Transcription
Why do your knees get weaker, stiffer, and more painful as you get older? Is it just a natural part of getting older? Is arthritis the thing that just destroys all of our knees as we get older? Let's talk about it.
In this video, we're going to talk about why your knees hurt, what you can do if they hurt, how to fix them if they hurt, and why the medical myths that you get fed on a daily basis are totally not useful for you. So, if you're ready, let's get ready to think right, move right, and feel right.
First, let's address some of the medical myths around knee pain. The biggest one is that running will cause knee pain. It'll cause knee arthritis. Your knee will wear out because you're running and pounding it too much. Guess what? That is a myth that has never been proven by long-term studies, and it's just something doctors have said because it sounded good and common sensey. Except it was totally false, and it made people stop exercising and get fearful of running and using their bodies the way they're supposed to.
If you don't believe me, check out any research that's been done on running and arthritis. And you can even look at the latest issue of the June 2020 Reader's Digest. Have you seen a magazine before? If you haven't, this is kind of what they look like, but they're usually bigger. But Reader's Digest is an actual thing. Still? I, I didn't know that either. On page 48, they actually talked specifically about how exercise won't ruin your knees because long-term studies are showing that that myth is just that, a total myth.
So why do our knees get weaker and less useful as we get older, and is there any way to avoid that? The answer is yes. There's a way to avoid your knees getting totally useless and stiff and weak. And the reason why it happens is because of a simple fact about your muscles: you either use them or you lose them.
Let's pretend this bunny is a real bunny and not just a magic bunny who watches you as you sleep at night to keep you safe from all the monsters that come in the dark. This bunny has muscles too, and those muscles will continue to develop. They'll maintain their mass, they'll maintain their ability to move the limbs really well, as long as this bunny is allowed to continue to hop around and exercise all the time. This bunny has got some major obvious joints like the shoulder joint and the hip joint here that are just like ours. Its knees aren't quite the same, so we'll just focus here, okay?
When those muscles are being used to help this bunny hippity hop along, those muscles stay in pretty good shape. The joints stay healthy because those muscles are still working really well to move the bones that create that joint. But what would happen if we stopped letting this bunny do any exercise? What if we just said, "Hey, bunny, guess what? You're now hog-tied and you're not allowed to use any of the muscles that are around these major joints of yours." What will happen to those muscles? Well, the answer is, those muscles would atrophy. And guess what? Atrophy aches.
If you stayed in your bed for three weeks straight, you would lose a significant percentage of your muscle mass, and guess what? You would start feeling really crappy. Your body would hurt, not because you're overusing it, but because you're underusing it, and muscles are starting to atrophy and disappear. That's what's happening to our bunny friend here when we have him hog-tied and are not allowing him to use any of the muscles of his body.
The point here is not to advocate for torture of bunnies. In fact, I am against the torture of bunnies. The point here is that if you are not using the muscles around your knee on a regular basis, you are hog-tying your own body, and you are forcing the muscles around your knee to atrophy. And I am also categorically against the abuse of human knees like yours.
So, what can we do to improve the health of your knees and to stop the atrophy that seems to happen as we get older? Huge thanks to you, Donna Roy, for the $50 donation to support this channel. If you'd like to support this channel too, use that "Thanks" button or the PayPal link that you'll find down below. Big thanks to Donna, you are a superstar.
The first thing we can do is recognize that our daily lives in modern life often don't do anything to challenge our knees. If you are sitting on a couch all day, or you're sitting in an office chair all day, or you're sitting in your car seat all day, guess what your knee muscles are doing? Basically nothing. As a baby and up until preschool, you're up and down off the floor, you're moving around, getting up, moving off camera. But once you hit grade school, you start sitting in a chair at a desk all day, and then recess starts getting shorter and shorter, and PE is pretty boring because your PE teacher doesn't know what they're talking about, and you're not even sure if he eats anything besides those weird potato chip things, but they're not really potato chips. And also, his breath smells suspiciously sometimes of alcohol. And then you get into video games, and you're studying, you're writing papers, and whatever, and you're in university, and you're still sitting all the time. Your knees are never getting worked. And then you get a real job, and guess what? At your real job, you're just sitting all day, and your knees are also not getting used. When you add this up over a lifetime, you're talking about decades of not using your knee muscles, which is the equivalent of what hog-tying our bunny friend.
So, if your knees are currently feeling weak and creaky, how do you restore strength to your knees? The simple answer is to take the hog tie off and let your knees actually work. When you do this, your knees are going to still feel weak and creaky because you haven't used them for years and years and years. So you need to start with easy challenges first, and then gradually build strength in the muscles around your knee.
Some simple ways to build strength in your knees from a very, very low level, wherever you're at, is to simply sit, since you're used to that, and then start extending the knee. You're extending, meaning straining the knee, getting this leg straight here, and just work on that. If you want to make this harder, you can hold this top position, feel the muscles work here, feel your quads fire. Many people who have weak, creaky knees, especially as they get older, will notice that there is almost no meat, no muscle around the knee. If that's you, you know 100% that your solution is going to come by pumping blood and growing the size of these muscles. Without those muscles, you cannot possibly articulate the knee joint safely. So, by doing light exercises now and harder exercises in the future, you're going to build the muscle, which is going to help you coordinate the movement and the motion around the knee joint, which is going to make your knee feel better, stronger, and more capable.
You can do this exercise to fatigue. You can hold on to it here if you want an extra challenge to work on your hamstring flexibility, or you can just let it stay low here and just work on a little bit of extension and just go until it gets tired. And if it never gets tired, then guess what? You can make it harder. You can put an ankle weight on top of it and just enjoy the burn. Or you can combine these and go until it fatigues with the ankle weight, and then take the ankle weight off and continue to do the exercise until you get more fatigue.
The thing that I would recommend here is that you would only do this once or twice a week, especially when you're just getting started. You don't want to injure yourself with soreness. So just know that when you do this, these muscles will get tired, they will get challenged, they might ache the next day because, guess what? You haven't been using your knee muscles in a long time. I would do two sets of this exercise, go to fatigue, then rest for one to two minutes, and then do one more set until you get fatigued. And definitely do it on both legs. If you have one leg that is obviously weaker than the other side or less developed than the other side, then do an extra set, meaning three sets for that weaker side.
But we are not finished just yet. You also need to work on the muscles on the back side of your thigh that also control your knee, and those are going to be your hamstrings. So, what we're going to do is actually take your wall and use it as a little helper. We're just going to stand right in front of a wall. So you're standing in front of the wall, you're going to take your foot and just bring it up towards your butt, just as high as you can. Hold it there for five seconds and be surprised at how much cramping you get in the back of your thigh. You might start losing your breath and going, "I hate this video already," and that's okay because your hamstrings are that weak. Then you can lower it back down and do it again. And you may get cramping again, and I'm sorry, but I promise you, it's good for you. And it's good for your hamstrings to actually start being used again. You're going to keep doing this until you can't take it anymore.
The first few times you do this, it may cramp a lot, and you may have to shake it out. And again, I'm sorry, but it is good for you. Then you keep going, you keep working until those muscles get stronger and more used to the challenges that you're giving it. I would suggest doing this at least twice a week, meaning like Monday, Thursday, or Tuesday, Saturday, or whatever works for you. And then gradually ramp it up to almost every day if you can, because we normally sit a lot, which crushes the hamstrings. So it's really hard to actually get good momentum on hamstring strength if you're not regularly doing something on a daily basis.
Now, the trick is, you're going to have to find the dosage that works for you. You may find that initially doing this every single day is just not doable because your hamstrings just cannot recover quick enough. And if you're an older person, maybe 50 or 60 plus, the recovery does come slower, so you have to be patient with yourself and give yourself that spacing like Monday, Thursday, or Tuesday, Saturday, that I mentioned before. But you do want to work on it until your body realizes, "Oh, we're going to be using these on a regular basis. These muscles do have to get stronger."
Now, when you're ready to, or if you want to start off with a really good challenge, then I would suggest you start off using some ankle weights. If you don't have ankle weights, maybe you have some heavy boots in the garage, throw those on, or just use an ankle weight and do the exercise the same way. It's really going to massively increase the gains that you get from this exercise. It's also going to make it much more challenging. So I would suggest starting off with no weight, and then as soon as you feel ready, just go ahead and throw on a light ankle weight. You can start with one or two pounds, work up to five pounds, work up to 10 pounds, strap a couple ankle weights on until you're doing however many pounds you want to do for this hamstring exercise. Again, I would suggest that you do two sets for each leg, and then if you have an obviously weaker side, then do an extra set, meaning three full sets for that weaker side. Again, space things out, especially when you are first beginning, so you don't injure yourself with soreness.
And then as you get better and better at the exercise and you want to keep waking up your hamstrings, work up to doing some version of the exercise every single day. That doesn't mean you have to do the full weighted version every day, but maybe, you know, when you wake up, you just take time to do one set on each leg and just work on waking up those hamstrings, doing some curls, and that's it. Simple. You're spending so much time sitting anyway that your hamstrings are regularly being crushed and deprived of blood, and that's just going to make them atrophy more.
So, I've shown you two simple exercises you can do, even if you've been told you have something silly like knee arthritis, or that your bones are too brittle, or that you're too old, or whatever, that you've worn out the knee. Just ignore all that noise. Remember to always think muscles, so that you can build the muscles that will help you control your body and move your body confidently through space. Hog-tying your body into not moving at all will never make you stronger, or more confident, or more mobile. So that medical advice of rest, rest, rest, rest, rest to make everything better, just plain doesn't work. That's why I always say, don't get caught in R.I.P.S. – Rest, Ice, Injections, Pills, and Surgery.
Another great way to improve your leg strength is to build your ability to do the deep Asian squat, and I'm going to link to that video as well up here. If you found this video helpful, use that "Thanks" button just below the video here on YouTube, or use the PayPal link that I've supplied down in the description box. I promise I will not use your money to buy a bunny torture device. If you don't want to give me any money, that's totally fine. Just hit the like button, subscribe with notifications on, and as always, I hope you remember that pain sucks. Life shouldn't.