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Can Exercise Heal Knee Arthritis? How To Rebuild Cartilage Naturally

Can exercise heal knee arthritis, or does it just improve pain and function?

Watch the video to learn how to rebuild cartilage naturally using medical exercise therapy.

Knee Arthritis Guide Prevent or Delay Knee Replacement More 4 Life Physical Therapy St. Louis MO 63011 Gladly Serving Ballwin, Manchester, Chesterfield, Des Peres, Ellisville, and St. Louis County

Understanding Knee Cartilage

To understand how exercise can help knee arthritis, you need to know a bit about the nature of the cartilage in your knees.

The type of cartilage in your knees, as well as most other joints in your body, is called articular cartilage or hyaline cartilage.

Articular cartilage is made up of chondrocytes, the cells that lay down new cartilage, as well as an extracellular matrix.

Structure of articular cartilage

Image Source: Research Gate, licensed via Creative Commons 4.0

The extracellular matrix consists of strong collagen fibers and proteoglycans.

Glycosaminoglycans and Proteoglycans in cartilage

Mfigueiredo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Proteoglycans hold a lot of water. In fact, 70-80% of your cartilage by mass is water.

Water content makes cartilage strong and resistant to compression.

However, after a cartilage injury such as arthritis, water can start to leak out of the cartilage.

Imagine a sponge filled with water. The more pressure you put on the sponge, the more water leaks out.

Imagine arthritic knee cartilage like a sponge holding water

This is why people with knee arthritis often have trouble with weight-bearing activities.

Can Exercise Heal Knee Arthritis?

Exercise is one of the most proven methods to help with knee arthritis, but it’s essential to balance the beneficial effects of exercise with potential inflammation caused by repetitive activity.

Partial weight-bearing exercises are ideal for this purpose.

They stimulate the chondrocytes through repetitive compression and distraction and improve blood flow and circulation to the knee joints without causing excessive pain and inflammation that can result from full weight-bearing exercises.

Now it's good to have realistic expectations. Although research does show that exercises has positive effects on knee cartilage structure (not just pain and function), it would be unrealistic to think that it will turn 70-year-old arthritic knees into 20-year-old knees.

However, with proper loading and exercise volume, exercise can help heal knee arthritis.

Partial Weight-Bearing Exercises For Knee Arthritis

For these partial weight-bearing exercises, we'll use a G8FLEX Total Performance Gym, which is similar to a Total Gym.

You can adjust the percentage of body weight bearing by the height of the incline.  This allows from 10% to 47.7% bodyweight.

Exercise To Rebuild Knee Cartilage

To perform these exercises, use a low incline on the GR8FLEX.

The video demonstrates at a Level 3, which is approximately 15% bodyweight.

GR8FLEX Squat Exercise to Rebuild Knee Cartilage

Lie down on the platform and scoot down into a deep squat.

If you have moderate to severe knee arthritis, it's likely that deep squatting may be either bothersome or impossible to do.

However, because you're only using a small percentage of bodyweight, the GR8FLEX allows you to move comfortably through a large range of motion.

This allows slight knee joint compression to stimulate chondrocytes and increase circulation without causing excessive pain and function.

In fact, this exercise should be as close to pain-free as possible.

For optimal cartilage health, aim for thousands of repetitions.

While research is lacking in this area, based on medical exercise therapy, a Norwegian form of therapy, thousands of repetitions at approximately 20% of your 1 repetition maximum (1RM) are needed to rebuild cartilage.

Medical exercise therapy has been used in several recent knee arthritis research studies. (Østerås2019, Logerstedt 2018, Torstensen 2018)

At one repetition per second, you would do 60 repetitions per minute, 120 reps in 2 minutes, and approximately 1,200 reps in 20 minutes.

Extrapolating this out further, that would be 3,600 in an hour of continuous exercise.

This amount of time on a leg press machine at a gym would be impractical, making home equipment like the G8FLEX ideal.

Exercises for Leg Strength

For strength improvement, adjust the G8FLEX to a higher position.

At the highest position, you’re bearing close to 50% of your body weight.

GR8FLEX Squat Exercise for Leg Strength

Perform the exercises in a comfortable range of motion, aiming for muscle endurance with around 15 repetitions for 3 sets.

This means you should choose a resistacne level at which you can do 15 repetitions with good technique, but not more than that.

If you need further resistance, use resistance bands to increase intensity.

For greater resistance, you can also use one leg at a time to improve single-leg strength.

GR8FLEX Single Leg Squat Exercise for Leg Strength

This is helpful for activities like getting up from the floor or going up and down stairs.

Switch legs between sets to ensure balanced strength.

Conclusion

Hopefully you found this post helpful, and it give you hope that you CAN heal knee arthritis.

It does require some commitment to exercise 20-60 minutes per day, but if you can commit the time, you should find it beneficial for your knee cartilage health.

Need Help For Knee Arthritis Pain?

If you live in St. Louis and need help for knee arthritis pain, we'd be happy to help you.

Tap the button below to request an appointment with one of our specialist physical therapists.

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