Hello everybody
This is week 5 of our 6-week travel series. This week we will talk about how to keep your knees feeling strong and pain free when travelling.
Travel can often involve negotiating more stairs than you would normally come across at home. Subjecting knees to more steps and loading them up repeatedly can lead to knee pain, which we know can make your travels miserable!
The knee is essentially a hinge joint and doesn’t like load bearing with twisting forces. Shoes with no arch support can make the knee turn slightly inwards. If this is only a couple of times, then usually there isn’t a problem, but if it happens repeatedly, then sometimes the tissues around the knee become inflamed and painful.
Here are a few tips to help:
* Have good arch support with well fitted shoes. Practice walking in your travel shoes at least a month before you plan your journey and gradually introduce steps/stairs into a daily walk.
* Prepare your thigh muscles for more load; get them stronger with squats, step-ups and stretching the quads and hamstrings.
* Strengthen the muscles around the hip and lower back as those muscles help control what happens at the knee.
* When you are going up and down steps, make sure your knee is in line with your feet. Remember the hinge joint – it needs to be well aligned. Ideally, the centre of your knee cap (patella) should be in line with your second toe.
Hope this is helpful,
Deb
