The Most Important Exercise For Knee Cartilage Repair

El Paso Welcome to the Stay Healthy El Paso Podcast. I'm your host Dr. David Middaugh, specialist physical therapist over at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. Today I'm going to be talking to you about the secret knee cartilage repair exercise. Oftentimes people with knee cartilage problems run into achiness, crunching, grinding and stiffness in their knee. They're having trouble going up and down steps, getting out of bed first thing in the morning is extremely painful and stiff for some of these people.

And treating knee problems like this is confusing. They just don't know where to get healthy people will go find their doctors and they'll recommend medications and injections. Of course, other people might recommend vitamins and supplements that might help out a bit but usually don't fix the problem. And stretches can feel good when doing them. But the knee problems might still come back pretty quickly afterwards. And some exercises tend to hurt more than others. Pain medications just take the pain away for a short period of time as well as injections they may take away for a longer period of time or you're talking more on the on the length of like weeks, or months even. And surgery is really what we want to avoid at all costs because it carries its own risks.

Let me tell you the secret knee cartilage repair exercise that you need to know, so that you can fix your knee cartilage. It's glute exercises. Now, there's a slew of different types of glute muscle exercises that you can do. There are all kinds and to give you a specific glute exercise to begin to do at home is a little challenging, because it depends on many factors, and it depends on how severe your knee cartilage problem is right now. It also depends on how active you are right now, how active you want to become in the future, and also how well you can activate your glute muscles. So, it's hard to tell you specifically.

I've got tons of videos that you can learn off of on our YouTube channel. If you head over to our YouTube channel and find more on our playlist for knee pain exercises knee pain videos, you'll find more glute exercises there.

Another option which is way better, it's going to be way more specific to what we're talking about with how to repair your cartilage, would be to look into purchasing our 28-Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program. This program, it's a 28-day program, where each day there's something for you to do, there's a rest day included each week. In this 28-day program, we'll go into heavy details on what good exercises to do, what time you should do them, depending on where you are and your knee cartilage injury, how often to do them, and all the details surrounding how to do these glute exercises in addition to other exercises. We'll go over how to repair your cartilage in your knees.

Now let me just backtrack a bit. Glute muscle exercises to repair knee cartilage is almost unheard of at this point. A lot of people focus on the quad muscles. Now let me just get my thigh bone here, my knee joint here. If you think about the quads, quads are on the front of the thigh right here. Here's the kneecap and they all attach to the kneecap. So the current thinking, that's been the thinking really, for decades, probably at least 30-40, maybe more years, is that if there's a knee cartilage problem, in other words, the cartilage behind the kneecap, and there's cartilage in the front of the thigh bone, right where the kneecap sits, that cartilage is injured or damaged somehow. The thought is to strengthen the muscles in the front of the thigh right here, the quadricep muscles.

Now a lot of people still do that. They still look for quad strengthening exercises. And what they find is that when they do those quad exercises that it kind of does feel good. It feels like you got to work out. You get that feedback that these muscles are tired, maybe even sore, but in the long term, what happens at the kneecap at the knee joint, where the cartilage problem is, is those quad muscles pull that kneecap harder against the thigh bone and causes it to rub it slowly over time further down and injures of cartilage more over time.

So one, avoid doing quad exercises. And if you're seeing a medical professional that's telling you to do this, I highly recommend you question them, show them this video if you want so they can think about it and critically think about what they're recommending to their patients a bit more.

The research is out there showing that glute exercises are more beneficial for the kneecap problems, then quad problems. It's important that they think about that, when we're trying to do by strengthening the glute muscles which would be over in this area relative to the bones is it pulls this this bone, the thigh bone in a certain way that allows for decreased pressure at the kneecap joint.

By avoiding strengthening the quads in the front of the thigh and strengthening the glute muscles in the back of the hip, it indirectly changes the pressure in a good way to alleviate the cartilage pressure behind the kneecap. That is how we can repair knee cartilage in your knee using exercise.

If you want to learn more about our 20-day Health and Wellness boost program, just go to the menu bar on the top of the website here and find the tab that says products and you'll find more about the 28-day knee health and wellness boost program. in that program, we go into detail about which good exercises to do, how to do them, how often to do them where you should feel during those exercises, and the focus is on reducing any discomfort in the knee. It should not hurt you for your knee as you're rehabilitating, as you're recovering the cartilage back there throughout the process.

If anything, you might feel a little bit of grinding, clicking popping, but nothing that should aggravate the knee feeling worse and worse each day. If that's the case, then you're doing exercises that are just not right for your knee at that time, or they may be not good for you at all.

But keep in mind that fixing knee cartilage naturally is a process. It's not just doing an exercise once or twice, or even for a short period of time, a few weeks, and you can't expect your knee cartilage to be repaired during that time. It's a process that lasts months, possibly for some that are more severe even a couple of years. So hang in there, be patient and talk to the right expert if you need some direct help about how to handle your knee cartilage problem.

Don't underestimate the weight of this problem. It's not something that's a quick fix them in the medical field. It can come off that way since people often prescribe medications or injections or surgery and they can lead you to believe unknowingly that it's going to be resolved within you know one treatment or a few treatments. But the reality of fixing a knee problem, a knee cartilage problem naturally, is it's a process.

It's a lot like brushing your teeth. If you brush your teeth once or twice, you can't expect to never ever get a cavity. It's a process that you have to maintain over time, and possibly do different. If you haven't been having the result that you're looking for. You might need to add flossing in there using mechanical toothbrush or using a different type of toothpaste or avoiding certain kinds of foods.

There’re all kinds of factors to look at and think about so that you can properly manage that problem naturally without having to get some sort of invasive procedure done or rely on injections or medications. In the same way, as you're progressing through glute exercises, you're trying different ones as you're finding the right one that works for you at the right time. You got to be patient and stick up the exercise program. The way that you should know that you're doing things right is your knees should be getting better and better. As the weeks go by, you should feel less pain, a better ability to go up and down steps, stand as long as you like, and do more things to love with family and friends, ideally. But the progress should be noticeable. As you're going through it, you should feel like you're getting better week to week.

Thanks for listening to this podcast. I hope that you found this helpful El Paso, so if you know of anybody that's got a knee problem, a knee cartilage problem specifically, please share this with them. Please get the link copy this and forward it over to them send it through the text or email or something and allow them to get some help. That way they're not suffering with this knee problem is just resorting to having surgery or relying on pain medications or injections for their knee problems. Let them know that it is possible to fix this problem naturally and get back to doing very active things.

I personally have had knee trouble off and on throughout my life. And it wasn't until now, when I'm older that I have it actually gotten under control. And I can do just about everything that I want, including running, lifting weights, riding bikes, picking up my kids, and my so my kids are getting big, I can do all that without worrying about my knee, I have complete confidence in my knee problems, that they're not going to get any worse than that they're going to be under control.

And I teach people that all the time our patients and other therapists when I train them, we teach them all that. So anyways, if you want to learn more about us, our company and how we help people, visit our website at www.EPmanualPT.com and check out the homepage there and you'll know exactly where to click on to go to the next Step depending on what you want to do, have a great day. Bye

The Most Important Exercise For Knee Cartilage Repair

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