Stop blaming your knee’s for your knee pain
If you have knee pain it’s very easy to think that you have a ‘problem’ with your knees.
But in our experience, this is not the case.
The knee is just the site of the feedback (in this case pain). The knee is the poor joint doing it’s best to compensate for some other joints not performing to their full function.
More often than not, your feet and your hips might be letting you down.
Sitting on furniture and keeping ourselves off the floor is the norm these days but that wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time furniture was the realm of the rich while the rest of us languished on the floor. Our societal view of those walking barefoot and sitting on the floor is often associated with poverty. As such people avoid being barefoot or spending time on the floor.
An unfortunate side effect of this is that furniture deprives our hips, knees and ankles from visiting ranges they otherwise would visit regularly. Sitting on the floor without discomfort is a sign on joints that function well.
Our hips are a ball and socket joint and require rotational movement, a simple example is that which we would be exposed to when sitting down on the floor cross legged and hopping back up again. By simply reintroducing movements as basic as this you will do yourself a big favour in regain lost function and reducing pain.
Our feet and ankles are also require varying terrain in order to stay flexible, adaptable and robust. Yet we often encase them in extremely cushioned and supportive shoes that do the work for them. To compound matters we also only walk on nice flat even surfaces. This robs us of the variety needed to stimulate our feet and our feet become lazy and weak – often to the point that we cannot do anything without our shoes.
So footwear and chairs essentially have taken away the ability for your hips and feet to do what they need to do, and therefore your knees take much more force, rotation and load than they are actually designed to do.
So rather than blame your knees, let’s pay them a little more respect and thank them for picking up the slack for as long as they have! It’s time to strip back the shoes, challenge your feet more and improve your hip mobility.
if you’d like to treat your body to some TLC try these follow along sessions to get you started.
