If you’re fed up of knee pain and sick and tired of not being able to be active, here are 3 tips to give you some quick wins and hopefully give you some relief from your knee pain.
Use a Knee Support
The first tip is using a knee support, some people think that a knee support will completely fix their problem which it’s very unlikely to do, but what it will do is support the knee and keep the knee warm. In the colder months when the weather is damper, the pressure in the air is less. Which means any angry or irritated knees are allowed to swell up, making them stiffer and more uncomfortable.
The second thing is because the weathers colder, the blood supply to the knee isn’t as good. So having something to wrap around the knee is great – you don’t need to spend massive amounts of money – but something to sit around the knee will offer support and warmth to the joint!
Keep the Knee Active
A lot of people think rest is the best way to help with knee pain, especially runners who want to go out and run a 5k, or someone that wants to go on a long walk. If they can’t do that, they think it’s best to stop all together.
In actual fact, a lot of the time with knee pain we want to keep it moving. This keeps the joint lubricated and all of the good nutrients that keep the joint healthy basically get moved around in the knee. So when we’re resting that doesn’t happen, the knee is allowed to get stiff and also become weak which opens up a range of new problems.
So keep active, keep moving as much as possible, but obviously respecting your symptoms. Different conditions dictate how much pain we would expect with certain activities, someone with an acute injury with lots of swelling would be expected to do very little activity at all that aggravates the knee, but someone with arthritis would expect some discomfort, we offer guidelines on exercise for this but different conditions dictate what the guidelines would be.
Good quality sleep
The final tip is to try and get good sleep. There’s nothing more important for health in my opinion that sleep, specifically for pain. That’s why footballers such as Cristiano Ronaldo sleeps twice a day, to get two good cycles of deep sleep per day.
This is when your body rest, recuperates and heals – as well as the body creating its own pain medication during deep sleep! So if you’re not getting quality sleep, the feel good hormones aren’t getting made and that means you’re more grouchy, the pain threshold is less and everything is basically perpetuated. So getting good sleep is really important for knee pain, especially if you like to keep active.
In my opinion, physiotherapy is the most effective treatment and has had the most research conducted to back this up. If you’re interested on jumping on a call with me, we can have a chat about your knee, about your goals, where you’re at and a plan to get you back active once again!
If you’re looking for a Physio in Tooting to treat your knee pain, simply click here to book an appointment.