Pressure on joints, especially your knees, increases over the years, and can cause pain during activity. Keeping joints healthy during your lifetime can be helped by healthy diet and lifestyle. Exercise, doesn’t have to be a strenuous hours long activity to give you benefit, and keep your joints healthy. Moderate and easy exercise such as cycling and swimming are great ways to exercise that have minimal impact on joints like the knees. Think of it like a car, you have to keep the mechanics of the car oiled for it to run smoothly. Exercise is like oil for your knees and other joints to keep them in top shape.
As you age, the pressure you put on our knees and other joints accumulates over your lifetime, which causes pain any time you move. But the the good news is, you can maintain an active lifestyle and avoid this pain.
To keep your joints healthy, focus on maintaining a healthy weight first. As “Each pound of body weight can have an essential impact on the stress you place on your knees as time goes by.”
These are the 5 Exercises You Should Try to Prevent Knee Pain as You Age:
1. Cycling
Cycling or riding a bike is another low-impact exercise, which is good for people with achy knees. Those who take a short trip on flat surfaces, are likely to experience little to no knee pain at all, during their ride.
Cycling is one of the excellent way to build up the muscles around your knee, without damaging the joints. The stronger your leg muscles are, the more impact it absorbs when you participate in activities such as cycling.
2. Doing Leg Lifts
Strengthening your muscles around the joint, which reduces the stress on it and therefore keeping you pain-free, is one of the best way to maintain healthy knees.
You can do these leg lifts on a leg lift machine or at the gym, but you can also do them anywhere without using weights.
How to:
1. Lie on the floor. While keeping your right leg on the floor, raise your left leg a foot or so, off the floor.
2. Lower your left leg. Then repeat 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps. Repeat on the other side.
3. Step-ups
As you age, the ligaments that surrounds your knee joint become stiffer, which means they cannot deal with the stress placed on them, as they once could. Therefore, pain or injury can result. To keep these ligaments more flexible, work the knee joint in a safe way, such as doing step-ups.
12/23/2016
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