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5 Common Habits Secretly Causing Your Knee Pain
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If you have ever experienced knee pain, you know how debilitating it can be. Even a minor injury seems to take forever to heal. Not being able to walk, or not walk without pain, can take a normal day and turn it on its head! It’s the simple things that sometimes end up causing you pain: twisting the knee while playing sports, or even a simple fall. However, sometimes the injury occurs from a lifetime of bad habits that you aren’t even aware of until you knee begins to ache.
When you consider the amount of work we demand from our knees every single day, and doing it all with your body weight on top of them, the only surprising thing is that injuries aren’t more common!
Your knee joint is a complex system of multiple components that can be completely incapacitated with just one wrong twist or fall. We are going to look at 5 of some common, and some less common, contributors to knee pain. You might be surprised to learn that simply correcting or dropping some of these habits will return your knees to their natural, healthy, pain-free state.
1. Posture
Most people believe that the only thing that is affected by their posture is their lower back, but it actually plays a huge role when it comes to your knees. When we refer to bad posture we mean locking your knees backwards as you stand, holding all your weight on one leg, slouching over with your stomach pushed forward or your head pushed forward. What you want to do is to straighten your posture, hold your head on top of your shoulders, and distribute your weight evenly on both legs.
2. Being Overweight
OK, so perhaps this isn’t a habit, but overeating surely is. When you allow your body weight to continue to increase a few pounds every year continues to add to the pressure on your knees. For every one pound of extra weight you are carrying, your knees have 3 extra pounds of pressure put on them. Being overweight is commonly linked to knee pain. Unfortunately, it is also linked to osteoarthritis of the knees.
Osteoarthritis will break down your knee cartilage much more quickly than normal, greatly increasing the chances that you will injure your knees. Work toward keeping your weight within the normal range and if you are overweight, try losing a few pounds every single month. In fact, according to the National Institutes of Health, a recent study showed that people who were overweight reduced their risk of developing osteoarthritis by as much as 50 percent simply by losing 10 pounds.
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