In this video I'm going to show you how to relieve knee arthritis pain in five minutes or less
using a percussion massage gun. Now these massage guns have become quite popular,
and they're much more affordable these days, you can get one for under 100 bucks or around $100.
This one's my favorite one, I've got a link for it in the description below. It's an affiliate links,
we make a tiny bit of money if you buy one through that link. So we appreciate you can
support our channel and allow us to continue making these videos. But truly, I love this
gun. It's the quietest gun that I've seen. It's pretty light, there are lighter ones out
there. But I like the weight of this one because it helps with what you got to do. The attachments
are easy to take on and take off. In fact, we've got it we've done a review on this and go check
that out. We'll talk more about it there. My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I'm a
specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated
to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and
pain medications. Please consider subscribing to our channel so that you don't miss out on any of
the helpful videos, we post each and every week. And before we get into using this device here,
I just want to warn you to stay off your bones, you don't want to go on this device with your
kneecap you want it to go onto your hip bone up here, we're going to be moving the tissues in the
front of your thigh and hip here. But it's only for muscle, you don't want to be putting this on
anything else but muscle. And you know right here on the front of your thighs all we're focused on.
So you're going to flip your device on this one has a switch here in the bottom,
that you flip over, and then the lights turn on, you hit that power button right there. And it's
on the lowest setting, which is where we're going to going to start. So the first thing I need you
to do is think about dividing the front of your thigh into thirds, you have your inner third, the
front third right here and the outer third, and you're just going to go up and down each one for
about a minute or so a little less is fine. And we're going to stick to the middle first
because that's there's a muscle right there, that tends to be the stiffest muscle when it comes to
knee arthritis problems. And you're just going to go up and down to kind of warm up the tissue.
And if you feel like you can tolerate a higher intensity right away, go for it. That's cool.
I'm going to bump myself up a few notches here. He's going to do a couple of passes up and down.
And make sure to stay just on the muscle. Now it doesn't matter do you have
clothes on like myself, or if you got shorts on and you're directly on your skin, that's fine,
too. whatever is most comfortable for you. And I'm pushing down slightly here, I can push down
harder if I like. If you can tolerate it, that's fine. Just don't push on anything that hurts.
You do want to find that knots or tender spots.
But don't push them super hard. Like I've got maybe a little tiny knot right here. All you want
to do is let the weight of the gun Hang on there. And your hand pressure just slightly increased
enough to not make it cringe or whine or, or cry or complain but we're just kind of works it out.
That's gold right there, you can find a knot and just hang out on it for a bit.
That is going to be super beneficial for helping out your knee arthritis.
So once you've got up and down the middle third here, the front of your thigh, and go onto the
inside part of your thigh and go up and down. And typically on the inside part of your thigh
right here, there's a teardrop shape of the quad muscle called the VMO. They call it the VMO. It's
not really its own muscle, it's called the vastus medialis oblique, it's just certain fibers of the
muscle that make like a teardrop shape right here. That's where people tend to get a little over
develop like myself. And you can work that out with a gun like this. Once you've done up and
down the inside part of the thigh here, then you want to go on to the outer part of the thigh. And
this outer part has some hip flexor muscles in it the run all the way up into the front pocket
area right here. This front pocket area is another spot like down here that can get kind of tender
and stiff, you might get knots in there. For me, I get a little bit here. So I'm
going to just dig it a little bit back, I'm going to ramp up the intensity of it
went from up to attend. And the point here is just to relax and let it do its work. You can rub it
around, you can hang out in the same spot. Just don't be on bone, make sure you're on the muscle
and get that area to soften up. You can make some passes up and down just like so
little bit of pressure is fine. And you really don't need a ton of time doing this. You get
diminishing returns after a few minutes, meaning it won't benefit you that much
more you need to actually go move and do exercise that's going to benefit you more
in the long run. So if you've gone up and down like this a few times, then what you can do to
make this a little more intense is bend your knee. So it looks like this. You can you can put your
leg up on the surface that you're on. You can you know put your leg up on something like this and
work it this way, just so that you can see better. I'm going to put my knee down on this stool here
and I've got my knee bent uncomfortable amounts. If you can't bend your knee very
good because of arthritis, then you'll have to find the best position of engineering,
right so here's a better angle for you to see what I'm doing here on the front of my face.
So I bend my knee here that puts a little bit of tension on the muscle, just make sure it doesn't
hurt your knee to bend it in this position. And now you do the exact same thing go up and down
the front middle of the thigh, as many passes as you like, I typically will do three or four,
sometimes a bit more, but I feel like I have a knot. And then right here on the front,
teardrop shaped muscle hang up there a bit and give it some good pressure.
Maybe up and down the inner groin, inner groin, inner thigh muscle, adductor muscles
is what they're called. And on the outside here, I'll hang up there a bit too. I do get a little
stiffer on the outside here, especially up in this hip area. Now these muscles are critical
in influencing knee arthritis. The reason why you want to loosen
them up is because with knee arthritis, you will develop an overpressure in the knee joint because
these muscles are too over developed into overuse. When that happens, it compresses the knee joint,
it pushes the kneecap down against the thigh bone. Let me show you on the skeleton here.
All those muscles on the front of the thigh. They when they shorten up, they pull the kneecap
up against the thigh bone, the hip flexor muscles, a one that's up here at your pocket,
it has the ability to compress a knee joint along with the quad muscles, they can also
push the shin bone into the thigh bone, and it compresses all the cartilage here in this area,
which over time causes that cartilage to wear down and the joints become more and more arthritic.
So the reason why you would want to use one of these guns to soften up this muscle is because it
can get it can shorten a bit and stiffen. And if you can relax it and allow it to lengthen a bit,
then temporarily, you'll have some relief in your knee by decompressing it so that the arthritis
isn't so bad. I think one of these goes a long way. If you don't have one already, you should
highly consider getting one yourself. They are available in so many places.
Now, like I said earlier, there's so much more affordable now, they used to cost over $300
starting up to five or $600. And now you can get one for about 100 US dollars or less if you can
catch one on sale. The benefit to this is if you can get some temporary relief that might replace
taking pain medications, whether with whether it's over the counter permanent pain medications,
or prescription pain medications, and not just the cost of these medications,
but the side effects of the medications because they can damage your liver,
your brain, your kidneys and your other organs. You want to preserve those as much as possible.
And this is a very natural solution for freeing up those muscles in specific to because pain
medication doesn't specifically treat one thing your body once you take it, it treats
kind of the whole thing. Now it can also help you avoid knee injections for pain,
which of course is a more specific problem. But it's not treating the root problem
which is freeing up this muscle like this does. Now the downside is it doesn't give you long term
relief because after you loosen this up, you'll feel better like I already feel better right now.
But these muscles are going to stiffen up again, if you're not addressing the underlying root
problem, which is a muscle imbalance. Typically these muscles back in here are too weak and
because of that weakness, these muscles are being used too much causing that compression here.
So fixing the root problem would have to do with fixing other muscles first to normalize pressures
in the joint. Now there might have been a lot but I can promise you to go into so much more detail
about it in other videos on this channel. In fact, we've linked them in the description below. If you
go find the playlist for knee arthritis help. There's tons of videos in there to help you
with exercises, advice and tips for addressing your knee arthritis problem at home. So if you
liked this video, give us a thumbs up and please consider subscribing to our channel so that you
don't miss out on any of our helpful videos. And we hope to see you in the next video friends bye