Is walking actually helpful to heal Chondromalacia Patella? Your health care provider may have
suggested going walking as a therapeutic exercise to heal the damaged cartilage right behind your
kneecap. And on the end of your thigh bone that's called Chondromalacia Patella, but maybe you've
tried walking and it's actually made it worse. In this video I'll explain how walking can
actually both hurt and help Chondromalacia Patella depending on your specific situation.
Chondromalacia Patella can get worse or get better with walking. And here's why.
There's two factors that you need to consider. The first factor is if you're flaring up right
now like your knee hurts if you just put pressure on your kneecap if you've been sitting for 15,
20, 30 minutes or an hour and your knee starts to ache in throb. If just squatting down if kneeling,
if doing simple activities that you do every day, hurt your kneecap, you feel
that Chondromalacia Patella pain in the front of your knee, then your knee is flared up right now.
And if you can definitively say your knees flared up, and you go try to walk for exercise,
if you get a mile in if you get 20, 30 minutes or more in, it's going to make
it worse because your cartilage on the back of your kneecap and I'm getting to the thigh
bone where those bones meet and move on each other. That cartilage is currently irritated.
And if you go walk and move your knee joint quite a bit, you're just going to rub it further. It's
very much like if you had a cut on your skin, and that skin was not healed properly yet. It's
in the healing process. And it's irritated right now if you touch it, it's going to hurt. If you
touch it enough or agitated, put pressure on it enough, it's going to damage it. Same thing.
It's happening on the inside of your body though, that cartilage right there is damaged,
it's irritated. And if you rub it more by going on a walk, because it's flared up right now,
it's going to make it worse. Now if you're not flared up, if you had Chondromalacia Patella that
was flared up in the recent past, but you've done your due diligence, you'd somehow gotten better.
Now walking might be better for you, walking might actually be therapeutic, it might actually load
the cartilage properly to facilitate healing and thickening of the cartilage. The second
factor that influences whether or not walking hurts or helps is the muscle balance that you
currently have around your knee and your hip. and to a lesser degree, but still influential.
You could even have muscle imbalances in your ankle and foot. So let me explain
Kandra Malaysia muscle imbalances. This is the root problem of Kandra. Malaysia,
in the knee joint here, here's the kneecap you have too much pressure from the quad muscles
and muscles that are on the front of the thigh. They come into this tendon right here and connect
to the kneecap, that kneecap then goes down into the shin bone right here, that kneecap rubs
against the thigh bone. And if these muscles are too strong, it's going to create excessive extra
pressure of the kneecap against the thigh bone, you should have a certain amount of
pressure cartilage is designed to take pressure. And the way the joint is set up the structure the
joints, you're supposed to put some pressure from the kneecap onto the thigh bone. But
if it's excessive, if you're getting too much pressure for what the system is designed for,
and what it's able to tolerate at this time based on your fitness level, then the
cartilage is going to begin to become injured. Now the root problem here is over dominant quad
muscles too strong in the quad muscles. Now that doesn't mean you have to have big quad muscles,
although that is usually a factor. But the muscles that are on the front of the thigh right here that
connect to that kneecap on me would be from the front of my hip right here down towards my knee.
These muscles have they're very overdeveloped they're big. If you do a lot of exercise and
you've got big quad muscles, and you don't really get this muscle back here,
the glutes muscle very strong, then it's probably going to be obvious that you
have a muscle imbalance. The other version of this is if you're not the fittest person you
really haven't exercised in a long time. If you're more thinner in your muscles,
you might still have a muscle imbalance even though you might look down at your thigh and say,
I don't have big quads. It's a relative balance, meaning if your quads are small,
but your glutes are even smaller, or maybe you do have some glutes, but you just don't use them.
If you think back to the last time that you felt tired in your glute
muscles besides sitting on them, you know from exercise versus tired and your quad muscles,
then you're probably quad dominant if you've had more fatigue and tiredness in your quads.
An easy way to measure this If you're not flared up as if you go on a brisk walk, I mean if you
kind of hustle just for a few minutes to three minutes, maybe five at most, and then you tell
yourself you think to yourself, what muscles are tired right now, if it is truly the quads are more
tired, then you've got the muscle imbalance and if you continue walking, you're probably going
to set off a Chondromalacia Patella problem or some other knee problem that shares the same
root problem as conundrum relation patella. So just to be clear, walking can hurt your
Chondromalacia Patella, if you're currently flared up. And if you have over dominant quads,
walking can help. If you're not currently flared up and you're using your glutes adequately.
They're the dominant muscle whenever you go walking. Now let me explain how to walk. In
order to help your knee pain from Chondromalacia Patella, I'm going to briefly describe this,
there's a video that I made that goes much more in depth on how to walk and gives
you much better views and angles of this I've linked it in the description below.
Go check that out if you want more specifics, but the gist of it is,
when you walk every time you take a step. So I'm going to, I'm about to put pressure on
my right foot on this leg right here. When I when I stand on this leg and other foots up,
this glute right here needs to tighten up a bit. And then when you step onto the other leg,
I'm going to put my left foot down now and pick up my right leg. Now my other glute,
my left side needs to contract. So every time you take a step by
step with my right side, my right glute should contract by step on my left side,
my left glute should contract. And that's how you should be taking steps. With your
glutes firing as you put weight on to the foot. There's research studies that show that when you
put weight on a leg, foot muscles and glute muscles should fire simultaneously. And they
should be one of the more dominant muscle groups working as you're moving along. thigh muscles and
even calf muscles are really more control muscles. They're more deceleration muscles without getting
into the specifics or slowing you down from bad movements, or putting too much force in
a certain direction. But the glutes and the foot muscles are really the ones that are
driving you forward as you're walking or even doing more intense activities like running.
Now, this seems simple at first thought just fire your glutes. But the trick is to not fire
your quads, the front of your thigh at the same time that you tighten up your glutes.
So in other words, when you step and you're firing the quad muscles, you want to contract this muscle
without also firing this muscle quite a bit. So it should feel like you're tightening back
here but not really tightening much at all, you might have a little bit of muscle tightening,
muscle flexing or engagement of the muscle, but it should never dominate
or be more than the muscles back here. This should be the one that's working the most.
That right there is a trick that many of you if you're dealing with contribution, patella, are
going to have the most difficulty overcoming being able to fire your glutes without also firing your
quads so much. And if you've got comfortableness with telling you been putting all that excessive
force onto your kneecap and thigh bone. Then it's because your quad muscles have
reflexively you've developed this over time you've trained the muscles to fire most of the time
whenever you're walking, and you might need to unlearn or reteach your quads to calm down and not
work so hard whenever you go walking and taking steps. You need to make it more glute dominance.
Now what do you do if you just can't get your quads to relax,
that means that you should not be walking because even if you're flared down right now and walking
a little bit doesn't really hurt your knees. If you go pursue walking and you're using your
quads quite a bit, you're going to be aggravating your kneecap and eventually working into some knee
pain again, that's why this recurs, this comes back and then people take a break and they rested
and do things to make it feel better and then they start exercising again or moving again. And then
the knee pain from Chondromalacia Patella returns. The reason for that is because they never fix
the underlying muscle imbalance of getting those quads to relax and making the glutes
work more. That means you've got to spend some time working on firing your glutes without your
quads in a non-locking position. You've got to do it lying down on your back maybe in standing.
I've actually got a video just on that it's linked in the description below. And that video is called
Top Five Chondromalacia Patella exercises that make your knee pain better go check out that video
and start doing the glute exercises so that you can calm down your quads after you've gotten your
quads to calm down and your glutes to fire better. Now you're in a position to come back to walking
with much more confidence that you're going to use your glutes properly and help your Chondromalacia
Patella rather than make it worse. I hope this video was helpful. For you give it a thumbs up
if you thought it was share it with somebody you think needs to hear this somebody who's suffering
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