Physio on ross - Chronic knee pain & weakness report
FOUR Mostly Unknown Biological Facts You Need To Discover About Knee “Treatments” If You Want To Slow, Stop or Even Reverse Their Downhill Slide As You Get Older.
Plus A Startling Fact That Will Give Your Clarity About Why You Must NOT Just “Live With It” When There Is A Path You Can Follow.
There is some great news about recovering the capabilities of your knees, if you are willing to follow the slow and boring path to recovery. Before we get to that it is vital to understand what makes your knees so important for your health – and it is not the reasons you think!
People don’t die of “Old Age”. There is no actual disease called “old age”. What happens is that your systems get clogged up over time, and results in a downward slide in your overall health. And people are often surprised to discover that knee problems can lead to an acceleration of the problems of “aging”.
You most likely think of your knee problem as just the pain, or the ache, or the annoyance of not being able to do things you really would like to do. Maybe it is the sleep disturbance. Maybe it is because you have to take pills. Maybe you are just waiting for it to get bad enough for an operation. Whatever your thoughts there is a really big and dangerous bull elephant in the room, and no one tells you about it.
What could be more important than pain and inflammation? Or being unable to do things? The answer is related to ability to move.
Your “Foot and Calf Pump” Is Absolutely VITAL To Your Health & Vitality
A key part of your anatomy called the “Foot and Calf Pump“. It is known as the “Venous Muscle Pump“. That does not sound to impressive, but let’s just touch on some very basic anatomy, and how your body works?
Firstly, you know that your heart pumps your blood in pipes called “arteries”.
These come FROM your heart and take blood to all parts of your body. As the arteries get closer and closer to your muscles (for example), they branch out and get smaller and smaller. When they reach your muscle the pipes are extremely small, so that the gases can move from the pipe to and from the muscle cells. Past this point – it is no longer your HEART pumping that moves the blood.
Once your blood pipes have delivered blood and nutrients to your muscle, how does it get back to your heart and lungs again?
The blood pipes are called VEINs when they are returning to your heart. Now consider that your body is mostly upright. Most of our lives are spent standing or sitting. This means that gravity can help pull that blood back to your heart. Fair enough.
But it needs to get back to the heart. Gravity CANNOT help move the venous blood back to your heart. It is UPHILL!
Luckily our bodies are designed to cope with this challenge. (You will see why knee health is so important.)
The answer is that muscle pumping in your legs PUSHES the blood from the tips of your toes all the way up. All the blood in your lower that must get back UP to your liver, heart and lungs is moved by the pumps built into your feet, calves and thigh muscles.
And those pumps only work when you MOVE the muscles. All the muscles do some of this work, but the most essential is the FOOT & CALF PUMP. If you do not use this sufficiently, the blood will POOL in your lower body. The veins (bring blood TO the heart) will over time fail to cope with that overflow. The “valves” will blow and leak. You will see swollen and varicose veins, and purple stains on your skin. Your legs will ache. The waste products from your muscles will not be cleared and will hang around – causing release of inflammation. The muscle, joints and other cells of your legs will not be able to access the oxygen and nutrients they need for maintenance.
You will have a “swamp”.
Also importantly your heart will try to help by working harder. Your blood pressure will be messed up. You get the picture, right? And that is only half of the reason that you need to recover your knee strength.
Without Pumping Movement of The Foot & Calf Pump – Your Lymph System Also Becomes Swampy
The other half is that as well as the “vein” system that brings depleted blood back to the chest, there is another circulation system that runs alongside it, which also relies on the Foot & Calf Pump. This is called the “Lymphatic System“.
The lymph system is responsible for moving all the of fluids that are not blood around your body.
The lymph system also provides you with “lymphocytes” (white blood cells) and is the basis for much of your immune system. You will have heard of “lymph nodes”. For now, just know that your lymph system is vitally important, and that it does not function perfectly unless there is good “flow”.
And that flow is also produced mostly by your Foot & Calf Pump. Just like the flow of your blood in your veins.
That was a little complex, but it is massively important for you to understand the danger that exists when you do not use your legs consistently. And you cannot use your legs if your knees don’t let you…
In simple summary: Your body is designed for you to MOVE your feet and legs almost constantly so that the blood and fluids can get pumped (against gravity) to where they need to be. If this does not happen, you are going to have increasing problems.
And that’s why anything that reduces your movement of your ankles and legs (like chronic knee problems) is a very serious threat. Your entire quality of life depends on the movement of this part of your body.
Pumps Your Blood and Lymph Fluids from Your Lower Body
Huge Threat To Health Due To Poor Circulation + Increased Resistance
Using Your Foot-Calf Pump Is A Major Component Of Keeping Health and Vitality
So we now know that without the ability to work our “Foot-Calf” pump regularly we are going to have challenges with the drainage systems in the lower half of our bodies. Just walking will do this to a great degree. Remember that “10,000 Steps Challenge”? Each step pumps a little blood and a little lymph fluid steadily up from the bottom of our bodies to the middle.
If you knees give you grief so you cannot walk without a lot of pain, swelling and misery – you have a problem. And after reading this you know how big a problem that can become. If your knees are completely stuffed, then it is advisable to get advice on a program that at least gets you moving your feet and calves to pump for you.
But Our Bodies Are Extraordinary. And Our Knees Can Respond To The Right Training Program – Even When X-Rays Look Dismal!
This is not a miracle clinic where a wand is waved and things instantly get better. Rather we have a program based on the proven knowledge that increasing the strength of the muscles in and around a joint can have a huge positive effect on the health of that joint. Very slowly STIMULATING your body to improve the blood flow, to flush inflammatory (pain) chemicals out, and in some cases it does seem amazing. This training can be done by anyone still above ground, but results vary a great deal.
The key is to do the very opposite of what most of us want. We want fast results, and we want to do as little as possible to get them, at least I do. And modern medicine has trained us to expect FAST, and that FAST equals GOOD. With the rehabilitation of your knee capability – FAST does not work. It fails. And then we tend to “live with it” and perhaps use medication to reduce the misery, or just do not do things we would like to do. Or NEED to do, like walking.
With a lack of imagination, I have called this SLOW, CAREFUL, CUSTOM STEPS program “The Cunningham Method“! (Actually I call it that because I lost a bet, but that’s another story).
This program is for people who recognize that they need to help their knees get better. Those knees might be just starting to give trouble, or they may have been a burden for decades. You might be in that terrible phase where your doctor has told to you to wait a few years until they are bad enough to have a knee replacement. Or you might have already had knee surgery and it has not given you the relief you were looking for – or the surgery was so long ago that the improvement has faded. Or you might just be in the early phase where it only hurts a bit for a day or two after a walk – but it puts you off walking the Strand with your dog.
Whatever category your knees are in – there is really only one track that is not medicines or surgery or both. And if you do end up getting surgery later, the stronger and healthier your knee muscles are the better your results from surgery. And unfortunately the Method must be done with a trained physiotherapist rather than be done at home. DIY at home just does not work in this case.
In one long sentence. It is a custom training program for you involving your knee muscles as well as your ankles and hips, that starts at exactly the right level of intensity for your condition with exercises done precisely under close supervision that increase only according to your condition progress in sessions twice a week for 12 weeks while ensuring that at no stage is the training too intense which will cause pain and inflammation and take you backwards.
It is SLOW and PRECISE. It is designed for “normal” people who are not is the super-duper condition of professional athletes who can make a recovery in 6 weeks or more. Rebuilding the strength of your knees is not something that can be done quickly. If you attempt to go to fast, you go backwards. And you need to continue the closely supervised training sessions for 12 weeks because less than that is not long enough to get results that can be sustained. There is usually a good improvement within 4 to 5 weeks, but it is essential to gently build a strong base and to complete the process.
The Cunningham Method simply trains the muscles around and in your knee to become stronger. This has been shown in research to reduce pain and inflammation, as well as reduce need for medications. You will find your stability improves as your strength improves, and your ability to balance and go further and further is enhanced.
When you finish the program, you will need to continue with a simple program to ensure you keep your strength – especially if you are getting on in age. You cannot become slack with your knees, because you need them functioning so that you can keep the circulation in the bottom half of your body flowing!
Your muscles of and around your knee joint can be strengthened with the PRECISE exercises, at the PRECISE level of intensity, the PRECISE level of frequency (how often), and WITHOUT OVERLOADING that will cause you inflammation and pain (and going backwards).
The process also includes the same PRECISE level of training of the muscles and joints of your hips and ankles.
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Molly Rogers created a safe and non-judgmental space for me to talk about my struggles in life and challenged me to answer difficult questions that have helped me take a deep look at myself and the life I truly want. She provided me valuable tools to overcome my obstacles and bad habits, and she has guided me in taking better decisions that will lead me in the right direction to achieving my life goals. I’m looking forward to our next session.
Before working with Molly I felt stuck. I wasn’t enjoying my job and my relationship was in a bad place. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. During coaching with Billy I regained my self-confidence and got clarity about what I value and what I want to achieve. As a result, I changed my career and I now live my life to the fullest. I’m very grateful for Billy's guidance, and recommend him to anyone who needs help in changing their life.”
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