How to Avoid and Alleviate Knee Pain

How to Avoid and Alleviate Knee Pain for Exercise Enthusiasts

If you think the throbbing pain in your knees is just part of leading an active lifestyle and transforming your body, think again. Check out my top five tips to avoid and alleviate knee pain.

Tip #1: Pay attention to form on lower body exercises.
In general, when you squat and lunge your knees should stay just above or behind your toes and the heel of your supporting foot or feet should stay in contact with the ground. Allowing your knees to cruise too far forward or taking your heels off the ground (and thereby putting pressure on your toes) puts undue stress on your knee joint and loads the join instead of the muscle. To ensure you are stressing the muscle rather than the joint, stick your hips out and back as if reaching for a chair as you lower yourself toward the ground and press through your heels as you are standing back up to starting position. Keep your toes and knees pointed in the same direction.

Tip #2: Stretch and foam roll DAILY (twice daily if you have time).
When you exercise, you place demand on your muscles that causes micro tears in the muscle. When you recover (take a day off from training that area), those tears are repaired. Sometimes however, you get scar tissue (much like you would from tearing anything else on your body) called adhesions that need to be broken up to ensure that your muscle continues to function as normal. Foam rolling will break up these adhesions which will allow you to get the most out of your static stretching and subsequent exercise sessions. For optimal knee health, foam roll all of the muscles around the joint including your quadriceps, hamstrings, illiotibial band, adductors, adductors, and peroneals (the front, back, outside and inside of your thighs as well as your calves and outside of the lower leg).

Tip #3: Get a deep tissue massage as often as is feasible for you.
If you are very tight and have lots of adhesions, foam rolling and stretching may not be enough at first to regain muscle tissue health and optimal, pain free performance. If you have joint pain but have never had a fall or accident, it is likely that getting a deep tissue massage would expose and eliminate a lot of the tightness and adhesions that may be causing unusual muscular force on your joints which leads to the pain you are experiencing.

Here's an analogy that will probably resonate with most busy women. Most of us have a daily or weekly cleaning regimen that we follow for our house. Now imagine if you neglected that routine for months on end. Did you get a visual of how messy and dirty the house would be? I hope so. Now how many of us would simply restart our old routine with hopes that our house would look and smell great? None of us! You would either take a few days to do a deep cleaning or most likely hire a cleaning crew to give you a "reset". Getting a deep tissue massage by an experienced therapist who specializes in orthopedic body work or Active Release Therapy is the "reset" your body needs to make your daily stretching and foam rolling routine effective.

Tip #4: Use footwear appropriate for your chosen activity and replace them when they are worn out.
For boot camp class, running or cross training shoes are optimal. If you are using fashion sneakers, it is likely that they won't provide adequate foot support. Also you don't want to use "shaping shoes" as they will lift your heels and make it hard to execute lower body exercises with proper form. Those shoes naturally push you forward when you want to be able to place your weight on your heels during lower body exercises. Some of our clients even enjoy training WITHOUT SHOES. There is research that shoes "barefoot training" to be beneficial because there is more proprioceptive feedback from the nerves in the feet thus improving your balance and glute activation during exercises and nonexistent heel lift that could encourage improper form on lower body exercises. In my opinion, it is better to train without shoes than with the wrong type or badly worn shoes.

Tip #5: Follow a balanced training program.
So many people train the muscles they can see and ignore the ones they can't. Many exercise enthusiasts are very quadriceps dominant having strong quads (front of thighs), tight hip flexors and overstretched, weak glutes and hamstrings. Make sure your training program involves exercises that work the back side of the lower body to avoid this muscular imbalance that can cause knee pain. Common exercises that work the glutes and hamstrings are deadlifts, hip bridges, step ups, and swings. At Great Shape Fit Club, we do plenty of exercises each class to work the glutes and hamstrings to ensure our members are just as strong on the back side as they are on the front side... that is also the secret to our signature Fit Club Booty (round, tight, and high).

Use these tips to avoid and alleviate knee pain so that you can stay active and achieve and maintain your body transformation results.