Know Your Knees: Three Things That Help Knee Pain

Most knee pain in people over the age of 40 is not from trauma, serious disease, or torn, damaged tissue.

Maybe you’ve heard that knee pain is from “wear and tear”, that you just wear your joint down like it’s some part of a machine.

That idea, the “wear and tear”, is not quite right. Most knee pain (or other joint pain) is from lifestyle choices: nutrition, disuse, and misuse.

Disuse – you haven’t been consistent with activity and exercise over the years and, as a result, your knee joint, on both the inside and the muscles on the outside, has become weaker. Then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, you notice your knee hurts when you climb a flight of stairs or haul the trash to the curb. And you’re scratching your head wondering why.

This is when people often mutter “Well, I guess I’m just old” whatever that means. When are you “old” exactly? A specific age or is it, more likely, that you hurt doing something that seems like it shouldn’t hurt and you toss in the “old” card?

No, it’s not your chronologic age. The problem is you’re weak. Usually both the joint and the muscles from years of disuse. You can change that though if you want.

Misuse – either you haven’t exercised consistently and then one day decide to get going and go all out. Full tilt. Or, you continue to do things – exercise, hobbies, sports – even though your knee hurts.

Either way, you end up with a sore, stiff, or achy knee and now start consulting Dr. Google to find out what to do.

Disclaimer – Dr. Google can create enormous frustration, confusion, misdirection, wasted time and money. Instead, go see someone – a human being – who has training and experience to help you sort out the issues. Sometimes you might find someone who can help you using Google but remember – pain is a symptom and not a problem. It’s a one to many relationship. One pain can come from many sources.

Now that I have that out of the way, let’s talk about things you can do for garden variety, achy knees.

Keep Your Weight in Check

The majority of body weight problems stem from your diet. So the first thing to do is analyze your food and beverage intake. It’s not so much about calorie counting as it is portion size (size of your palm is one serving) and what those portions consist of. How your body reacts to, for example, carbohydrates is apt to be quite different than that friend of yours who hasn’t gained any weight since high school, drinks Gatorade all day and devours Twinkies.

It’s safe to say though that simple, refined carbs such as most breads, pasta, rice, chips, pretzels, cookies, etc are nutritionally sparse and energy dense. Remove all of that kind of food from your diet and you’ll lose weight without any exercise.

Same goes for alcohol. Not only is it nutritionally empty, it also interferes with how your body uses fat. Stop drinking and the pounds almost slide off.

Why does this matter? For every extra pound your body is carrying around that it doesn’t need, your knee works three times harder. Conversely, lose three pounds and your knee will feel like it lost nine.^[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15986358 If climbing stairs hurts your knee and you know you are carrying about 30 pounds of extra weight, after you lose that weight, there’s a good chance your knee won’t hurt climbing stairs and you’ll suddenly feel much younger.

Your diet also appears to influence cartilage loss. In one study, the knees of overweight or obese people who lost weight were compared to people of normal weight.^[2]https://www.oarsijournal.com/article/S1063-4584(19)30859-3/fulltext?rss=yes Everyone in the study had mild to moderate osteoarthritis. The study lasted for eight months.

The overweight subjects who lost weight were sub-grouped based on the method of weight loss: exercise only, diet only or exercise and diet.

The people who lost weight by either diet or diet and exercise had less cartilage loss or a slower progression. But the exercise only group didn’t have that result. They had more cartilage loss.

Strengthen Your Knee from the Inside – Out

Almost every article you read about knee pain tells you to strengthen your leg muscles, in particular the quadriceps, to reduce stress on the knee. And while it’s true that stronger leg muscles helps your knee, when your knee hurts, doing something like a squat or lunge, even without extra weight, is often much too painful and difficult to do.

It’s a mismatch. The problem is the joint and the solution used is for muscle. Sometimes this works but usually it creates trouble.

Instead, move your joint gently, repeatedly and as it gains strength, add load to that repetitive motion (you’ll find all the details about this in my book The 90 Day Knee Arthritis Remedy or The Runner’s Knee Bible). Painful joints don’t gain strength or capacity in the same way muscles do. You nudge a joint problem while you can push a muscle problem. Some people can use stationary cycling as a way to boost the strength of the joint while others need something a bit easier like the foot slider exercise.

Do A Lot of This Exercise

Ok, so now I’m going to seemingly contradict myself by suggesting you do a lot of “quad sets” – the old standby used by almost everyone in treating knee pain. But what is usually suggested is three sets of ten repetitions when what you need, and this is my experience not a study, is about 100 per day.

You can work your way up to one hundred, spread the sets over the day. But you’ll notice that as you increase the number performed, your knee will often start feeling better. The exercise improves the quality of the synovial fluid in your knee kind of like getting an oil change.^[3]Miyaguchi, M., Kobayashi, A., Kadoya, Y., Ohashi, H., Yamano, Y., & Takaoka, K. (2003). Biochemical change in joint fluid after isometric quadriceps exercise for patients with osteoarthritis of … Continue reading My colleague, Laurie Kertz Kelly, has a good YouTube video on the details of the quad set and tips on how to do it correctly.

Thanks for reading.

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