When to baby the leg with knee pain is a solid common-sense strategy to use. Especially when you’ve been suffering from chronic knee pain and you’ve been going to physical therapy while not seeing any results. You can find yourself in a situation where another radically different approach is required in order to feel any improvement in your knee pain.
“If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.”
– Albert Einstein
Learning from a baby
Getting different results for how your knee feels and performs requires a different way of looking at knee pain.
The example I like to use is comparing your knee pain with the crying of a newborn baby. When a baby is first born, no one, including the mother, knows why the baby is crying, because it crys alot, it can be crying for a number of reasons.
The baby could be:
- Hungry
- Thirsty
- Tired
- Want to be rocked and held
- or need a diaper change
But until we begin to “test” each of these solutions and then observe how the baby responds, we will still be in the dark as to what the baby needs.
I remember this process with my young daughter…
I knew if she made a certain face, her diaper was full and after a certain amount of time after eating she would be hungry again.
When to baby the leg with knee pain
Now let’s think of your knee as screaming like a new born baby. All swollen, painful, and achy! Forget your diagnosis for a moment…
What does your knee need?
We don’t know until be begin to “test” how the knee responds to what we give it…
The knee may need:
- Rest
- Exercise
- Water
- Nutrition (A different diet)
- Supplementation
- Breathing (You need to breathe more, aka: you’re holding your breath)
- Mindset (i.e. A different mindset to open up the possibilities of how your knee can heal, or perhaps to stop doing the things making your knee hurt)
- Neurological Re-education (Creating comfort in the knee working with the intrinsic movement of the knee joint)
Until we begin testing how your knee responds to these different inputs, watch for the results and then test again, we may find ourselves in the same place with knee pain
A Section For The “Naysayers”
We live in a society that “looks down” on resting as weakness when in actuality, resting is an essential part of recovering from any pain or injury.
Think about the following phrases we hear on a daily basis:
- “No pain no gain”
- “Pain is weakness leaving the body”
- “Push through the pain”
- “Just do it”
Many clients I work with in my group coaching program “Knee Club Premium” get stuck in this “pitfall” of NOT fully allowing their body to heal and recover. They are too quick to want to strengthen the muscles in their legs – NOT realizing that exercising from this place of neurological compensation further embeds this dysfunctional tension pattern in their movement.
As an aside, I believe the body is designed to be pushed out of its comfort zone. It causes us to grow and change in ways we wouldn’t normally if we sat on the couch all day eating bonbons. However, when you start out the process in pain, pushing through the pain is not going to get you out of pain. As a matter of fact, when the euphoria of the adrenaline high wears off, many times the body is in more pain afterward and will take longer to recover.
Hopefully this perspective can shed a little light and point you in a different direction to get more relief in less time with your knee situation…
If you’d like more help and support with your knee, I’d encourage you to JOIN my “Knee Club Premium” program and begin working with me in person twice per week…
Regards,
Bill Parravano
(The Knee Pain Guru)
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