Common Mistakes which can hurt your joints and Knees

It doesn’t matter whether you are a professional athlete, weekend sports enthusiast or a laid-back person, protecting your knees is important for long term mobility, flexibility and fulfilling lifestyle. The body always give warning signs before advanced disease. We need to identify them and take timely remedial measures for a healthy knee.

The knee is a hinge joint between the foot and rest of the body and so it has to take lot of stress to balance the body on the ground. It has to bear bending, twisting, landing and propelling forces. It actually acts like a wheel for the machine called “Human Body”.

Here are some common mistakes, which you can avoid to save your knees:

• Ignoring pain:

We all get small aches and pain here and there in the body. Most of the time we recover from that pain without much issue. But, if you have pain which is limiting your routine life for more than one week then you need to consult a doctor to find out the underlying cause. A small injury in the early stage can be treated in a better way than when it becomes chronic. Take an example of meniscus injury (the shock absorber of the knee), if you have a small tear in the meniscus, it can be repaired to perfection in the early stage. But if you ignore it for few weeks or months, then the tear will progress like torn cloth and becomes non repairable. In these chronic cases, we have to remove the torn meniscus and you loose the cushion in your joint.

• Overweight:

The knee joints take four times the load of the body weight during the stance phase of walking. So, one kg increase in body weight will put 4 kg extra load on the knee joint. This extra pressure will crush the cartilage of the knee between the two hard bony ends.
Standing from sitting position on the floor and climbing stairs will put 8 times higher load on the knee and the damage will be much more. The patients are usually trapped in a vicious cycle where they are not able to walk and do exercises because of the knee pain and that increases the body weight and that further damages the knee joint cartilage which eventually causes more knee pain.

• Not following the prescription:

People tend to ignore the allopathic doctor’s advice. They don’t follow the full prescription for complete recovery. They skip medicines and exercise program prescribed for the recovery and ultimately land in bigger trouble. In India, alternative medicines are used frequently without any scientific basis and most of the time they cause more damage to your bones and joints.

• Neglecting ACL injury:

The knee is a complex joint and depends a lot on its ligaments for stability and normal movements. Many sports are prone for knee injury. Football, hockey, basketball, rugby, skating etc are such sports. If you hear a “pop” during the injury, it is usually a ligament injury of the knee. Seek proper opinion to recover from the injury. Ignoring an ACL tear will make the knee unstable and you become prone for further injuries and damage to menisci and cartilage as well.

To avoid tearing your ACL it’s important to incorporate neuromuscular training, which involves supervised practice in improving agility, leg strength, and jump-landing techniques, for better knee joint stability into your regular routine. Athletes of any age who play ACL risk-prone sports (like those listed above) should seek help from an athletic trainer to help avoid this debilitating injury. The training program should incorporate stretching, plyometric exercises (training to increase speed and force of muscular contractions) and weight training to teach athletes proper techniques for jumping and landing.

• Overdoing:

Some people do very aggressive weight training exercises everyday. Body needs rest to recover from the work out. We need to plan our workout in such a way to add light work out days in between the heavy work out days with some days of absolute rest. This will prevent the muscles from overstrain and tendinitis issues.

• Overlooking other muscles of the leg:

During recovery from injury, many people focus only on knee joint muscles and ignore the other muscles of the leg, like hip muscles and calf muscles and small muscles of the feet. This will lead to imbalance in the leg and can lead to repeat injury or incomplete recovery.

• Wearing wrong shoes:

The foot is foundation for the stance phase of walking/running. If we don’t wear proper shoes, it is going to affect the ligaments and muscles of the next nearest joint, that is knee. So we should wear proper shoes to prevent any injury to the knee. Remember the old saying “Prevention is Better than Cure”