FEELING GREAT: Beware of bad advice when it comes to your painful knees

"Knees have a habit of getting more painful as you get older, and you will benefit from something to slow that down – which could be simple exercises to strengthen muscles to help protect and support your knee done once or twice per day."

Now I’m going to tell you what you can do about it.

Of course, you have the option of doing nothing about it or even trying one of those knee supports, which might help (but only for a short while), or you might opt to go and see a good physio for some solid advice!

Knees have a habit of getting more painful as you get older, and you will benefit from something to slow that down – which could be simple exercises to strengthen muscles to help protect and support your knee done once or twice per day.

We are constantly giving out information and advice to help ease knee pain at the Paul Gough Physio Rooms. It’s among the most common issues we deal with.

To avoid, or get relief from, knee pain from that gradual wear and tear process, you need to be doing the right type of exercises, in the right way, at the right time.

You must be doing routines that specifically strengthen your muscles and add control.

Without control in your knee muscles, the degeneration in your knee accelerates fast.

I hear a lot of people talking about their painful knees in conversations with friends.

Everyone thinks they have the answers, but people are often giving each other bad and even dangerous advice, which is usually confusing and dilutes the importance of the message that something needs to be done – like physio.

I want you to know this medical fact: there’s a big difference between exercising and doing exercises (I define exercising as something like walking for 20 minutes per day, and exercises being a steady and controlled sequence of movements designed to strengthen or make flexible a specific muscle group).

A big mistake I see GPs make is telling people looking for a solution to knee pain to just “do some exercise”, yet more exercise is rarely the right answer.

People sometimes think that when knee pain gets bad, doing exercise - running and more walking - will help make your knee stronger and therefore less painful. It won’t, exercise will often make a swollen, painful knee even worse.