Your posture and its effect on Knees

The Knee is a complex joint that does a simple job: synchronising the hip and ankle or Knee is a simple joint doing a complex job. Both are true.

Healthy knees need only one thing: alignment with the other load bearing joints. Knees rarely have problems if they are aligned and allowed to work in association with the ankles and hips, but if your hip is rotated or elevated, which usually happens with the majority of the population, the unequal weight distribution affects the knee .In most cases knee pain vanishes if your hip alignment is restored.

The muscles aren’t replaced when an artificial hip or knee is installed .Yet muscle pain caused much of the agony that was blamed on the “bad” hip or knee .These muscles and the structures they operate are suffering from years of abuse from musculosketal dysfunction .Unless that’s corrected, they will continue to hurt .Common sense dictates that effective treatment start with working on muscle pain with non-invasive procedures.

Let’s do an anatomy, physiology and biomechanics review just to make sure everyone understands exactly why posture and alignment are so important.

Your knee is a hinge joint made up of 3 bones: femur, tibia and patella (fibula doesn’t play directly into the knee joint). Here’s what it looks like:

You can see and feel how your knee joint works by doing a simple experiment. Make fist with both hands and put them together like this: The first two knuckles of one hand are the femoral condyles and the flat spaces between the knuckles on your other hand are the tibial plateaus. Now open and close your fists and this is normal flexion and extension of the knee joint. The cartilage in your knee is designed to not only withstand this motion without damage for as long as you live, but movement and activity (walking, running, jumping) actually strengthens the cartilage! The problem occurs when your knee is no longer aligned the way it is designed. This can show up as varus or valgus knee alignment (see photos below) and/or as internal or external femur rotation (see photos below).

 

To see how these positions wear down the cartilage and create osteoarthritis put your fists back together, but move them in each of the alignments above. You’ll quickly see how damage occurs to the structures of the knee where the most friction and stress is. When a person knee is internally or externally rotated we know that the knee is no longer functioning like a hinge joint, but rather has a rotational stress put on the structures of the knee (you will feel the stress with your fists). Varus (bowlegged) alignment causes the breakdown of cartilage on the inside of the knee. Valgus (knock-kneed) alignment causes breakdown on the outside of the knee. You can see in the x-ray below how the valgus alignment of the right knee has caused the cartilage on the outside of the right knee to wear away.

Postural Alignment Therapy : Results

You can see the results of doing Postural Alignment Therapy in the clients x-ray that was taken after 14 months of consistent Postural Alignment Therapy. As the client’s muscular imbalances were corrected his posture improved (no longer valgus in the right knee) the results speak for themselves.

We know the true cause of your knee pain and damage, it’s easy to see that pain killers, steroid injections, micro-fracture surgery, and knee replacement are only trying to help the symptom and do nothing about the cause. If you want long term relief and a permanent solution to your pain you must correct your posture and alignment.