of the chair. That’s not good. You need to be able to get up right out of the chair. And chances are you’re missing strength to do that.
If you can’t tolerate standing more than 10 or 15 minutes, just because you get tired. That’s a sign that you’re probably pretty weak as well. Maybe you’re more fit than what I’m talking about and you’re able to do all that stuff but haven’t worked out in a while. And you probably need to strengthen more from where you’re at so that this knee problem isn’t going to come back. So get strong in the right muscles to ensure that your knee cartilage is healthy.
The reason for this is because as you get stronger and you put good forces through your knee cartilage, it thickens. It densifies and allows your knee cartilage to absorb more aggressive forces without becoming irritated. Essentially, you build a margin for being able to tolerate bad forces, so you protect it. This protection is what allows you to avoid having a surgery later on, or avoid taking medications, or injections because of a knee problem.
Now that being said, you might still have sounds coming from your knees whenever you go to go upstairs or downstairs or squat down and get something from the ground. That’s okay. As long as it’s not painful, then you’re okay. If you’re really concerned about your knee cartilage problem getting worse and you want to hire us to help you to solve your Knee cartilage problem naturally so that you can get back to doing the things that you love, then I strongly encourage you to hit our cost and availability button right up top in the menu bar of our websites.
Once you hit that, you’ll get taken to a page where you can leave us your details. And then one of my staff will give you a call and we want to hear all about your knee cartilage problem, so that we can make sure that we’re the right people to help you out with it. And if we are, we’ll tell you the next steps after that. I hope that we can be a part of your success story real soon. Have a great day. Bye