In this video, I'm going to tell you the top three secret ways to slow down and
even stop knee arthritis progression. Now, this is a controversial topic, because in
the healthcare field, it's very divided, there really isn't much middle ground, people either
believe that you cannot stop the progression of knee arthritis. And people that have it
are doomed to have a knee replacement someday. And there's another population in the healthcare
field that believes that you can slow down the arthritis and even stop it and avoid
having to get a knee replacement surgery. Obviously, I side with that population,
the last one that I think that you can stop knee arthritis progression. So I do have to warn you,
if you've been seeing your doctor, and they're telling you that you're going to need
a knee replacement someday, and you're not buying that information, then this video is for you.
But if you're of the camp, if you strongly believe that knee arthritis just ends up in getting a knee
replacement someday, then you might have some beef with this video. And I'll completely take
it you want to drop comments in here. Let's go at it. I want to I love to hear it. But listen
to this video first, before you drop comments in there, make sure that you analyze the information,
look it up Google it if you want, I am not making this stuff up. This is completely true stuff.
So let me tell you the number one secret, it's to stop irritating your knees. Healthcare
professionals often recommend that people with knee arthritis go do exercises that
actually end up making their knee arthritis worse. The reason for that is because the
exercise itself is an irritating factor because of the way the exercise is done.
One of the most common exercises, it's recommended for knee arthritis is walking. And
this is recommended because in some people, it kind of helps. And in a lot of people,
it doesn't help. And there's other exercises too. If you've ever been to a physical therapy
clinic or you've looked up exercises on the internet, you'll find that a lot of these
exercises actually kind of make you worse. I've even had patients here in my office
that have brought me sheets of exercises, pictures of exercises and instructions from
their doctor's office. And these are exercises for knee arthritis. And the patient is in front of me
telling me I hurt when I do these exercises, I feel worse my knees swells. So here's the
secret, you got to stop those exercises. Even if a healthcare professional gave them
to you, you have to just listen to your knees. If there's swelling going on, if there's more pain,
if overall as the weeks go by, you're getting worse and not necessarily better from those
exercises, then you got to stop them. And let me tell you this one situation, whenever you try
the exercises for a week, you get worse than you stop, you take a break, maybe a week or two off,
and then you start doing the exercises again. But you worsened again, but you're not as bad
as when you started it because you did the exercises lighter. This happens all the time.
And people convince themselves that, well the exercises should kind of hurt, no pain,
no gain. But I took some time off so I got better. But it wasn't the exercises that make you better.
It was taking that time off that made you better. So you have to really focus in on what is helping
you and what is hurting you. And if some movements some exercise if you go walking, if overall you're
getting worse doing it, you need to stop that because you're irritating the inside of your
knee joint, you're rubbing the surfaces that are already irritated, and you're making them worse.
By definition, Arthritis is joint swelling. That's what the Latin words for arthritis means. osteo
arthritis means bone and joint swelling. So if you go do some activity, and it just creates more
swelling in the area, more redness, stiffness, more heat, more pain, when you go put weight on
it or try to bend it all the way or straightened out all the way in that activity is irritating
your knees, and it's progressing the arthritis rather than stopping it or ending it completely.
You need to stop that exercise. And I do have to warn you, it's going to be a challenge to go back
to that healthcare professional that gave you those exercises and tell them that they're not
working for you. They might be open to hearing what you're saying hopefully they will be but
they may not also have very much more to offer you that may not be a specialist in helping
you out with your knee arthritis problem. Now being a physical therapist myself and
having taught in a physical therapy school and train many therapists over the years,
I can tell you with confidence that physical therapists as a whole are generally pretty
good at helping people after they've had surgery. But helping somebody before they have surgery and
helping them in a way so that they can prevent having surgery like a knee replacement surgery
for somebody who's suffering from knee arthritis. That is not a common thing that every physical
therapist does. It is a small specialty amongst all the therapists and you have to do some digging
and research to find the right therapist for you. So please stop irritating your knees.
Listen into your poor knees, make sure you're not making more swelling happening your knees,
because you're not losing any more motion. exercises should generally feel good.
They should reduce swelling overall. And they should begin to increase the amount of time
you can spend on your feet. And they should make you feel better in the morning when you
wake up and you have that knee stiffness, they should allow you to sleep better secret number
two is get stronger glutes increasing the strength of your gluteus muscles,
which there's many muscles back there. It is directly correlated or in other
words connected to decreasing knee pain. There's strong research to show this especially beginning
in the 2000s. Moving on to today, we're in 2022. Today, their strong research connecting
glute strength with a reduction in knee pain yet the current mainstream thinking in the
medical field is to strengthen all the muscles in the area of the knee and the hip exhaustively.
When it comes to knee arthritis. That means your healthcare professional that might be helping you
with your knee arthritis problem is they may be giving you glute exercises, but they're probably
also giving you quad exercises, hamstring exercises, foot exercises, calf exercises.
And working out all of those muscles may seem like a good idea. When you just think about it
logically like well, let's work out everything. That's kind of the thought behind therapists.
But what I found in practice is that if we solely focus on glute muscles, especially
when it's obvious that they're weak, I mean, I get patients all the time. And I tell them their glute
muscles are weak and they kind of scoff at it. They're like, I could have told you that I see
myself in the mirror and there's nothing there. But I literally tell them only work on glute
muscles do not work on your quads, you almost want your quads to get weaker, not directly, it's more
you want the glutes to get stronger so that it can balance out the imbalance that you have between
the quads and the glutes. And if you spend any time strengthening your quads, then you're not
letting your glutes catch up to your quads. Now I'm not necessarily in favor of losing strength.
So I don't really tell my patients to get weaker in their quads,
I just tell them to focus a lot on their glute muscles. Now this information is taught in most
schools that I know of as far as talking to my colleagues, this is something that they get.
But implementing it properly in treatments is still not something that's mainstream.
Healthcare professionals as a whole are still guiding their patients to really focus on
quad muscle strengthening, hamstring muscle strengthening and all the other muscles that
I listed. And they're not spending enough time on the glutes. So if you're at home dealing with
a knee arthritis problem, and you've been working out your quads, your hamstrings and other muscles,
and not paying that much attention to your glutes, you need to focus on your glutes.
And kind of a bonus secret here attached to this secret is when you do an exercise,
and somebody tells you it's supposed to work out a certain muscle and you don't feel it
working out that muscle. It's not working out that muscle. Again, listen to your body,
you need to feel the glute muscle tightening up working, burning, getting a little bit sore.
In order for you to know to have certainty that you're working out your glute muscles,
I get so many patients that tell me they work out their glute muscles. And then I tell them,
Okay, show me the exercise you're doing. And ask them where do you feel it work it out. And they
do not point to their glutes, they point somewhere else in their body, their hamstrings, your quads,
other muscles are working, not their glutes, therefore, that exercise is no longer a glute
exercise, even if that's the intensity exercise. Another example connected to this is if you go
to a gym, and there's a bunch of machines there for weightlifting, for exercising, you know the
types that you see, like at a planet fitness or a Gold's Gym, where you sit in there, it's got
pads all over the place, and you put the pin in the plate, it's got a stack of plates, well on
those machines, there's usually a little picture of a human body with the muscles highlighted that
you're supposed to be working on that exercise. And if you go on there, and you see that the
glutes are highlighted, but you do the exercise, and it does not work out your glutes. It's not
a glute exercise for you, everybody's body's a little bit different. And not everybody's body's
going to respond the same way to that machine. So you need to figure out a way to make your glutes
work. Otherwise, you're not being productive in stopping the progression of knee arthritis
who follow on some rants here, this is a good rent video.
I didn't expect it to be this intense. But let's move on to number three. Got to figure out what
phase of knee arthritis you're in. I've got some phases listed here that I'm going to give you some
more details on. And these are the phases of our knee arthritis recovery program, which you
can learn more about in the description below. We have yet to clearly identify the different
phases of knee arthritis in our medical research. The only phases that you'll probably find if you
Google are the severity phase. uses meaning like stage one, stage two, stage three, I think it goes
up to stage four these days. And that's just basically like mild arthritis, mild, moderate
arthritis, severe arthritis. And then like beyond repair arthritis, that would be your stage for
like your knee and knee replacement. There's no turning back. It's a point of no return.
And I believe that staging system is flawed, because it only goes one way.
And it doesn't really allow you a way out of knee arthritis. That's what this staging system does,
it allows you a way out, the red means is severe, and then you get better as time goes on. And this
staging system reflects the normal stages of healing that we talk about when it comes to
other body parts. And that's well documented. And to just give you a little taste of them
a preview of that, when it comes to skin, there's four stages of healing stage number
one is hemostasis. And that's like, right when you cut yourself, like if you were to
make yourself right here, and blood starts coming out, the first priority that your
body is going through in that area is clotting the blood vessels so that you don't bleed out.
After you develop a blood clot and you stop bleeding, then you move into the next phase,
which is the inflammation phase. Many people don't realize that
inflammation is a necessary part of healing. In fact, there's all these anti-inflammatory
medications out there that disrupt the healing process. And this is something that doctors know
about, but they don't tell you they, if you think about it, they're giving you anti-inflammatory
medication, like ibuprofen naproxen injections have anti-inflammatory medications in them,
and they are messing up the healing process. In exchange for pain relief. The in the
inflammation phase is characterized by swelling, heat, pain, and what's happening there is your
body is sending special cells to the area to begin to move you into the next phase, which is
the proliferation phase. In the proliferation phase, your body is laying down scar tissue,
it's making scar tissue in the area to heal it so that you can use the tissue again,
just like your skin, think of that cut idea. Again, if your skin is cut right there, you clot,
then it gets red and swollen for a while, then you begin to develop a scab and under the scab,
the scar tissue is developing. And eventually that scab falls off and you can see the scar
that's there, then you hit the fourth stage, which is maturation, that's what they call it.
And the idea behind this stage is the scar tissue is gradually remodeling. So that it
can be tissue that you use the rest of your life. And it's functional for what you need it for. This
thinking has yet to be applied to situations like knee arthritis, because you can't see the inside
of your knee like you can the outside of your skin. This is my strong belief that your knee
arthritis follows the same process. And if you give it what it needs, just like your skin, if you
baby your skin and let it go through those phases, it heals and you get a normal looking scar.
Maybe you're not proud of your scar, maybe you are. But the nice thing is you know that
your skin is going to be okay, you're not going to bleed out and you'll be able to do everything you
need to do on the inside of your knee. A healthy scar tissue on your joint lining is actually a
good thing. This is why we're finding in research studies that it is possible to have no knee pain,
and no limitations in your knee, but still have evidence of knee arthritis if you take an x ray.
So the signs of knee arthritis are still there. But an individual might be just fine. They might
be active, healthy exercising, have full range of motion, their knee joint and feel just fine.
That's because they've gone through all those phases that I just mentioned. It just hasn't
been explained to them. And I don't think the health care professionals managing these people
are really thinking about it when it comes to to figuring out how these patients got better.
So there you have it three secrets in the healthcare field that most healthcare
professionals know about. They just don't know how to apply it and tell their patients and then
they get used to everyday practice a certain way and it's hard to disrupt that pattern.
I hope this can help you out. If you're looking for more help for knee arthritis.
We've got tons of videos with exercises stretches more helpful information like this,
more explanations on how knee arthritis happens everything you need to know about knee arthritis.
You can find in a playlist in the link in the description below for knee arthritis help. And
you can also learn more about our Knee Arthritis Recovery Program, which is a program that walks
you through these phases right here so that you can know exactly what to do to march into feeling
better in your knee arthritis. Thanks so much for watching. I'll catch you in the next video. Bye