My knees hurt, how can a trainer help?
This is an interesting question because I believe it really highlights one of the gap areas between PT and personal training. Knee pain can occur for a number of reasons including active injury, arthritis, overuse during exercise or work, or just simple lifestyle factors. Once we rule out active injury we are still left with a huge amount of knee pain that people experience in their day to day lives. Let’s look at one thing at a time.
Osteoarthritis: I hear something like this way too often “my knees have arthritis so I can’t use them” or “I wore them out and they are bone on bone”. In most cases of Osteoarthritis, movement helps circulate synovial fluid (joint lubrication) around the joint and directly reduces pain. People who are told they are “bone on bone” have strong fear associations with their pain and often move less, to their detriment. Now the key here is the amount, especially if you are just starting out it is important to ramp up activity, which is something we can absolutely facilitate. In general, for Osteoarthritis, we like the phrase “motion is lotion”.
Overuse injuries: People who have repetitive physical jobs or do endurance sports can experience knee pain. This is something that proper strengthening, programming of exercise and diversification of movement can help to reduce.
Lifestyle factors: Chronic pain of any type is influenced by many factors including sleep, stress, alcohol and nutrition. We can help get you on the right track with all these things in order to reduce reoccurrence of knee pain.
Lastly, changes in technique with exercise can dramatically reduce pain. This doesn’t necessarily even mean you did anything wrong, in many cases diversifying your exercises or tweaking them to better fit your body type can make a huge difference.
I look forward to helping you reduce your knee pain and improving your confidence in your body!
