If you’re like most people, you’ll probably take your knees for granted; they work when you want them to, and they do what you want them to do without complaint. However, knees can come under some serious strain, and as the largest (and strongest) joints within your body, it’s crucial you take good care of them. Remember, your knees carry about eight percent of your entire body weight, and you use them all the time. Whether you’re extremely active or your day entails a lot of sitting – you’ll still need to use your knees.
This is why it’s important to understand how to take care of your knees in the best way. Damaged knees can cause huge problems with mobility, as well as causing a lot of pain, and if you want to continue being active, your knees have to be healthy. Read on to find out what you can do.
Lose A Little Weight
As we’ve said, your knees take a lot of the strain of your body weight, so by losing a little weight, you can reduce the work your knees have to do. Just a relatively small weight loss of ten pounds can take 40 pounds away from your knee joints. Clearly, this is a huge difference, and it’s going to make your knees much healthier.
Not only will losing weight help to protect your knees, but it’s good for your overall health too. Losing weight will help you become more mobile, it will protect your heart, and it will even help you have better mental health, so if this is something you know you need to do and have been thinking about for a while, now is the perfect time to start.
Use A Knee Support
Although the most obvious reason to wear a knee support from podobrace.co.uk is after an injury to keep the joint stable, you can actually wear one without having been injured if you want to protect your knee.
If you know that your knee is susceptible to damage, perhaps due to a previous injury that weakened the joint, for example, wearing a knee support will help to ensure that you can put weight on the joint and move as you want to, and it will help to reduce the chances of suffering another injury, causing you even more problems.
Move
Your joints are made to be moved, and keeping them still and inactive for too long can actually cause problems rather than prevent them, which is what many people are sure to think. Of course, when you move, you do need to be careful and prevent injury as much as possible by taking precautions, but it’s far better to regularly move your joints than it is to keep them still.
The reason movement is so good for your knees is that when you move this joint, it will become lubricated, and that makes movement in general easier. If you stay still for a long time, you’ll notice your joints are stiff when you do move, and this is due to lack of lubrication and will cause pain and potentially lead to injury too.
