Top 8 Reasons Why Walking Actually Hurts And Helps Knee Arthritis

Walking is a very common exercise recommendation given by healthcare professionals to people suffering from knee arthritis problems. And for some people, it helps her knee arthritis situation but for others, it actually makes her knee arthritis worse.

In this video, I’ll give you eight reasons why walking actually helps me arthritis and hurts knee arthritis. The first four reasons are going to be how walking helps. And the second four reasons are going to be how walking hurts knee arthritis.

Reason number one walking can help you lose weight. If you got a lot of weight to lose, and you’re looking to burn some extra calories walking is a fantastic way to up your calorie burning so that you can shut off some pounds that could reduce the pressure going through your knee joints, so that you might help your knee arthritis situation. Now walking is considered a low impact activity, at least relative to things like walking, and anything that involves jumping.

But there’s other lower impact activities out there like elliptical, and bicycling. And keep in mind that not everyone who has knee arthritis problems is actually even overweight. So you may not choose to pursue walking just for the weight loss reason you may pursue it for other reasons, which takes me to

Reason number two, walking can help you gain some strength if you haven’t really been an active person. And walking has never been something that you’ve gone to go do for exercise and your normal level of activity does not meet what walking requires, then inevitably, you’re going to get stronger by taking up a walking program, your muscles are going to adapt to the activity that you put them through.

So if you start to go walk for a mile two miles for a few kilometers, then you are going to get stronger in your muscles. Depending on the balance of strength around your hips and knees. This might be very beneficial for your knee arthritis.

Reason number three is that walking can actually help cartilage health cartilage is found on the ends of the bones. And in your knee joints. Here’s the knee joints. The entire edge of this thigh bone right here is covered in cartilage. And this is the kneecap on the back of the kneecap.

There’s also cartilage in the bottom part of the knee joint, the top of this bone right here, there’s also cartilage, there’s special cartilage there called the meniscus as well, all the cartilage surfaces can actually be improved in their overall health with the right amount of walking.

The reason for this is because cartilage is designed to take pressures, that’s what it’s built for. That’s what it’s supposed to do. So if you load it with appropriate pressures over the right amount of time, cartilage can actually get healthier, it can get stronger, more dense and better able to take on even more walking. Just like how muscles respond if you exercise your muscles the right way, the right amount and not overdo it or under do it.

Muscles get stronger and healthier so that they can take on the next round of exercise with greater ease. Keep in mind that muscles respond to these kinds of forces like from exercise way faster than cartilage. Getting cartilage in the knee joint healthy is a much slower process than getting more strength around your knee. Getting the cartilage in your knee joint healthier is a much slower process than getting the muscles around your knee joint stronger.

And this is especially helpful if you’re in the earlier stages of knee arthritis. And you haven’t had a lot of severe trauma to your cartilage in your knee joints. If your knee osteoarthritis is extremely severe and you’ve had massive losses in motion like you can’t bend or straighten out your knee, then there’s a good chance that your cartilage might be damaged so much that walking may not be beneficial to you at that point in order to get your cartilage health stronger.

But there’s probably other exercises that you can do to improve your cartilage health in the remaining cartilage that will adapt based on your severity of knee arthritis. Reason number four is walking can make you feel good. Whenever you exercise, you release endorphins and if you’re outdoors and you’re getting some sunshine, then you may also get exposure to vitamin D which is associated with feeling good.

If you can make your walking intense enough for you to get a good sweat. You will sweat out toxins and bad stuff in your body. That also helps you to improve your overall health. So those are your four reasons why walking can be helpful if you have any arthritis. And before we move into the second half of this video where I talk about the reasons why walking is actually harmful for knee arthritis.

I’m going to say the reason why I’m doing this video, I talk a lot about knee arthritis and other knee problems on this channel. And I talk a lot about walking as well because there’s a lot of tweaks you can make in your walking to really help it make it make your knees better, but it’s important for you understand the exact ins and outs of walking and I’m going to get into that a bit more here.

So be sure to pay attention because there’s a lot of intricacies or complications as to why walking is going to be helpful and harmful for you. And in other videos throughout this channel. I’ve talked about why walking is Good in some videos and why it’s bad in some videos, and we had some subscribers some viewers comments on our videos saying they’re confused about is walking good or is it bad.

So my hope in making this video is to clear this up for you. And to show you that you need to take this situationally to understand your specific situation, your condition, the severity of your knee problem, and then apply what I’m talking to you about here on this video and other videos that I’ve put out to your situation so that you can determine if walking is going to be helpful for you, or harmful for you.

Well, let’s continue reason number five, walking can make muscle imbalances worse, let me just tell you what a muscle imbalances really quickly because this is not talked about in typical healthcare settings. If we’re talking about the knee joint, a muscle imbalance means that there’s certain forces from certain muscles, causing too much pressure through the knee joints. And that means the muscles are out of balance.

In knee arthritis, the most common muscle imbalance is the quads, which are the muscles in the front of your thigh right here, these muscles right here on your thigh. They’re too strong, they’re too dominant. And you would think the hamstrings need to be worked out to balance it out. But it’s not the hamstrings, it’s actually the glute muscles up in the hip.

If the glute muscles can get stronger than it can put the muscles in balance around the hip and the knee joint so that there’s less forces at the knee joints. Now understanding that part if you have knee arthritis, and you probably have this muscle imbalance. And if you tend to use your quads a lot, if you go on a walk, if you’ve been on a walk recently, or you go try walking, and you really get yourself tired, you walk to the point where you feel like you’re working your muscles, then take inventory.

Think in that moment, what muscles Am I using to do this walk. And if you have to say if you tell me that it’s your quad muscles, then you’re walking in a muscle imbalance. And if you pursue walking, in other words, you walk consistently, you try to increase the amount of time that you’re walking the distance, when you try to walk faster.

If you try to make walking harder for you, in an effort to help your knee problem, your arthritis problem, then you’re going to be feeding into the muscle imbalance, you’re going to be making the muscle imbalance that you already have that took you to this point, where do you have knee arthritis, you’re going to be making it worse.

And this doesn’t mean that you should never go walking, it just means you need to fix the muscle imbalance. And then learn how to walk appropriately using the right muscles so that you can make walking a healthy thing for you to be doing.

 Reason number six is walking can cause pain in other areas besides the knee related to the muscle imbalance. If those muscles are over dominant on the front of the thigh, then it often sets up hip pain on the same side, or it can even be causing pain on the other knee or the other hip on your unaffected side.

Or maybe you have arthritis on both sides already. If you start a walking program, you put yourself on a consistent schedule where you’re going to be walking a certain distance, in an effort to help your knee arthritis situation and your hips starts to bother you, your other hip or your other knee starts to bother you on the other leg or your feet start to hurt you in an uncomfortable way, or your back begins to become a problem too, then you’ve definitely got a muscle imbalance.

And you’ve got to fix that before you pursue walking. Reason number seven is that you might overstressed your knee cartilage it is very possible for you to overdo it with walking, and really aggravate the cartilage in your knee joint. Now it could be that your muscles are not out of balance, you have the proper strength around your hip and knee. But your cartilage is just not ready for the amount of walking that you’re planning on doing.

And there’s so many other variables especially if you have not been somebody who walks for exercise, you might need to consider how you’re walking because the way that you walk right now with possible bad form could be okay for the amount of walking that you do within your home and going to run errands and work things like that. But if you now are going to walk consistently for 10, 20, 30 minutes or more, it may be a bad thing for your knee cartilage.

And there’s so many other variables to consider besides the amount of time that you spend on your feet walking, I’m talking about variables like what surface you’re walking on the rate, the speed that you’re walking at which muscles you’re focused on using, whether or not you should be using an assistive device like a cane, a walker, a walking stick, and of course the distance that you’re walking.

Those are all variables. And there’s more than that. Those are all variables to consider when it comes to walking. Not everybody goes through that because it’s not something that healthcare providers generally talk about. They just say go start walking, and they just give a random time. 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever you can tolerate, and there aren’t any specifics on how you should do it. Where and when all these vary that I talked about need to be considered if you’re running into problems when it comes to walking for knee arthritis.

And this leads me to Reason number eight is that it’s possible to set false expectations about how a walking program is going to help your knee arthritis, many people expect walking to just be magical for them, for them to just start a walking program, go walk a mile, and the next week walk two miles every day. And the following week, add a mile and for it to just be a very linear improvement where every week gets better and better and the knee arthritis just magically melts away.

And you are all of a sudden walking 10 miles a day and your knees are golden. Like when you were 20 years old, again, plus you hear friends or family that actually did have a good experience of walking, they actually benefited tremendously from it. And that might have been all they did, or at least all they shared with you that they did to help their knee arthritis situation. And there’s other factors too, like it’s cheap to go walking, you just need a decent pair of shoes and a place to go walk that’s generally safe. And most people just treat it as a very straightforward, simple thing to do.

Assuming that you have proper muscle balance the right strength and proper form when walking, when that has never been addressed or looked at. And so if you have this belief about it, and you go pursue a walking program, and then you run into pain from the walking, it’s very frustrating. And people tend to go one of two ways with this, they either just quit walking because it’s painful to do.

Or they force their way through the pain and keep walking because they believe that it’s going to eventually get better, their doctor might be encouraging them to do that, or some other health care professional that they’re seeing might be encouraging them to still walk because there’s research or scientific research showing that walking is beneficial for knee osteoarthritis. And the research doesn’t go into all the details of the variables of walking that I just mentioned.

And the truth is what you need to take away from this video to make sure that walking can be a successful thing for you, if you have knee arthritis is that there’s a right time to walk. If you’re very irritated in your knee joint, if you’re running into pain after walking a certain distance, that’s not something that you should be pursuing.

You should not be walking into pain, making it hurt, you should not feel worse afterwards, you need to make sure that walking is a good thing for your knee joints. And if you’re very swollen and irritated right now your stiffness is just off the charts, you shouldn’t be worrying about walking you need to be pursuing other exercises and activities.

Before you can go take on walking is a regular thing. And walking isn’t the only exercise that’s really more of a cardiovascular exercise, meaning it gets your heart rate going makes you sweat, it makes your breathing increase as well.

But you also need strengthening and need to strengthen the right way so that you don’t feed a muscle imbalance that in the strengthening in combination with cardiovascular exercise like walking, the two of those factors must be combined with even more factors like possibly your diet. And there’s other things to look at supplements as well.

All those things need to be considered and combined in a treatment plan for knee arthritis so that you can achieve the best outcome for the long term. And that’s the more realistic expectation of how walking can help your knee arthritis situation.

So Don’t set yourself up with a false expectation that walking alone is going to fix your knee arthritis. If you’re looking for a comprehensive program on addressing your knee arthritis, we’ve got a program called the knee arthritis recovery program where we go in depth into exactly how to walk, how to know when you should stop, how to know when you should begin to walk.

There are different phases to consider as well where there’s different exercises depending on the phase that you’re in. We go into all these details and so much more. It’s a very comprehensive online program. It’s called the knee arthritis recovery program and you can find the details about it in the link in the description below.

I hope this video was helpful for you. If you have questions, please drop them as a comment below. If you want to update us on how your knee arthritis is doing. If you’ve been trying out some of our exercises or some of our approaches or if you’ve bought one of our programs in the past. Let us know how you’re doing.

Let us know if it’s helped you out. And don’t forget to give us a thumbs up and if you haven’t yet, please subscribe and turn on your notifications so that so that you don’t miss out on any of our helpful videos that we post every single week. Thanks so much for watching. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye