Is Excess Weight Hurting Your Knees?

It is a well-known fact that being overweight or obese brings a lot of health problems. Diabetes, high blood pressure, blood clots, high cholesterol, etc are all common problems in people experience obesity.

However, what many folks do not realise is that pain in the joints such as your back, hips and knees are also health problems due to obesity. Since, it’s the joints and bones that hurt, people assume that it’s an unrelated condition. This is probably not true.

Excess weight on a body puts tremendous pressure on the joints. Even being a few pounds overweight can cause your knees to hurt. If you’re 15 pounds overweight, there is a force of 45 pounds on your knee joints when you walk. Over time, your knees will not be able to handle the torture anymore.

Since the knees are close to the ground, they experience more pressure than your shoulder joints. That is the reason why doctors are seeing many cases of knee and ankle problems nowadays due to the rise in obesity.

In the beginning, your joints are strong and can handle the pressure from the excess weight. Over time, the ligaments get worn out and the knees will start experiencing pain. This is a slow process which is why most people don’t realise it till it’s too late. Once the knees have weakened and given out, that’s when they feel pain and it feels like they developed a knee problem overnight.

Overweight people are more prone to spraining their ankles, twisting their knee, tearing their cartilage or having joints suffer from inflammation. This is due to the amount of stress placed on the joints.

So what can you do if you are overweight and have knee pain?

The first step will be to make changes in your diet. You want to be eating healthy and you want to be eating less. This step alone will help you shed some weight.

Since your knees hurt, you’ll want to engage in exercise that is low impact in nature. Yoga is an excellent choice. Swimming is great too.
Next up, it will be good to do some exercises to strengthen your knees. Half squats, lunges and general stretching are great. Bear in mind that you do not exercise through pain. Stop if it hurts. Pain is not gain here.

Get yourself a pair of good shoes that has good support. Keep your clothing loose and comfortable. Try and move around the house as much as possible. Walk more, do more chores, take the stairs, etc. The more active you are, the more calories you burn and the faster you lose weight.

Once you have lost a chunk of weight, the pressure on your knee joints will be greatly lessened. You will definitely feel less pain. It would be a good idea to engage the services of a physiotherapist to help you ease the pain. They’ll tell you what is wrong and what needs to be done to alleviate the pain.

Knee pain can be avoided by maintaining a healthy weight. Prevention is better than cure. Live an active and healthy life and you’ll keep all these problems at bay.