Of all the joints in the lower body, the knee is the one most likely to send you to a physical therapist.
“It carries most of the body's weight and being a hinge joint means it doesn't have a good socket structure,” says physiotherapist Dr Gillian Eyles from the University of Sydney. “It relies on the ligaments, the joint capsules and the muscles around it to really stabilize the joint, and it's quite easy to damage compared to another joint that is more supported.”
Knee injuries and the associated increased risk of developing knee osteoarthritis are the main reason why more than 53,000 knee replacements are performed in Australia each year, a figure expected to increase more than doubled by 2030.
Here's what experts say about how to keep your knees healthy and avoid becoming a surgical patient:
Avoid injury
Knee injury significantly increases the risk of knee osteoarthritis, and at a younger age. One of the most common serious knee injuries is a tear. anterior cruciate ligamentwhich runs diagonally under the kneecap and connects the femur to the tibia – the same injury suffered by the Matildas' star striker. Sam Kerr been out of the game for over a year.
“You can reduce the risk of these types of knee injuries by properly warming up before exercise,” says physiotherapist Dr Catherine Mills, from Kensington University Physiotherapy and Macquarie University in Sydney. “It's not about jogging and stretching—it's about doing a designed program designed to train both how your muscles work, the degree to which they work, and how your brain engages those muscles,” she says.
Warm-ups recommended to prevent ACL injuries include squats, walking with lunges, running with high knees, and jumping from side to side.
Maintain a healthy weight
The knee is one of the body's key load-bearing joints, so the more stress placed on this joint, the greater the risk of injury over its lifespan. “If you think about how many steps a person walks a day, [that] accumulates over life, if you put a lot of stress on these joints (which can be caused by body weight), this can contribute,” says Professor Rana Hinman, a research physiotherapist at the University of Melbourne. She recommends maintaining a healthy knee weight to reduce stress and inflammation.
There are also convincing evidence For people who are overweight and have knee pain, losing just a small percentage of their body weight can significantly reduce the pain and symptoms of osteoarthritis, Eyles says.
Be active
“One of the best ways to keep your knees healthy is to keep them moving,” says Natalie Collins, APA sport and exercise physiotherapist and associate professor at the University of Queensland. She advises about 150 minutes of at least moderate physical activity each week, “but also, very importantly, include some resistance training, twice a week, where you're really training your muscles to be able to do everything you need to do during the day, like squatting, going up and down the stairs, maybe working out or running,” Collins says.
Simple exercises such as squats or lunges or getting up from a chair repeatedly are a good starting point. If you have access to exercise equipment, she recommends leg extensions—where you straighten your leg from a bent position, placing your weight on the top of your ankle—or leg curls, where you lie face down and curl your shin upward against a kettlebell or resistance band, both of which work the quadriceps and hamstrings.
Ease of operation
During the Covid lockdown, many people battled cabin fever and gym closures by enthusiastically taking up new outdoor activities like running. And while activity is encouraged, it should be introduced gradually, says physiotherapist Dr Michael O'Brien from La Trobe University in Melbourne.
“Everyone just started running or walking, doing a lot of things very quickly, and having a lot of problems with sudden onset of pain while doing a lot of things they weren't used to,” he says.
The main thing is to gradually expose the body – especially the joints – to this load. “If you want to run a marathon, you don't decide three weeks before and then just go out and do it,” he says.
Mills suggests gradually increasing your activity level. “Start small and you can increase by about 10% each week. [and] 30%,” she says. “You will get where you want to go, and more importantly, you will continually improve.”
