Transcription
I'm going to explain to you the process that we use to help people with knee arthritis avoid surgery and get back to being active again. I've got five concepts I'm going to cover in this video.
First one is that we have to get inflammation down. Now, with anyone that has knee arthritis, they get to points where the inflammation in their knee goes up, and their knee begins to get swollen, stiff, and painful, and it can hurt all the time. I mean, literally, every minute of the day while they're awake, there'll be a low level of pain, maybe even a high level of pain, and then it it worsens at times depending on what you're doing. Like, if you start to walk too much, it might get worse. If you sit in a certain position with your knee bent, that can worsen it. At night, when you go to sleep, it might feel like that's when it gets worse. Generally, if you do less activity, the inflammation goes down.
But the number one thing that needs to happen to get that inflammation down is you have to offload the knee joint. So that means getting on a cane, getting on crutches, or even using a walker. You have to find the right amount of offloading that you can do to get the pressures off your knee so that you're not constantly irritating it more. The more you're on your feet, generally speaking, the more pressure you're going to put through your knee joints. But also, you're going to be using the muscles to do the walking and to stand around and to do all your daily activities. And when you're using the muscles, you're probably putting too much pressure on it because you have a a muscle imbalance, likely more on that in just a moment.
Now, some other things you can do to help you bring the inflammation down, sticking with this concept, there's some easy exercises you can do like tailgate swings. That's you're just sitting on the edge of a chair somewhere and you're just swinging your legs back and forth. This motion helps the fluid inside your knee joint to circulate and move around because it's the fluid inside the knee joint, we call it synovial fluid in the medical field, that nourishes the cartilage lining of the joint inside the knee. So on the end of the thigh bone and on the end of the shin bone and the meniscus in here, there's all that cartilage in there. And when you can just nice and easy move your legs around without putting pressure through your body, without being aggressive, it shouldn't hurt to do this. It moves the fluid inside and brings nourishment to your irritated cartilage inside your knee. Doing tons of this helps with bringing the inflammation down because you're helping to bring in good nutrients to the cartilage that's irritated and you're allowing that irritated cartilage to heal because it's developing waste products as it's healing and those waste products get moved out through the synovial fluid. That synovial fluid is made in the lining of the joint and so it gets absorbed into the lining, the bad stuff, and then good stuff gets pushed from the lining of the joint into the synovial fluid to maintain the health of that joint fluid. So that's critical in getting the inflammation down. You have to get some easy movements in and tailgate swinging is one of the best things out there.
Let's talk about the second concept here of the five that I'm going to share with you. You have to turn on the weakest muscles. Now, what I mean by this is usually in people with knee arthritis, there's some weak muscles. There's three key muscles that I like to talk about that are consistently weak in people that have knee arthritis. I can't think of a single case that I've talked to in person that hasn't had weakness in at least two of these muscle groups.
Number one is the glute muscles. These are the butt muscles behind the hip joint. These glute muscles are so important because they attach to the edges of the bones right here, the pelvis and the tailbone, and then they travel outwards and downwards to the top of the thigh bone. So they they go like this, and I'm being general here. There's tons of muscles, I can go into all the names of them, but they all generally help to extend the hip and externally rotate or turn the thigh bone outwards. And it's that external rotation component that I'm most concerned about because if your glutes are weak, then they're not great at turning your thigh bone outwards, and there's other muscles that begin to take over or compensate.
If you have weak glutes, and they're going to be the quad muscles in the front of the thigh and then the adductor muscles, the inner groin muscles on the inside of the thigh that start up here and they run down to your knee. When those muscles on the front and inside of your thigh are working too much because they're compensating for weakness back here, then what's going to tend to happen is these muscles are going to pull that thigh bone inwards. And what that does down at your knee joint is it creates this little rotation movement in here, which adds bad pressures to your knee joint in more than one way. So just the the pure rotation adds it, but also you using these thigh muscles too much pulls the kneecap up. Let me show you on this model better. This is the quad tendon right here, and so it's going to pull that kneecap up and add compression to the joint by pushing the kneecap up against the thigh bone. And then because of the continued tendon that runs down here, now it's a ligament, it pulls on this and it pulls the shin bone up into the thigh bone. So you have all this extra compression going through the knee joint because you're compensating by not using the muscles properly throughout your leg.
So if we need to, if we can turn on the glute muscles back here, then you can begin to use your muscles properly in your leg, turn off those quads and and the adductors, the inner thigh muscles, and decrease the pressures inside your knee joint. This is so important because if you can bring down that inflammation, like I said in the first, the first concept, now you can begin to fire the right muscle group to get some better motion through your knee and be able to be on your feet more or have less pain throughout the day.
Now, that's just one muscle group that I talked about. What are the other two? Well, the the next one is going to be your lower abdominals. The reason for that, the main reason is because when you don't have enough strength in your lower abdominals, it tends to make your pelvis bones, these big wing-shaped bones right here, be not stable. In other words, they they might shift in position too much. And if you have those dominant quad muscles, then you're going to tend to tip them forward, and it's going to also set up, it's going to contribute to your glutes not working as well. So it's really a combination of low abdominal strength and glute strength together to give you good stability up here, which then allows your thigh bone to be properly positioned so that your knee joint isn't overly compressed.
Now, that third muscle group is going to be down in your foot here. In your foot, you have a bunch of muscles that help support the arch. But there's some key ones, the toe flexors, the ones that help you to curl your toes down. There's some muscles there that run under the arch of the foot. And especially if you have a fallen arch, if you have a flat arch, when you bear weight, when you stand up and your your arch flattens out, that's a sign that you have weakness in those toe flexors. If you can get those toe flexors stronger, those toe exercises you actually have to do, then what's going to happen is you're going to be able to support your ankle and foot better because if your arch collapses down, then it moves the shin bone downwards and then it changes the position of the shin bone at the knee joint. And you don't need that. You need good support from your arch muscles so that your shin bone is straight up and down and your knee joint is stable.
If there's little excessive motion happening whenever you're walking around, whenever you're taking steps, doing your chores, from down in the foot because the shin bone is unstable, and then you also have weak abs and glutes up here and your thigh bone is unstable, you're moving with a very unstable knee joint. And those extra motions need to be stabilized somehow. So your body finds a way and it compensates. That's why you end up using the quads very often, or the groin muscles on the inside.
So you, this is important. You need to figure out how to just turn on the muscles. In most cases, because many people, especially if they've had knee arthritis for a while, like for years, a decade, or maybe even multiple decades, they can't even fire their glutes. And the landmark thing that we need to just do at the beginning, like the milestone that you need to achieve in this second part, is you have to just get these muscles to activate. And here's what I mean by this. Right now, in the position that you're in, if you just tighten your glute muscles, like think about your muscles squeezing back there, if they tighten up and your thigh muscles also tighten up, then you have that compensation. That means that your thigh muscles have taken over for stability and your hips and knees and legs because your glutes aren't doing their job back here.
And what you need to do is be able to tighten your glutes apart from your thigh muscles working around here, the front and the back. If you can get to the point where your glutes are working independently of your thigh muscles, and you're getting support from your toe muscles and your lower abdominals, then you're in the position to move into the next concept.
You have to strengthen these weakest muscles. So for just to be clear, in concept two, you just are trying to turn them on and turn them on apart from the other muscles. That for some people is like the hardest thing to do, the hardest thing to overcome, because you don't even need to add weights in that in that concept. You just need to practice firing the muscles, seated in your chair, or lying down in bed, or standing around in the kitchen. Just try to tighten the glutes, get your toes working, get your lower abdominals to draw in. If you can do all that, then only then should you be allowed to now do exercises where you might add weights, maybe you're just using body weight too. But that's what we're doing in the third concept here, is we're strengthening these weakest muscles.
So going back to those glutes, the lower abdominals, and the the foot muscles, the toe curl muscles, you have to now do reps where you're tiring out those muscles and consistently fatiguing, targeting those muscles.
Hey, I want to tell you about our knee arthritis recovery program. It's program is specifically for people that have knee arthritis, whether you've been formally diagnosed, you've had an x-ray or an MRI and the doctor told you that you have knee arthritis, or you suspect you have it. And it doesn't matter how severe it is, if you've had it just mild, you know, grade one, some doctors will tell you, or if it's more on the severe end. If you have tried exercises and advice and tips that I've given you through our videos here, then chances are you are have benefited from it because this stuff works. Chances are even better that you're going to get tremendous improvements if you join this program.
And let me just tell you how it is real quick, how how the program is set up. It's a membership program and there's different tiers of this. On the first tier, it's group coaching along with the whole curriculum of 40 plus, I think it's approaching 50 videos now, showing you how to do it. So you can just go through the program, watch the videos and have massive improvements. But you also get access to group coaching where I'm on the call with you, me and my coaches, and you get to ask us questions so that you don't get stuck through this program. And then you also have the option to get our higher tier, which is one-to-one coaching with our recovery coaches. But you still get the group coaching too, and of course, you get the whole curriculum as part of that package. So go check out the link nearby here to learn more about the knee arthritis recovery program and I hope to see you in the program on our coaching calls.
Some people confuse fatigue and soreness. Let me explain it for you very simply here. Fatigue is when you're doing reps of an exercise and you feel the muscle get tired and tired, and then it starts to burn even, and then you have to stop because then you lose the form or the technique of the exercise. You can't do anymore, or you start to compensate. Maybe you're trying to do a glute exercise and you're fatiguing and fatiguing it, you're getting it tired, and then all of a sudden you feel your quads working too. That's a stopping point, and that happens during the exercise and immediately afterwards, like seconds, maybe a minute at most, after the exercise, you'll feel that sensation of tiredness, burning, maybe like the muscle kind of wants to cramp. Hopefully it doesn't cramp.
Soreness usually happens more time after the exercise. So it might be later on that day, like hours later, it might even be a day or two later that you get muscle soreness. We call it delayed onset muscle soreness in the in the health and fitness world. Soreness isn't always associated with targeting the right muscle because it is very possible that you'll get sore a day or two later in thigh muscles when during the exercise, what you what you felt was the glutes get tired. You felt fatigue in the glutes, you felt the glutes burn, you felt your toe muscles burn and get tired. You did an ab exercise, you targeted your lower abdominals, and right in the middle of the reps and sets that you were doing, you felt the burn in that area. That's good. That's what you want.
But don't be discouraged if a day or two later you're like, ah, I didn't even get sore in those muscles. I was trying to target these muscles and ended up getting my quad sore, I end up getting my my groin muscle sore, my hamstring muscle sore, or my upper ab sore. That happens too. That's okay. That will happen. And don't worry about that. The delayed onset muscle soreness, the soreness that comes on a day later, later or two days later or more, is not nearly as good a feedback as in the moment while you're doing the exercise. And so that's what I need you to understand for the third concept here.
You need to feel the burn in the right muscle that you're targeting. If you're going to go do an exercise for your glutes and you're you're trying to get in 50 reps, 70 reps, whatever it is, and 60, 70 reps in, you feel your quads burning more than your glutes, that's not successful. But what is successful is you feel your glutes burning and it just gets more and more intense, then you get to the point where you're like, I got to stop, it's too intense, other stuff's want to fire. That's your stopping point right there. In that situation, a day or two later, you might be like, oh wow, I'm actually sore from my back or I'm sore from my hamstrings. That's cool. As long as during the exercise you felt your glutes working hard, that's what you need.
Now, the fourth concept is you have to be able to use these muscles to do normal activities, everyday normal activities. You have to be consciously using these muscles. And what I mean by that is like, if you just walk, everybody has to walk, right? As long as you've got the ability, you should be walking. First thing in the morning, getting up to go to the bathroom, going to the kitchen, taking care of your normal daily things. Maybe you work a job and you go to work, you have to walk to do those things. When you walk, you have to be thinking about what muscles you're using because if you had to go through that first milestone that I told you about where you couldn't even get your glutes to fire without all these other muscles working, some people can't even get the glutes to fire at all, only the thigh muscles work when they intend to fire their glute muscles.
But let's say you got through that. Now you can fire your glutes, right? Your job at this point, after you've been strengthening them some and you've got in practice turning them on and getting them tired, now you've got to figure out how to walk with your glutes. And the way this occurs is whenever you bear weight on a leg. So let's say you're stepping on your right foot, the right glutes should fire. You should feel that glute tighten up. You have to intentionally do it. It's not going to always automatically happen. Then, as you take the next step and your left foot moves forward and you bear weight on that left foot, the left glute should fire. And this is walking. Now you just alternate. Every time you bear weight on the right foot, right glute fires. Every time you bear weight on the left, left glute fires. And you're just alternating. Glutes should be kind of squeezing, letting go, squeezing, letting go, based on which foot you're bearing weight on. This is how walking should occur.
And I'm not asking for perfection here because some people will say, so wait, every single step I have to take, is it has to be a glute contraction and a foot contraction and your abs have to be working? That's the idea. But let me put it objectively for you. If you can take eight out of 10 steps correctly, that allows you for two bad steps every 10 steps, then that's probably good. Your body has the ability to tolerate some bad movements here and there. But what isn't good if if that ratio is flipped the other way around, if you only have two good steps and eight bad steps, you're not thinking about it, you're not subconsciously doing it because you've practiced it enough, enough, and you don't have to think about it as much. If you're flipped the other way around, then you're probably going to irritate your knee again because the pressures are going to build up and you're going to be back having to think about the getting the irritation down, the first concept that I gave you.
But hopefully you're doing eight out of 10 steps or nine or maybe even 10 out of 10, 9.9 steps out of 10 steps good. If you're in that zone, then you're going to feel tremendously better and you're going to increase the capacity, the amount of time that you can be on your feet doing things.
The fifth concept is you have to do strength and conditioning for these muscles so you can do normal activities. At this point, people that get to this point, they're doing maintenance work at this point. They are walking for long distances, hiking for long distances, they're they're like they're moving forward. They they haven't had knee problems in a long time, basically. But they're still conscious of checking themselves that they're using the glutes, they're doing a workout for their glutes and their abs and their feet on a consistent basis, like a few times a week.
What has been proven up to this point if you have knee arthritis is that you have a tendency to get it again. You're going to irritate yourself again somehow unless you're on yourself about maintaining strength in these groups, lower abs, glutes, and the uh, the foot muscles. These muscle groups, if you can maintain that strength, then you're going to protect yourself against flare-ups because the pressures are going to be normal in your knee and you're going to be moving great. 80% of the time, eight out of 10 steps, that's protective against irritating your knee joint again and furthering knee arthritis.
This is what people don't do. This is what people aren't told. This is what healthcare professionals don't know. They're they're not focused on treating problems this way. They're focused on recommending a medication, an injection, or even a surgery. But none of those things are going to solve the muscle imbalances. This, this whole, all the stuff that I talked to you about in this video, that's what needs to be addressed. Most healthcare for people with knee arthritis doesn't go past the second concept. They try to make you do exercises, but you're not firing the right muscles, and then you end up making it worse.
So that's why it's so important for you, if you've got knee arthritis, to go through these concepts in order so that you can get back to doing the things that you want to do confidently, not worrying about your knee joints.
Now, something important I want to say to you is despite what your x-ray looks like, because you may have been told that you've got bone-on-bone knee arthritis, that the spacing inside your knee joint is is non-existent or a lot less than it should be, that the cartilage is gone, all those things. We know in research that you can have really bad findings on your x-ray but still feel great. And I think that's powerful because if you go through these concepts that I listed out and your knee gets better, you're moving better, you're doing more things, and you're not hurting along the way, even though your x-ray shows this much space between your your joints in your joint between your bones, that's okay. That's the the the main factor in getting a knee replacement is how you feel at the end of the day. The surgeon's going to say, well, how do you feel? Oh, I feel great. Well, then we don't need to do a knee replacement. You've won at that point.
I made a video about people in our knee arthritis recovery program. It's called "14 Things We Learned After Helping 1,426 People," and you can check out that video right here. It's all about people that have been through our knee arthritis program and what we've learned since working with them.