Top 3 Meniscus Exercises For Home
Are you suffering from a meniscus problem at home? Do you think that you might have a torn meniscus, or an irritated meniscus, or any sort of meniscus injury? I’m going to cover with you today, the top three knee meniscus exercises that you can do at home.
Meniscus problems can take a really long time to heal. The reason for that is because they are made up of cartilage. You have an inner a medial meniscus, and an outer or a lateral meniscus in each knee. Meniscus tissue is loaded every time you go to stand up on it, you put your weight through it, so it doesn’t really get the best chance to heal if you don’t provide it the right healing environments.
There are lots of reasons why you can get a meniscus problem, and healing it is a process. It can take a long time, anywhere from 6 to 12 months as long as you are doing the right things. But it is possible to heal a meniscus without surgery, and without having to rely on injections or pain medications.
For anybody that’s dealing with a meniscus injury out there, of course, you want to talk to a health care professional and make sure that you are safe to do exercises before you go out to try these exercises that we’re going to cover here.
Let’s get into the top three exercises. I’m going to show you these as a progression. All of them are to be done one right after the other, and this shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to do. We will start it out here. What I’m going to have Kevin do here is tailgate swinging. So go ahead and start swinging your legs Kevin. And what you are going to do with this is, find somewhere that you can sit where your feet dangle.
A great place, that a lot of people tend to have is a computer chair or a barstool, somewhere where your feet dangle real nice and easy. This shouldn’t tire you out, you are just going to swing your legs back and forth. What this is doing is because the cartilage, the meniscus tissue does not have a good blood supply, it relies on the fluid that’s inside of the joint. So when you tailgate swing like this, you gently move the fluid within the joint, and get it to circulate without putting a whole lot of pressure through as if you were standing or doing some other exercise, or you are putting pressure through your feet to get the fluid flowing inside and that can provide some nutrition. Some good stuff to the cartilage, the meniscus inside your knees.
I would do this for about five minutes. Set a timer, keep an eye on the clock, and after five minutes, you are going to go into the second exercise. This exercise you are going to turn your toes all the way in, try that out. And then all the way out. And what you saw Kevin do there he’s moving his knees in and out just a bit too at the at the hips. That might happen a bit but try to minimize that, you don’t want to be opening and closing your knees. It’s more twisting your feet in and then twisting your feet out. Keep going there. We’ll go for one minute here.
If you are watching this at home, make sure that it’s not hurting you to do this. In some cases, with meniscus injuries, going all the way in or all the way out, might be a little bit tender in the knee. Just go as far as you can before it starts to get tender. The reason why this is important is, because usually, most people and their knees have a decent amount of rotation that can occur in the shin bone against the thigh bone. And the meniscus tissue is sandwiched right between those two bones. And a lot of times it just doesn’t move while it gets kind of stuck or restricted. Doing this type of motion, real nice and easy, don’t force it, should begin to free up the rotation within the knee and make your meniscus a bit happier.
Now the last one is an exercise but kind of a stretch at the same time because you are taking the knee through some twist. The most common way that a knee gets restricted is it can’t turn in very good. So, what you are going to do is turn in just like you did a second ago, hold it there, and then you are going to bend your knees. Now, you might do this one at a time, just because it might throw you off balance, especially if you are sitting up in a high place and go as far as you can comfortably go. And if you hit the chair, some obstacle down there with your foot just to hang out there.
It’s not about how far you go. It’s about turning your foot all the way in as long as it doesn’t hurt. And then bending that knee to activate a muscle that’s on the inner thigh, but on the back of the thigh. It’s one of the hamstring muscles. Hold for about 10 seconds and then just relax and do this 10 times each side. You can alternate or you can do them all on one side and then on the other side, it doesn’t matter. The idea here is to get that muscle to fire and to stretch that joint to help improve the rotation within the knee joint. So, you’ll do that 10 times each side.
Between these three exercises, the tailgate swinging for five minutes, toes in, toes out for a minute without pain. And then these holds where you are coming in holding for about 10 seconds, do both sides 10 times each. Do this daily several times, I’d venture to say if your knee problem is pretty bad, if you have a swollen meniscus issue right now, you should be doing this every hour, at least every two hours, just to get the swelling and pain under control.
Of course, this is not going to cure a meniscus problem on its own. This is merely step one. There are lots of steps like I said at the beginning. This is a process to effectively cure a meniscus problem to avoid surgery and having to rely on injections and pain medications.
If you are interested in hiring us to help you out with your meniscus problem, hit the cost and availability button right up above and fill out the form. Leave us your details, and one of my staff will get back to you as soon as possible to begin to ask you questions about your knee meniscus problem.
We just want to make sure that it’s the type of problem that we can effectively help and make a big difference in, so that you can get back to being healthy, active and mobile without having surgery, injections, or medications. I hope you have the best day and I hope that we can be a part of your success story real soon. Bye.
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