What Happened Inside Your Painful Bone On Bone Knee Joint?

In this video I’m going to explain to you what happened inside your painful bone on bone knee joint. The purpose of this video is to help you understand the processes that are going on inside a knee joint so that you can make better decisions about how to help yourself. There are three processes that I’m going to cover in this video in the third one is what sets up the bone-on-bone knee joint situation, but there’s two before that during which you can intervene, and really prevent the third from happening.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh Finn, I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and pain medications. Please consider subscribing to our channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we post every single week.

So let’s get into it the first process that people begin to have, usually in their teenage years, 20s, even 30s is just simply getting Knee Compression pressure through the inside of the knee joint. And that happens due to muscle imbalances, meaning there’s certain muscles on one side of the knee that are adding a lot of excessive pressure, and it’s compressing the cartilage.

And there isn’t necessarily any damage, yet there probably isn’t going to be a bone-on-bone joint situation, if you were to take an x ray, you wouldn’t see that you’d see normal looking cartilage and a normal height between the bones so that there isn’t any bone on bone situations.

But you can feel the compression. And the best way to describe it is if you take your hand, let me put my skeleton down. If you just take your hand and gently move your fingers like this, it should feel like nothing, maybe a little bit of movement through these knuckles right here. Now if you curl your fingers like this, you’re using the muscles that bend the fingertips, which the tendons that bend the joints out here and your fingertips, they run through the hand and they cross the knuckles, these joints on this side of the hand. And all those muscles end up in the forearm.

So if you bend those fingertips, you’ve increased the pressure on these joints. And now if you go to move your fingers, your knuckles this way, you’ll feel instantly more pressure going through these joints. And now your joints can take that for a little bit. Like if you were to just do it several times right here, right now, as long as you don’t have any joint problems in your hand, it should feel fine, it shouldn’t bother your hand long term.

But if you were to be moving your hand like this all the time, every time you go to bend and do something with your hand, you bet at your knuckles here, the cartilage inside is going to become irritated, you’re going to aggravate it. And that’s what goes on inside a knee joint when you’re using your muscles inappropriately. And you don’t always know this. In fact, most people are told to use your muscles a certain way that causes a muscle imbalance, which you’ll feel inside your knee joint is a pressure, the best way that I can describe it is if you’ve just had a workout of some sort, or you’ve just gone on a long walk, and then you go to rest. And you think about what’s tired and your legs.

If you feel like your knee joint itself, like where your knee bends is tired, then you’ve had excessive pressure to your knee joints. You should feel like your thigh muscles, your hip muscles, even your calf and foot muscles are tired, they’re fatigued, maybe kind of achy, even because they got tired from whatever workout you did. That’s normal. But if you feel tired in your joints, especially your knee joint, then you have put too much pressure to your knee joint more than what it’s designed to take right now.

Now, if you’re a marathon runner, for instance, just to take this to the extreme, you’re running 26 miles during the marathon and during the training, you’re running similar distances, maybe not quite that much. Or maybe you are you will probably feel zero knee problems if you’re running just two or three miles even just 10 miles because your joints are adapted to take that kind of force for that long of time, the cartilage will adapt in order to absorb those forces.

But if you’ve been a couch potato you haven’t worked out or you haven’t been running specifically in a while and then you go try to run a mile or two. Your knee joints may not like it even if you have the proper balance around your of muscles around your knees and hips. And it’s just because your knee joints aren’t ready to take it.

They aren’t adapted to those kinds of forces over time yet. So just to bring it down to simple levels. Again, you’re putting too much pressure through your joints. Just do this again, we can rewind and go over that explanation and it’s compressing the knee joint which should happen is we should control the knee joint from the foot and from the hips, specifically the buttock muscles and we shouldn’t be using the quads, the muscles that are on the front of the thighs.

We should shouldn’t be using those very much during exercise. Otherwise we do a lot of compression to the knee joints. And sadly, a lot of people are told to go work out their quads if they have any problem, or the toll by professionals, healthcare professionals, fitness professionals to get a big burn in their thigh muscles in the front of the thigh. But that sets up over compression at the knee joint. And it typically is painless.

It just feels like an ache Enos a tiredness in the knee joint. But if this is done enough times, over months over years, then you move on to the second process the next level, which is joint irritation. So at this point, the cartilage is it’s taking on too much force for too much time. And now the lining of the card the other on the bones, the cartilage lining on the end of the bones. On the thigh bone on the back of the kneecap, there’s meniscus tissue, which is a cartilage on the top of the shin bone right here, it becomes irritated just as if I were to scratch my skin right here.

Without breaking my skin without cutting myself open, my skin will get red because my skin became irritated. Skin responds super-fast it can, it can heal really fast, it can also be damaged kind of quickly, versus cartilage. It’s damaged much more slowly unless there’s a traumatic accident. But it also heals very slowly. So when you get irritated in your cartilage, you’re not going to see an instant improvement overnight.

Always it could take days to weeks or even months depending on how severe it’s irritated. And how much pressure you’re still putting on it throughout the day, especially a knee joint because you’re probably walking around all day, not knowing that you’re irritating that knee joint. Oftentimes there’s other signs and symptoms associated with this knee joint irritation, some could be tendinitis, like knee joint tendinitis, patellofemoral pain syndrome is another one.

That’s where you get pain behind the kneecap. And in some cases, the beginning signs of arthritis are forming. And those are, are felt by hearing, cracking, crunching, popping sounds in the knee. Or you might have gotten an x ray if you had a knee injury, or you had enough pain to go to the doctor. And they might be telling you that you have the beginning signs of arthritis as well. And the third process that happens is knee cartilage damage.

This is also known as knee arthritis. Osteoarthritis is what I’m talking about. Because there’s other types of arthritis, but I’m talking specifically about knee osteoarthritis, people will typically have stiffness associated with this, like they will, they won’t be able to move their knee very smoothly, especially when they first get up in the morning, take a few steps or if they’ve been sitting for a while and they go to take a few steps, their knee will be quite stiff.

And if they’ve ever been to the doctor, the X ray, the classic X ray that they’ll do on the knee joint the doctor will use that to tell them if they’ve got knee arthritis or not. So you’ll know if you’ve been to the doctor and had an x ray, and you can’t get to the third process without having gone through the second process in the first process. So depending on where you’re at today, depending on how you feel about your knees right now how irritated they are or if you feel like they’re making noise, you’re going through that stiffness, you can intervene and make it better.

I’m not saying you can get a 100% better and start doing, you know, backflips again, if that’s what you used to do in the past, but you should be able to get better enough to prevent this from becoming worse. Maybe even prevent a surgery from happening like a knee replacement or some other invasive surgery and your knee.

Most importantly, if you can fix the root problems of your knee compression problem and your knee irritation and, and your knee cartilage damage problem, then you have a shot at resuming life as normal with your knees the way they’re intended to be. And even if you do have a knee surgery, for whatever reason, like you had to have it done or maybe you’ve already had anything you’re barely finding this video.

Fixing that root problem is going to prevent you from having the second knee surgery because that problem was never fixed. Those mechanical forces going through your knee joints are still going to affect the knee joint even if you’ve had a procedure done even if it’s been a replaced joint, you can still injure the joint replacement and have to get another surgery.

We’ve got tons of videos with great tips, advice and exercises to do for arthritic knees or bone on bone, knee joints. And we’ve linked a video with a playlist for knee arthritis problems down the description below. So go check that out if you’re looking for the next steps to take on this. If you got any questions on these three processes that we talked about right now, drop them in the comments below and we’ll get back to them as best as we can. Have a wonderful day. We’ll see the next video.