Would you like to know how to keep your knees from aching so much? In a nutshell, use your bum and back of your thighs more.
Yes, it may be that simple, especially if you haven’t had an accident or surgery to which you can attribute your painful knees.
Have you decided not walking as much or avoiding stairs is the answer to keeping your knees painless? Have you been told you need physical therapy to strengthen your legs and knees to ease the pain?
Avoiding using your knees and legs simply denies you the exercise you need to keep your body healthy by making your heart and lungs work harder so blood is pumped to your entire body, feeding the needed nutrients to your bones and muscles and your organs — to help you become stronger and heal.
If you are in physical therapy, your therapist will give you exercises to do at home, but are you doing them correctly? Did the PT explain to you what each exercise was intended to strengthen to help you succeed when you perform those exercises on your own?
Many of the exercises we all have seen in gyms and classes through the years truly just strengthen the front of your thighs while your body weight is supported by your knees. What about the back of your thighs and rear (or hamstrings and glutes)? Is any focus being put on using these muscles while you are using the front of your thighs (quads)? By using the muscles on one side of your leg (front) and not the other (back) creates an imbalance in your legs. The tendons and ligaments holding these strong quad muscles in place are attached around the knee, thus creating an imbalance in how the knee functions — eventually creating pain in your knees.
Traditional exercises that strengthen the legs involve squats and lunges with different modifications added to increase or decrease the challenge.
While performing a squat do you bend at the waist, so your chest almost touches your thigh? Most people do, but when you think about it by bending over so much you’re ensuring your body weight stays forward and over your knees, while your bum is in the air doing very little.
Taking some of this weight off your knees would help lessen your knee pain. You can accomplish this by not bending over so far — so your body weight shifts more into your heels, which encourages your bum and the back of your thighs to work more. It sounds too simple, I know, but we have not been trained to think about using these muscles more.
We all have learned to move our bodies in habitual form. In other words, we learned to walk, sit, stand, lift and move through repetition, using whichever muscles we subconsciously could find until we were successful in our movement. We were never asked to think about which muscles we were actually using, but to use whatever worked to keep us from falling over.
The element we all work with is gravity, so everything we do has to take into consideration the power of gravity., If we are bent at the waist, placing our chests onto our thighs, we are supporting our upper body weight with our thighs. And if our body weight is mostly in the balls of our feet, that weight is supported by the front of our thighs and knees. But if we squat by bending at the waist and knees, allowing the weight of our bum go back while the weight of our chest comes forward, we can keep our weight throughout our feet. If weight is equally distributed from the balls of our feet through our heels, we have a better chance of using the muscles both in the front and back of our thighs.
Now, one more piece should be included in this example of a squat: as we stand back up (which works against gravity), if we focus on engaging the back of our thighs and bum, as well as engaging our belly, we can put the work of standing into these areas, and much less on the front of our thighs and knees.
It is possible to alleviate knee pain by reducing the pressure we put on them. Give my suggestions a try for a few days — and let me know if you have questions or feedback!
