This is our most useful tip for every single person that experiences persisting knee pain.
Chances are there are certain parts of your day that have become absolute agony.
If you experience persisting knee pain, you will know what we’re talking about. It’s the stairs. More often than not they are the most problematic activity someone has to regularly do once they begin to experience knee pain. This experience of pain usually leads to a cycle of avoidance [See why this is a bad idea].
But we have a great tip to help you get back to the stairs with confidence!
This simple video tutorial shows how you can begin to load your knee more favorably when walking upstairs, so you engage more of your hip and hamstring musculature and operate in a positon that reduces the biomechanical stress on your knees when taking the stairs. Your body is amazing at adapting to the stress/challenges we give it. So having a way to maintain the stairs in your life will go a long way to improving your long term health outcomes. [See how this applies to OA].
In a nutshell, if you do it right, the stairs can actually help you get better! Crazy right, this works in two ways:
- Improving your bodies capacity to tolerate load by training your muscles to lift your bodyweight off the ground and onto the stair. We can experience loads between 1.2-17X bodyweight when ascending stairs and between 1.4-2X bodyweight when descending. Over time this increased exposure to loading means you will get increased muscle strength and be able to do more with less stress.
- Improving your perceived capacity to perform tasks aka. confidence! The energy that is wasted with the worry about whether there will be stairs, if there is another way to take etc. is massive. So learning how to do something in a painless fashion gives you the freedom to do what you like without fear of stairs lingering in the back of your mind.
BONUS
See how this same concept applies to walking down stairs, so that you can start to tackle every stair with confidence and strengthen yourself back up to where you need to be!
Try it out for yourself!
But remember, the key is in execution. If you aren’t confident in executing it properly, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We will be happy to show you what you need to do in order to make it perfect 🙂
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