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Does pain in the knees have you looking for the elevator or avoiding slopes while out walking or hiking? Regularly exercising the gluteal muscles may help.
By: Amber Yang
Do your knees cry out in pain when going up or down staircases or slopes? Unless it’s problem with your innate skeletal structure or an accidental impact suffered in the past, it’s likely the pain is related to improper use of muscles and/or adhesion of the fascia. Dr. Chen Chao-long from Taiwan We Care Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic explains the concept of knee health. I will also provide three simple exercises to make walking up and down staircases or climbing slopes easier.
What Is Fascial Adhesion?
Fascia is the key material that connects all soft tissues in the body, that is, the material that separates tendons, ligaments, and muscles. Fascia itself is also a connection that is rigid yet elastic. It is found all over the body from head to toe. The two most common causes of fascia injuries are muscle overuse and injuries due to external impact. Like all other things, any damaged parts must be repaired, and the repair process will inevitably produce scars. Fascia is like cloth fibers. When the cloth is torn, the suture of the patch is called an adhesion or scar.
When injuries and scars occur due to improper use of muscles, and if the scars are not treated in a timely fashion, the degree of adhesion will become increasingly apparent. Adhesion will lead to poor circulation of blood vessels and weakening of nerve signal transmission, thus affecting physiological functions, and causing pain.
Dr. Chen believes that the concept of fascial adhesion in Western medicine comparable to the idea of “muscle out of groove, bone suture” in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). TCM relies on massage to flatten the uneven scars and restore them to the original pre-injury muscle texture, to reduce the extent of adhesion and scars which cause pain.
Exercise to Prevent Knee Pain
Dr. Chen said that for knee pain, we must achieve skeletal restoration first. Resolving skeletal dislocation can immediately reduce the pain by half, but what is more important is how to use the muscles around the knee correctly. The muscles involved are the quadriceps, hamstrings, popliteus, and gastrocnemius. Most people experience pain above the knee when going upstairs or climbing a slope, and pain below the knee when going down. All such pains are caused by the overuse of untrained quadriceps, so proper quadriceps training is essential, says Dr. Chen.
The action of going up and down the staircase requires muscles to work in harmony, such as the gluteal muscles and hamstrings. The largest and most powerful muscle in the human body is the gluteal muscle. So, if you can master your gluteal muscles in climbing stairs, you can reduce the pressure on your quadriceps and knees. That is, when going up, try to avoid using your quadriceps alone. Instead of using your hip joints to move your foot to the next stair, try using the gluteal muscles instead to push forward in going up.
Many people today are accustomed to spending more time sitting in offices or moving much less, resulting in their body’s not remembering how to exert force in the gluteal muscles. This phenomenon is called “gluteal amnesia” in sports. I recommend practicing the following three exercises to activate the gluteal muscles.
