So your knees don’t hurt now. That’s awesome! But, you want to keep it that way, right? Prevention is the best medicine, is it not? We want to do something before a problem arises, if we can, to keep it from becoming a problem in the first place. As they say “A stitch in time saves nine”. So, what can you do to prevent knee pain? What is that “stitch” you can make to save nine? Well, there are a few common mistakes that may lead to knee pain. The good news is there are things that you can do to avoid them.
1. FORM!
Exercise form is so important. Many times aches and pains are not caused by the exercise, but by doing the exercise incorrectly. Compensating and using our knees when we should be using our thighs, hamstrings, and glutes leads to overload on the knees. The knees are a small joint and if we aren’t careful we can end up putting all our body weight on that small joint to make up for weakness in certain muscles or lack of mobility in other joints. It’s kind of like putting the entire weight of a heavy door onto only one small hinge. The hinge would break and your door would fall. We don’t want our knees to break…
2. Ankle and Hip Mobility
If we want to prevent knee pain, we have to have mobility. Sometimes these compensations are due to weakness in the target muscles. However, they can also be caused by a lack of mobility in the surrounding joints, such as the ankles and hips. Lack of mobility in these joints can cause you to not be able to get into the correct position to put the load where it needs to be. Like water following the path of least resistance. Then the load gets put in the wrong place. In this case the knees. Then the knees become overloaded, leading to pain and discomfort. Because, again, it becomes like that single small hinge on the big door…
3. Stretching
There is static stretching and there is dynamic stretching. Static stretching is great for passive flexibility. Dynamic stretching is good for active mobility. Because static stretching is, well static, and more passive it is good for flexibility. But, if your focus is mobility the movement in more dynamic stretching is a more productive use of your time. Mobility is what helps us be able to put the load where it needs to be (ie the glutes, thighs, and hamstrings) and not on the knees. Like adding one or two much larger hinges for our big door. This helps reduce pain and discomfort much like the extra hinges would help support the door.
4. Foam Rolling
One way to help increase mobility is to foam roll. As I mentioned earlier, issues may not arise from the point of pain or discomfort, but rather in the surrounding joints. A good way to address this is to foam roll the hips and ankles as well as the knees. You can imagine knots in your muscles and tendons like knots in a string. Stretching would be like pulling the string. That’s not going to get the knot out unless you break the string. And we don’t want to do that. Foam rolling would be like working to undo the knot. Getting at the source, so to speak.
Knee pain doesn’t have to ever become a problem in the first place. If we make our minor “stitches” and take steps to avoid issues before they arise we can find ourselves in a much better and happier place in our training and our daily lives.