FITNESS Five Excellent Things to do For Your Knees

Why are your knees like your love life?Your knees need to be your friends!  Too many of my patient come to me with knee pain that I can do very little for by the time they reach my office: they have “bone on bone” contact or a healed torn meniscus, or even healing from a meniscus operation!  


How did they end up like this- an accident or trauma?  NO – just normal life!  The knees are an excellent example of a body part abused by overuse – the wear and tear we  call OSTEOARTHRITIS.   The knees become candidates for injections of hyaluronic acid, prolotherapy, or even a replacement.  A chiropractor can help you after these procedures.

But it never needed to get to this point!  Early intervention, a good exercise program and monitoring by a chiropractor could have prevented 100% of these cases from getting to this point!

Here are five excellent ways to keep those pivotal joints (I couldn’t resist) as strong, flexible and happily active as your love life can be. 

1. Firm up your thighs. It’s like installing shock absorbers for your knees. Strengthening your front and back thigh muscles (quadriceps and hamstrings) helps protect the knee joints from injury. Increasing quad strength also can cut your risk of knee osteoarthritis by up to 30 percent.

2. Walk backward. It gives your quads a slightly different workout while going easy on a particularly vulnerable knee zone, the ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), a joint connector that women and athletes frequently tear. Do this with your true love walking behind you as a spotter for bad sidewalks. 

3. Go low-impact. You gotta keep moving to improve your knees’ range of motion and build the muscles that surround and support them. Just don’t pound them (nix pavement running high-impact aerobics). Instead, go easy with walking, swimming, yoga, biking, elliptical machines or padded treadmills, and weight work. 

4. Feed your knees. The inflammation-fighting nutrients in berries, ginger, avocado, flaxseeds, omega-3-rich fish (trout, salmon) or the DHA type of omega-3 supplements all help stifle joint damage. 

5. Lose a few. Every extra pound you carry adds up to three pounds of pressure on your knee joints when you walk, and 10 pounds when you run. 

If you are just starting to get aches in your knees and a loss of some motion, please coe to our office and let us help you prevent further problems.

Chiropractic Lane
290 Ferry Street
Suite A1
Newark, NJ 07105

973-344-5656

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