Top 7 Home Remedies For Knee Pain

Get your knee pain under control using these top seven expert recommended natural home knee pain remedies. In this video I’ll be covering all seven natural remedies.

And just a bit about me. My name is Dr. David Middaugh and I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. This channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and medications. Please subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we upload every single week.

Let’s get to these natural remedies. Number one, tailgate swings. This is a hidden gem and this is huge. So I’m sitting here on this table My feet are dangling. You may not be able to see my feet but all I’m doing is just swinging my legs back and forth at home, find a computer chair or a barstool or somewhere where you can sit where your feet dangle off the ground. And all you got to do is wiggle back and forth.

This is huge to make sure that fluid inside the knee joint moves around so that it can nourish the cartilage, the meniscus and all the other tissues inside the ligaments. This does tons of good for recovering from knee cartilage problems, knee meniscus problems and getting swelling to go down. Doing this for five to 10 minutes at a time, several times a day every two to three hours. Or more often, if you can, really can help control knee swelling as well as pain, you can sleep better at night and get back to being a bit more active throughout the day.

Now speaking of sleep, the next tip that I highly recommend is finding the best sleep position for your knees. Oftentimes people get much discomfort with finding the best sleeping position at night they can’t have their legs straight or bands relying on their side hurts their knees or their hips.

Let me show you what you should be doing. If you go to your bed and grab a pillow, lining yourself side is ideal. Not everybody can do it. I’ll show you how to lie in your back with knee pain but getting a pillow under your knees and making sure that your knees are comfortably bent, not bent a lot.

Not straight either. But bent just a comfortable level, you might need to play with a position as best as possible, but getting your thighs parallel to each other rather than with your knees together so that your thighs make more of a triangle shape, you want them to be parallel to where you got some space between your knees. Because if you have your legs together, then you put some stress and tension on these muscles right here.

But as soon as you do that right there, a thicker pillow works better. And you can take some of the stress and tension off and alleviate the irritation at the knee joint while you sleep at night. Now what you need to know about this is you might still get irritation all your knee joint, it might still hurt and wake you up at night. But it should reduce the amount of discomfort that you’re getting. And it should allow you to get a little better sleep.

Fixing the root problem is a key thing to make sure that your sleeping gets better. But this will allow you to get a few extra hours of sleep with more comfort. If you can’t lie on your side, then you want to get your knees in a bad position on your back. So just getting a pillow under your knees is a big deal so that you’re not completely flat, because that tends to increase pressures inside the knee joint which irritates cartilage, meniscus tissues and other things inside the knees.

But as soon as you put something under the back of your thighs close to your knees, under your calves, not only is it much more comfortable, being able to tolerate sleeping better at night, because of this pillow behind your knees. The third natural remedy that I highly recommend is using a foam roller or some cylinder like this that’s padded, but firm to release your quad muscles, the front of your thighs.

Often with knee problems, these muscles in the front of your thighs all the way up into the hip area can get very short and tight, they can be tender, they might have knots in them as well. And rolling them out is of huge benefit. You can roll it out with your hands just like this if it’s really sensitive, or if you want a little bit more aggressive pressure into your thigh muscles, which is fine as long as you can tolerate it.

And what you want to do is a lie face down on one of these things. And roll on it like so. And you could just hang out here for a minute or two rolling different positions to get different angles of your muscles all the way up into your hip area like this.

This doesn’t need to be done for very long. I would do this multiple times a day as well especially if you have very tight muscles in your quads a minute or two per muscle. So if you’re talking about all the different muscles in your thigh, you shouldn’t need to spend more than five minutes on your on your one side that’s bothering you.

Of course you can do your other side they’ll add more time but you get diminishing returns. The more you use this, I’ll put a link in the description for purchasing one of these. There’s a huge one for these are some that vibrate that have a device in the middle and they, they buzz while you’re ruling on it. A simple one like this, I think is most effective, you can always get a fancier one if you like.

They’re all kind of the same, in my opinion, unless you have your personal preference for a nicer one. The fourth tip that I recommend is strengthening your glute muscles. I’m going to link another video in the description that’s got five glute muscle exercises that you need to be doing if you’ve got knee pain. But just to give you the brief synopsis of why you need to be strengthening your glutes is because your knee problem is almost always coming from the hip because the hip joint is a ball and socket joint.

And not only can the hip move up and back like this, and it can come inside and outside but it can also rotate. And rotation is one of the biggest problems in the glute muscles, the butt muscles greatly control the amount of rotation that happens. Which means that at the knee joint, if you’re not trying to glue muscles, you’re going to tend to rotate inwards. And that’s what causes increased pressures at the knee.

I can go into all the details. And if you want to check out our channel and find more videos about it, we’ve got tons of it. But what I can tell you right now is it’s a key very important thing. very key thing to be strengthening your glute muscles. If you’ve got any problem, the number five remedy that I recommend is strengthening your calf’s second only to strengthening your glutes.

The calf muscles are of course in the back of the lower leg behind the knee joint. And they do attach the knee into the knee joint and influence the knee joint not all the muscles go up into the knee joint area, but some are below the leg and because of their influence on the foot and the foot position the ankle, it can those forces can be transmitted up into the knee joint. And if you don’t have good strength in your calf muscles, you bet your knees not going to operate correctly.

So you’ve got to be doing some calf exercises. And just like I did with the glute exercises I’ve linked in other video that we’ve got about calf muscle exercises that you could be doing to strengthen your knee joint, just check it out in the description here below. Number six for helping your knees naturally is using your toes when walking.

Now this is a weird one for everybody. But when done right, it tremendously helps knee problems. I’ve got a video in the description link here below that talks about exactly how to use your toes during walking. But the gist of it is, every time you step your toes should be grabbing a bit with every single step that you take. And this can be done inside your shoes. You can practice it barefoot, there’s a bunch of different ways to do it.

This video will take you step by step on how to do it in go check it out so that you can begin to use your toes properly to support your knee joints and reduce those bad pressures and save it from becoming a worse situation like arthritis or a meniscus tear. Tip number seven is using a brace for specific knee problems. I’ve got a video also describing when you shouldn’t use a brace and when you shouldn’t, and what types of braces are appropriate for certain conditions.

That’s also linked here in the description below. But if you’ve got the right problem, which happens quite a bit, using a specific type of brace, which you can find out exactly which ones I’m talking about in these videos will help your need problem out tremendously. If you use a brace for a certain amount of time, it will allow certain tissues to heal like a meniscus or a ligament problem so that you can get better mobility without having to have surgery without having to rely on injections or pain medications.

But you’ve got to have a structured plan for using the brace and it’s not a good idea to be using the brace indefinitely, you know without some goal in mind for the brace. Because if you do that muscles can get weaker over time and you’ll actually become very dependent on the brace. But if you go into using the brace with a plan, like we discussed in our videos, you’ll be able to eventually wean yourself off the brace and resolve your knee problem for the long term.

So that covers the seven natural tips to solve any problem and to give you a bonus one that I’m of course biased towards being a specialist physical therapist myself, I highly recommend going through specialty physical therapy. What I mean by especially physical therapy, as most PT clinics know what to do for people that had surgery.

So if you’ve had a knee replacement, or a meniscectomy, where like they’ve done an arthroscopic procedure for your knee where they’ve gone in with the cameras and little by little holding your knee. Most PT clinics can handle that type of care afterwards very well.

They’re designed to run you through exercise machines and a circuit and when you can work with assistance, and you’ll do pretty good in typical PT clinics. But if you’ve never had a surgery, then seeing a specialist, especially like a manual therapist, like myself, is ideal for resolving your knee problem naturally without having to eventually have a surgery or rely on injections or pain medications.

Hey, if you thought this video was helpful for you, and you’re thinking that we might be able to help you solve your knee problem We’d love to take a look at it and see if it’s a type that we can help out and get a full recovery from it. I’d like to invite you to apply for one of our free discovery visits.

A discovery visit is a 20 minute appointment with a specialist physical therapist will will take a look in person at your knee joint, want to hear your story from when it began up until how that knee problem is, has become today. And then we want to give you a diagnosis for your knee problem and let you know if it’s possible to recover naturally without surgery.

We’ll, let you ask all the questions that you need. We’ll look at the anatomy book together. And our goal after this appointment is for you to be able to leave our office, feeling like you have all the information necessary to make the best decision about your knee problem. And if you decide you want to work with us, and we’ll talk about what your bill will look like. And we’ll discuss a plan to getting you back to normal again.

To apply for one of these discovery visits. All you got to do is scroll down to the bottom of this page and find the button that says apply for a free discovery visit. Once you click on that button of formal pop up, leave us all your details and one of my staff will call you back right away with the next steps in the application process for your free discovery visits. I hope we can be a part of your success story real soon. Have a wonderful day.