The knee joint is essential for both daily activities and physical performance. You could argue that it’s particularly crucial for athletes due to the additional strain placed on the knee during physical activity. The joint’s unique structure, which includes bones, cartilage, ligaments, and tendons, gives it a high level of movement. Think of the knee as a hinge; it can flex and extend, making it great for walking or running, while its ligaments ensure it maintains stability.
If you want to do more to care for your knees, start by thinking about ways you can alleviate knee pain externally. This may be as simple as doing knee-strengthening exercises that work to reduce the chance of injury like an ACL sprain or tear—by building up knee muscle strength through performing exercises to strengthen the knee. You’ll reduce your risk of a knee injury.
The Anatomy of the Knee
The knee joint is a hinge-type joint that forms the connection between the femur, tibia, and patella, and is actively maintained and stabilized by a multitude of ligaments, tendons, and muscles that also serve to facilitate normal joint motion. Several key ligaments (ACL, PCL, MCL, LCL) help maintain anatomical coherency of the knee joint structure and prevent it from shifting past its intended normal anatomical range of motion.
Importance of Knee Health
Knee injuries are incredibly common, and they happen to be a significant source of mobility loss.
If it hurts to move your knee, you could be suffering from any number of knee-related health problems. This includes damage like a torn ACL, or general wear and tear like arthritis. You use your knee joint in almost every activity, ranging from running to walking around the house. As a result, any injury can lead to:
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Pain
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Swelling
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A decreased range of motion
A loss of range of motion will directly affect your mobility. It’s that simple. In your day-to-day life, you are much more likely to abstain from activities if you’re at risk of pain. On a larger scale, you may stop doing things like skiing, or any other intense physical activity. No one wants to become a sedentary version of their true self, especially because a lack of movement also indirectly relates to many other causes of disease.
Further understanding what we do not yet know requires more function-focused knowledge. Some of this necessary information is anatomical and includes a brief understanding of the knee's ligaments, the tendons, and the cartilage that lives in between. This will be our first step in developing a better, more universalized plan for knee rehabilitation.
Knee Strengthening Exercises
Exercises that strengthen the knees are important because the majority of sports and similar activities can be extremely hard on them. Strength exercises include squats, lunges, and leg presses. You want to focus on all of the major muscles of the lower body — the quadriceps, the hamstrings in the back of the thigh, and the glutes.
Knee Injury Prevention Strategies
Taking care to maintain the health of your knees will be beneficial in keeping mobile and maintaining a good quality of life.
Lifestyle changes that will reduce the amount of stress put on your knees include:
· Regular, low-impact exercise
· Staying at a healthy weight
· Wearing properly fitting shoes
· The regular performance of a warm-up and cool-down routine associated with exercise or physical activity
If you understand the structure of the knee and how it works, you can better understand why it’s so crucial to keep it healthy. The anatomy of the knee can be complicated because there’s so much going on in this hinge joint and it needs to be able to withstand body weight and additional forces each time the footstrike changes when you go from sitting to standing.
Doing exercises for knee pain can strengthen the surrounding muscles, therefore, allowing those muscles to take the edge off the contact force strength. In this way, you can delay arthritis pain for several years. Besides, you may want to prepare your knees for surgery by doing some "prehabilitation."