Since exercise is a physical activity, there is an inherent risk of injury. The role of a coach is to not only help you succeed in your health and fitness goals but to also help mitigate the risks of getting hurt. This gets accomplished through a couple of different avenues which include: proper exercise selection, resistance management, volume management (how many repetitions you do), warmup/cooldown, and form supervision/modification. However, there are just some days when your body isn’t feeling it.
What do you do? You’ve made such amazing progress since you first started and a hiccup like this may put it all to a halt. It was previously said that with any sort of injury, you must rest until your body heals up. Today I am telling you that in most cases, that is not true and there are ways around such injuries. In fact, exercise itself can help manage inflammation which will decrease your pain, improve your strength, and help you recover faster!
As an exercise and movement specialist, the signs/symptoms that I look for which would warrant further medical attention for knee pain include excessive clicking/popping (post-injury), numbness/tingling, knee giving out, knee hitching, and knee instability. If you have any of these, please have your knee evaluated. If you are looking for a doc, I’d be happy to refer you to the right person. Today I would like to share with you 5 ways to train around knee pain. (This should not replace the medical advice from a physician/physical therapist, however, if you are safe enough to workout, then these action items can be helpful).
- Focus on posterior chain exercises like the deadlift, kettlebell swing, single-leg Romanian deadlifts. Hinge movements (a lot of hip motion, little knee motion) are great to help make sure that there’s a better balance between the muscles on the front of your thigh/knee (quads) and the muscles in the back (hamstring). Not only will you get a great workout, but your knees will feel better too.
- Address your core! There are many exercises that we can do to address the core and the great thing is that little to no knee movement is needed!
- Work on your arms. Pushups, ring rows, bicep curls (it is beach season right?). Most upper body exercises require little to no use from the knees, so it will be a lot easier to do them without irritating you!
- Ride the bike. This is a low impact exercise that will help warm up your knees, but it is also a way to add a little spice to your workouts. Start off with a little 3-5 minute warm up to get the joints moving (joints moving equals improved fluid dynamics within the joint itself), and then switch to some interval work to get the heart rate up. My favorite is the Tabata interval (which includes 20s of work and 10s of rest).
- Eat mostly veggies, lean proteins, and limited processed foods. When your body is going through pain, it will cause an inflammatory response. Inflammation is great with healing, but chronic inflammation will most likely hinder progress. So a healthy nutrition practice will be key to accelerate healing and also help you keep off those extra pounds if you do choose to not work out during this time.
Injuries aren’t fun, especially in the knees. What makes it harder is all the different information out there talking about how exercise can be bad for them. The truth is, yes, there are exercises that aren’t the best for knee injuries, but there are also really great exercises to work around them and facilitate healing.
If you are having knee issues and need help, reply with “bees knees” and let’s figure out a plan to help you. If you want to come in and meet with a coach to see how we can help while you get out of pain book your FREE Intro by clicking here.
You don’t have to be sidelined by injuries. We’ve worked with 100s of injured people from Achilles, to ACL’s, to torn hip and shoulder labrums and got them back into shape.
Stay tuned for more action steps on other injuries affecting you.
-Tim.
