Exercise can fix dodgy knees
Margo calls this “postponement therapy”.
Although exercise can be the last thing on your mind if you have chronic pain, specialists are now convinced that building the muscles around the knee could be the best way to slow the worsening of conditions such as osteoarthritis — and really can have a beneficial impact on pain, even if your movement is already limited by the condition.
Research consistently shows it is quite common for knee joints to degrade as we get older.
But, interestingly, the degree of degradation doesn’t appear to correlate with reported pain - some people can have huge amounts of damage with no or few symptoms, whereas others can be crippled by pain which barely shows up on an X- ray.
one early study, published in the journal
found that 60% of people with significant arthritic changes in their knees, as seen on X- rays, had no symptoms whatsoever.
This doesn’t mean your pain is “all in the mind”, but it could mean that something else is going on - and the key could be the muscles around your knee joint.
Professor Phillip Conaghan, chair of musculoskeletal medicine at the University of Leeds, is convinced that, “the way to help a painful knee is first through strengthening the muscles around the knee. Arthritis causes varying degrees of pain, so the natural instinct is to stop moving,” he said.
“But the best medicine is actually to exercise to strengthen the muscles, which help support the joints.
“It may mean working through a bit of a pain barrier initially to reap the benefits and you must commit to exercising daily for the best effect.”
The key muscle to exercise is the main thigh muscle — or, to be technically accurate, the quadricep, a group of muscles at the front of the thighs — according to Jim Johnson, a physiotherapist at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, and author of
He said: “If you strengthen just one knee muscle, make sure it’s this one.”
It’s a vicious circle: studies show that quadricep weakness can make knee pain more likely, and knee pain can lead to quadricep weakness.
These muscles are fundamental to keeping the knee stable. If they are weak, your knee may be prone to misalignment and damage.
But pain itself can impair the communication between the muscle and the brain, meaning the quadriceps are less likely to “fire” on demand and, therefore, more likely to rapidly weaken.
Any impact is inevitably compounded by the fact that people avoid exercising when in pain.
Jim Johnson is a firm believer in a “one size fits all” strategy of strengthening exercises, rather than getting hung up on exactly what might be structurally causing the knee pain.
“Since many structural knee abnormalities are common, it is hard to determine the true cause of knee pain in a lot of cases,” he said.