The Real Reason Your Knee Pain Keeps Coming Back (50+)

For most people over 50, knee pain keeps coming back because three key things are being missed and in today's video I'm going to show you what they are and how to fix them. If your knee pain keeps coming back no matter what you try then this video is for you and you've probably tried resting it or exercising and it feels better for a while then it flares up again and you're left But did you know that over 80% of people have changes in their knee that you can see on a scan yet only a fraction of them have pain and that tells us wear and tear is only a very small part of the problem. The knee is often the victim not the cause. It's part of a support chain and if one link is weak then pain shows up. So here are the problems in that knee support chain that can actually cause knee pain and all of them are fixable. The first problem is hidden up here in your hips and it's weakness of a very important muscle group called the glutes and the glutes control the alignment of your thigh and at the bottom of your thigh bone is your knee and if your hip can't control the thigh the knee ends up taking all the load and it would be like a door that hasn't been hung properly. It would creak and groan for a very long time until eventually the hinges start to wear out but you can fix this problem with one incredible exercise. I call it hip abductions and here's how it looks. Now before I show you the exercises I just need to make you aware they're not suitable for everyone and please avoid them if they cause you pain. So for this exercise you just need somewhere comfortable to lie down so your bed works absolutely fine and you're going to work the side that's on top. So lie down on your side like this you can support your head with your hand take your top hand and put it on the mat or the bed in front of you and keep your body in a nice straight line. Now this part is really important you're then going to roll your body slightly further forward than feels natural. Most people do this exercise like this and that's why they get it wrong. We want to be in this position here so this hip is just slightly ahead of the bottom one and once you're in this position very simple you're going to keep that top leg nice and straight and you're going to lift it up in the air and ever so slightly behind. So we're trying to go as far up towards the ceiling and probably about five or ten degrees backwards so it's only a small backwards movement and then we drift back down. Now it's really important that as you're doing this you feel the area underneath your belt line start to activate not the area above it. If you feel this area here where my hand is now that's your lower back trying to take over not the glutes and if you're very weak you might feel that lower back tension almost straight away and if that's the case for you just don't go quite so high just go about half the movement and keep moving it without stopping until you start to feel a bit of a nice healthy burn in this zone here that's your gluteus medius working really hard and that is the muscle that controls your thigh bone. So you're going to try and repeat 10 to 15 of these in a row three sets on each side and try and do that three days per week. So that's your first great exercise to help you resolve that knee pain once and for all but if you don't fix the next link it doesn't matter how strong your hips are. Let's have a look at how to fix this next problem now. The second issue that stops your knee from getting better is a lack of ankle mobility particularly in a movement called dorsiflexion which looks like this. Now you need this movement to get that knees over toes motion that lets you squat or climb stairs and research shows that if you lose just five of those precious degrees of dorsiflexion that can increase your risk of knee pain by between 50 and 100 percent and so many people have lost this movement but if you know what to do you can regain it and here is one of my favorite exercises to help you do that. It's called ankle dorsiflexion on a chair and it looks like this. It's a mobilization so what we're going to do is take a chair prop it up against the wall like this with the seat facing you and the leg you're going to work on you're going to rest that foot on the chair seat like this. Now what we're going to do is keep your heel down and take this knee over the top of your toes and grab the back of the chair like this. It's really important that this heel stays down. You're then going to pull yourself in towards the back of the chair taking that knee further over your toes and then easing off like this and when you do this exercise the tempo you're going to do it at is like this so one second in one second out one second in one second out and every time you come forward you're going to take it to the point where you feel a bit of restriction either in your calf or at the front of the ankle whichever place you feel the restriction is the area that's restricting you the most and what I want you to do is 20 to 30 of those repetitions then do the other side and try and do that three times a day for best results. So that's two of our three problems solved but if you want my ultimate guides to getting knee problems fixed once and for all you should grab a copy of my brand new book Independence for Life. It shows you how to build your very own home plan to fix your pain improve your mobility and regain strength and you can order or pre-order your copy using the link below this video. The final problem we need to solve to stop that knee pain from coming back takes us back up to our hips but this time we're not talking about strength we're talking about mobility and it's this movement here that matters most for our knees and it's called internal rotation and most people with knee pain have lost some hip internal rotation and that's not a coincidence because if your hip can't rotate your knee is forced to and it's not designed to move in that way and that's when irritation starts to build up over time but thankfully with the right approach you can regain some hip rotation and just a few extra precious degrees can make a massive difference to your knee pain. So I'm going to show you the exercise now it's called the reverse clam and here is how it looks you're just going to lie down on your bed or a mat like this and instead of having our legs out straight like we did before this time they're going to be bent up so you've got a 90 degree angle here and a 90 degree angle here now we're going to do the same thing with our hands put our hands on the bed like this and take yourself nice and further forward than feels natural now from this position you're going to keep your knees tightly together and then you're just going to lift your top ankle up in the air as high as you can go and once you get to that maximum limit you're just going to pause for a second and then bring it back down now if you've lost a lot of internal rotation because that's what this movement is here you won't be able to get your foot up as high as I can but don't worry about it even if you can only get to here and then come back down what you're going to do is a slowly increase what you can do but b you're going to improve the control over what you already have and both of those things are vital if you want to keep your knees nice and healthy and stop that pain from coming back so with this one what we're going to do is 10 to 20 of these in a row and you're going to try and do three sets on each side and again if you can do that three times a week that's going to make a massive difference to your knees so that's how to not only fix your knee pain but to stop it from coming back for good but if you want to move better and walk well for life it isn't just your knee that's going to need addressing there's something else that can slow us down massively as we get older and most people have never even considered it so I've got another video on the screen right now that reveals what that problem is and shows you how to fix it it's on the screen now so click on it if you're interested and I'll see you over there