Anyone suffering from knee pain knows how vulnerable it can make you feel - knee pain hinders day-to-day work, keeps you away from normal activities and places significant psychological strain especially if you are used to an active, bouncy lifestyle.
If you are lucky enough to be short of having to undergo knee surgery, then knee injury exercises are crucial to get you back and bouncing like you used to do before the injury. Following is a brief guide for how to get back on your feet following knee injury in the shortest amount of time.
Knee injury rehabilitation is not just focused on the knee joint alone but also on your entire leg alignment and core strength. It is only when you work on all these three elements that you will deal with knee pain in the best possible manner. Remember though, “it always gets worse before it gets better,” so one must be consistent in knee injury exercises to get the maximum out of rehabilitation.
Stretching Out for knee pain
According to resources cited by the National Academy of Sports Medicine1, the risk of knee injury rises significantly if one has limited flexibility in the calves, hamstrings and hip flexors (the muscles in the groin area that flex the hip.) A key to knee pain rehabilitation therefore is performing flexibility enhancing stretches including the supine calf stretch, the supine hamstring stretch, the kneeling hip flexor (or groin) stretch as well as the standing calf stretch.
Guided videos as well as detailed instructions for all of these are available easily on rehabilitation resources on the internet. But one must make sure to perform these at least three times a day consistently over four to six weeks to see results.
Tube Walking for Knee Pain
In most people, knee injury results from an imbalance in leg musculature. It is common amongst people with today’s sedentary lifestyles to have tight inner thigh muscles and weak outer thigh muscles, which leads to the knee rolling inwards. This causes poor leg alignment and eventually, knee injury.
The key therefore is to strengthen the right muscles and stretch out the tight muscles. In this case, tube walking is ideal to strengthen the outer thigh muscles (also called abductors). One must also stretch out the inner thigh muscles (or adductors). Exercise tubing is commonly available for purchase online and video links for tube walking can easily be found on internet resources. Once again, consistency is key to knee injury rehab.
Core Strength for Knee Pain
Finally and not forgetting proper core strength, learning to properly balance our body with the correct posture is the third key element to knee injury rehab. Two key exercises for balance is the single-leg balance as well as the squat. When doing both these exercises, one must make sure that the knee cap lies directly above the heel and never goes beyond the toes; also, it is important to keep the knee in-line with the second and third toes. Finally, the stomach muscles must be drawn in at all times to properly engage the core.
Plenty of resources are available on all these techniques on-line and some of the best knee pain rehabilitation websites are:
- www.kneeguru.co.uk
- www.about.com
- www.athleticadvisor.com
The key to extracting the most out of all these resources is to adapt consistency in your knee rehabilitation exercise program. No matter how small the injury is, knee pain does take at least a few weeks to settle down so time and patience are your best friends.
References:
- NASM Essentials of Personal Fitness Training
- Sports Injury Clinic
Mehreen Ali - I am a fitness instructor by profession and a writer by choice. I also love to read, experiment with food recipes and play around with ...
