22 Mar What Are The Best Exercises For Knee Pain?
What are the best exercises for knee pain?
When understanding what exercises are best for knee pain, it is important to understand why your knee is hurting in the first place. This is where it is important to differentiate source of pain vs. cause. Now, if you’re reading this, the source is fairly obvious. The source of pain is the knee itself, you can touch certain areas and it is painful.
The cause is a little bit more complex, this is the dysfunctional area of the body that has led to the knee pain. Besides direct trauma to the knee, the cause of knee pain will often be secondary to dysfunction occurring at the hip joint, ankle joint or the surrounding muscles/soft tissue. This is why directly exercising the knee may not be the best course of rehab, as you are not addressing the cause of the knee pain in the first place.
Top Exercises For Knee Pain
Shin Box Get Up
Let’s take a look first at the hip. Knee issues can stem from both hip immobility or instability. While it is important to differentiate between the two, there is an exercise that can address both. This exercise is the shin box get up. This requires not only dynamic control of both the hip complex and core, but it also needs adequate mobility to ensure you can get into all positions necessary. Another perk? No equipment is necessary!
Band Assisted Ankle Dorsiflexion
Another common cause of knee pain is a lack of ankle mobility. A limit in ankle dorsiflexion (bending the ankle up towards your shin), will lead to an increase of stress at the actual knee. Utilizing the band assisted ankle dorsiflexion exercise, you can help restore some of that lost motion in the ankle. This is a very simple exercise that only requires some form of resistance band, along with an anchor point.
The Couch Stretch
The couch stretch will be great if you are suffering from quad and hip flexor tension. If this is the case, the increase in tension from these muscles can create some compression on the patella (knee cap) which will create irritation with things such as running. This is intended to help lengthen the muscles which will take pressure off of the knee.
The above are some of the most popular exercises we use at MYo Lab for the cause of knee pain. Countless of other exercises can be applied to the knee directly to help offload the source of pain such as isometric loads for different types of knee tendonitis. This is also an important factor to have addressed, which can be done by booking in for an Initial Assessment for Chiropractic or Physiotherapy!
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