7 Tips for Faster Knee Joint Pain Recovery While Staying Active

Knee injury or ongoing pain? These seven tips can help you stay active during knee joint pain recovery and even help speed the healing along.

Coach E from Precision Movement here. Today, I’m going to do something a little bit different and share with you how I’ve been dealing with a recent knee issue when I was playing hockey this past winter. It was a combination of bad ice and a bad pass into my skates. I was a little bit off balance and hit a rut. My knee had a wobble, and it got shook.

The day after, I had pain, swelling, and trouble bending the knee. It also hurt when I was going up and down stairs, so there was definitely something up.

Now, I purposely didn’t go for a diagnosis or any imaging because I wanted to see how our general principles of dealing with injuries worked.

If you don’t have access to that kind of information or technology, how are you going to deal with an issue if you don’t know exactly what’s going on?

I came up with seven knee pain relief tips that I observed myself and implemented. I just thought that jotting them down and then sharing them with you here would be helpful if you’ve got an issue right now or need to file away for the future. If you’re active, if you play sports, something will inevitably happen.

These tips are specific to knee joint pain, but many of them will also apply if you’re dealing with another area of the body.

Tip 1: Avoid Prolonged Stretching & Compression

The first tip I found was really important was to avoid any prolonged and aggressive static stretching. This might be a toe touch stretch for your hamstrings or pulling your heel to butt to stretch out the quads.

These are natural things that you might want to do because muscles will often tighten up around the injured joint. They tighten up because your brain wants to protect that joint from further damage. It does that by using muscular tightness to prevent it from moving.

The other area that applies to the knee is avoiding compression.

This can occur in situations like kneeling. If you’re kneeling down and your knee is bent, you’re not putting the active force through it; you’re not pulling on it, but it does need to support the weight of your body in that position. Whenever I kneeled, my knee was achy afterward.

Be aware of any kneeling or deep squatting where you’re bending down, even tying your shoes. You’ve got to find alternative ways to do that.

Now, one situation that I found myself doing a lot was getting up from the ground. I’ve got young kids. I love playing on the ground with them. My three-year-old loves it when I get down there with him, too. I had to figure out how I was going to get up from the ground and get back to standing without aggravating my knee.

There are a couple of different ways, but here’s one that I used: I rolled over, kept my injured knee straight, and stood up with my arms and good leg.

Tip 2: Don’t Sit In Knee-Stressing Positions

Tip number two is not to stress your knee when you’re sitting. One was when you’re crossing your feet or legs. I like to cross my leg ankle and rest it on top of my right thigh. That would aggravate my knee. Avoid that position.

The other position that I would find myself in is crossing my ankles and stretching out. You’re leaning back. Your legs are straight out, and you’re crossing your ankles, which also aggravates it.

Avoid those two positions.

The third one that I found was when you sit on the edge of your seat, put your feet underneath you, and either flip your feet under you, resting the tops of your feet or on your toes on the floor. This puts that knee in that compressed position, the bent position, with some static force on it. If you sit in that position for a long time, you’ll find an achy knee when you get up.

Avoid those positions when you’re sitting. Instead, sit with your feet flat on the floor and your knee in a comfortable, relaxed, neutral posture.

Tip 3: Minimize Stress When Moving & Walking

Tip number three is to minimize the stress when you’re walking and moving around.

One helpful thing that you can do is to use a cane. You might feel like, “Oh, I’m not going to do that,” but it could be helpful.

If you have to walk around, and you know that walking aggravates your knees, so you’re walking around for long, sit down, and find your knee a bit achy, then just use a cane. There’s no harm in doing that. And it might help you recover faster because you’re just not aggravating your knee over and over with the walking.

When you’re going up and down stairs, use the rail.

These are just a couple of simple ways to avoid putting excess stress on the knee. If you’re doing those things—you’re using the rail, and you’re using a cane—that will get you moving, which is beneficial. But it will also minimize the aggravation.

Tip 4: Foam Roll

Tip number four is to foam roll. Foam roll your:

• Quads
• IT band
• Hamstrings
• Calves

These muscles will probably tighten up for the reasons I mentioned before, which is protective guarding of the knee.

Your brain doesn’t want your knee to move so that it can heal. It tightens your muscles, all the muscles that cross the knee, it tightens those guys up. So you don’t stretch them. You don’t want to do passive stretching, which can irritate the joint.

But foam rolling will work and act like a massage, which can loosen and relax the muscles, increase blood flow, and relieve tension and achiness. It’s not going to irritate like static stretching will.

Foam rolling is great, and I found it really relieving for those muscles without bothering the knee.

But What If You Want to Keep At A Sport?

Now, we’re going to get into how to manage the exercises when your knee is in pain. Through this whole process, I never stopped playing tennis, playing basketball, or lifting weights. But I did do things a little bit differently.

The next three tips are for you if you want to keep moving, you want to keep going, or you’re just addicted, and you can’t stop yourself and be able to continue to play and lift a workout without prolonging your recovery and not getting better. Because right now, I’m standing on my knee, and I’ve got no more knee pain and no more problems.

Tip 5: Use Activation & No Load Mobilization to Warmup

Tip number five starts with your warm-up. Before you exercise, before you play sports or work out, do an activation warm-up of all of the muscles around the knee, including the quads, hamstrings, adductors, and calves, as well as up and down the kinetic chain, so your feet, ankles, and glutes.

The more your feet, ankles, and glutes work well, the less load has to go through your knee. So, you want to focus on all of these areas with activation-style exercises, firing the muscle up and holding it for 5 – 10 seconds and then relaxing the muscle.

You don’t want to focus on any ballistic movements, especially with the knee extending and flexing, so straightening and bending. You want to avoid that high-speed, high-velocity, high-load stuff and instead make slow, gentle isometric movements.

Do isometric exercises for the muscles around the knee, feet, ankles, and hips.

Now, when it comes to the knee itself, you will use it. If you’re playing tennis, you’re going to bend your knee. If you’re playing hockey, you’re bending your knee when you skate. What I recommend in your warm-up is no load mobilization.

It’s very simple. You can just stand up and lift your leg up in the air, gently bend the knee, and straighten the knee. That way, you’ll mobilize through the ranges of motion and work through them without actually putting a load through them.

This is a great way to start before you get into sport: activation and no-load mobilization.

Tip 6: Contrast Therapy After Activity

Tip number six is for after sport, after working out, when you might feel a little bit achy. This happened to me after hockey and tennis; I could feel my knees.

What did I do? I did contrast therapy.

Three to five sets of 30 seconds as hot as possible, alternated with 30 seconds of as cold as possible in the shower. Afterward, I felt better, and I found that when I did it, there was less achiness and less swelling the next day compared to when I didn’t do it.

Contrast therapy is a great tool to use when you’re playing sport or working out while managing an injury.

Tip 7: Avoid Knee-Dominant Strength Exercises

The seventh and final tip is specifically for people who like to lift weights and stay strong. Avoid exercises that bend the knee a lot, so knee-dominant exercises like squats and lunges.

Lunges are my favorite lower body exercises for strength. But during this time, I avoided them completely. Instead, I focused on hip-dominant exercises, like deadlifts, stiff leg deadlifts, one-leg deadlifts, hip thrusts – as well as ankle exercises, like calf exercises like calf raises.

Then, exercises that integrate the lower body from the feet to the hips should be done without a lot of knee bends. These are Precision Movement techniques like the 3-Way Clamshell or Standing Slumpy Psoas exercises. Anything where you’re loading the hips or the ankles without using a lot of knee will help keep you active during knee joint pain recovery.

You just have to switch up your routine a little bit. You will still maintain strength. Exercises like lunges and squats will slow you down, but when you return, you’ll return faster and quickly regain any strength you’ve lost.

What To Do After Knee Joint Pain Recovery

So, there are seven tips I’ve been using that I thought might be helpful for you if you’re dealing with knee joint pain recovery.

We’ve got some other articles for you on knee pain relief. Alternatively, if you want the video version of these tips, click here to watch 7 Tips for Staying Active with Knee Joint Pain on YouTube.

Unexplainable Knee Joint or Knee Cap Pain? Try These 3 Exercises – Nagging knee cap pain can really wear you down and mess with your performance. Try these 3 easy exercises to find some knee pain relief.

5 Lower Body Mobility Exercises for Pain-Free Aging – Painful and achy joints (like hips and knees) don’t have to be a common part of aging. Age pain-free with these 5 lower body mobility exercises.

We’ve got our Knee Pain Solution Program. I followed this in terms of rehab exercises and programming to ensure that I’m covering all of the areas to prevent knee problems from happening in the future.