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MSK Health
Brighton & Hove and West Sussex
Brighton & Hove and West Sussex
Knee pain is a frequent complaint. It can sometimes be concerning, particularly if it is very sore. However, knees often respond well to specific exercises and the pain is rarely caused by something serious. The knee is built to be very strong and is good at holding your weight, walking, and jumping (especially when the surrounding muscles are strong). It is very difficult to damage.
Most knee complaints will improve with time and some simple steps to strengthen it. At times it might not feel that your knee can get any better, but very few people need any extra care other than the steps below.
The best advice is to continue to use your knee as normally as you can. It may be sensible to make some adjustments to what you do with your knee whilst it is sore. It is important to know that using your knee is safe and the right thing to do.
Being closer to your ideal body weight is likely to also help your knee issue. It is often the process of getting fitter (eating ‘cleaner’ and being more active) that helps the waist line and can help sore knees feel better too.
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Exercise, particularly strengthening exercise, is the best medicine for most aches and pains including knees, even very sore knees. Exercise can be anything that challenges your muscles and does not need to mean going to the gym or the swimming pool, as not everyone enjoys these things.
There are some examples of exercises to do below. You can use our symptom tracker to check if what you are doing is helping you to improve.
Yes. If you start avoiding things that you find difficult, it often becomes more challenging to help your knee. You are safe to exercise and use your leg despite the fact that it might be a bit uncomfortable.
In most cases, having an X-ray or a scan is not useful in helping your knee get better. In certain situations they are important and necessary, but often the results show us things that are normal for the age of your knee and are not related to your pain. This is why your GP or clinician may say that it is not needed.
Most knee pain will settle naturally in time with little or no help. Occasionally you may need some extra help to get your knee better.
If you feel you would like to talk to a healthcare professional to help you further with your knee you can fill in a self referral form.
Exercise is often used to help you improve your symptoms by increasing your muscular strength. We all need to improve our muscle mass (the amount of muscle we have) before being able to increase our strength, power and endurance.
Strengthening is a process that requires us to challenge our bodies with activity to be able to drive a change. These changes are not immediate and strengthening will take at least 6-8 weeks before we notice big changes.
Below are some ideas of how to choose what repetitions you should be using. Remember that you need muscle mass and strength before you can improve your power and/or endurance:
This is the process where we build muscle mass.
Rep range tends to be greater.
3 sets x 12-15 repetitions.
Improve your strength with lifting heavier loads.
Improve your strength by lifting more repetitions.
3 sets x 3-5 repetitions with a heavier load.
3 sets x 8-12 repetitions slowly.
Hard work (80%)
When you are ‘strong’ you can increase the speed at which you move a load.
4 sets x 4-6 repetitions.
50% maximal effort.
Explosive.
The goal is to be able to improve the amount of time that you can keep going for.
3-4 sets x 15-25 repetitions.
Light resistance.
Do you find it too difficult?
Is your pain worsening
Do you lose good technique/movement patterning?
If Yes, Regress.
Reduce the load.
Reduce the repetitions.
Reduce the depth of the movement
Have you just recently progressed?
Do you feel that there is still a challenge but your pain does not worsen?
If Yes, Maintain.
You might need a bit longer doing what you’re doing.
Do you find it easy?
Can you complete your whole program without a challenge?
Do you not have any flare ups?
If Yes, Progress.
Increase the weight.
Increase the repetitions.