What kind of sports don't hurt your knees?

We know that we will feel tired after exercise, and most exercises will use the knees. If the exercise method is not mastered well, it will cause knee injuries. Many friends want to know which exercises do not hurt the knees. In fact, if you want to exercise easily without hurting your knees, running is a good way to exercise. This requires controlling the amount of running and reducing the speed.

However, when the wear and impact during running exceeds the capacity of skeletal muscles, or the increased intensity exceeds the growth rate of skeletal muscles, injuries will occur. If the muscles and bones are strong enough to withstand the wear and tear and impact, no injuries will occur. Therefore, every time after a knee injury, the doctor's advice is to rest and not move; while some experienced runners suggest continuing to run, and there is also a saying that "jogging can cure knee injuries." In fact, both statements are reasonable and one-sided. The key lies in how to control the wear and impact force and the degree of bone and muscle growth and recovery.

After knowing this basic principle, the way to avoid knee injuries from running is to reduce wear and impact and increase the strength of bones and muscles. Instead of not running, if you don't exercise for a long time, your muscles and bones will degenerate, and osteoporosis or slight impact will cause various injuries. At the same time, the lack of effective aerobic training will cause various problems in cardiopulmonary capacity, resistance, blood pressure and other physiological functions. Therefore, you should never give up running simply because it may cause wear and tear on the knee joints. Any exercise can cause physical harm if done excessively or improperly. Choosing a scientific training method is the best solution.

1. Control the amount of running: There are different opinions about the incremental amount of running, such as no more than 10% or 5% per week. However, each person has great individual differences, and the running volume base is also different. Simply using percentages to control is only a statistical result and is not very reasonable. That’s why how you feel during each run is so important. This feeling is the degree of tiredness of your muscles and body.

After running for a while, I can feel tiredness more accurately than before. The daily temperature, physical condition, diet and other factors will cause the body to become tired at different points. When the leg muscles are tired, in addition to slowing down the speed, a very important point is that the control of the steps and landing will become worse. The more tired the muscles are, the greater the impact force on the meniscus, and when it exceeds its buffering range, it will damage the femoral head. Many injuries to the meniscus and femoral head are irreparable.

For experienced runners, during the pre-race period when the running volume increases, they should first feel whether it is easier to run the same amount as last week. If so, they should stop at any point in the excess running volume if they feel they cannot control their running posture. If you don't feel any easier than last week, don't choose to increase your mileage. After increasing running volume or high-intensity training for 3-4 weeks, you should design a one-week interval week to reduce the running volume to about 70% of the peak and allow for adequate recovery and rest. Then continue to increase your running volume and training intensity.

For beginners, it is more reasonable to increase the running volume once every two weeks. It is equivalent to one week of improvement and one week of consolidating the results. The amount of increase does not have to be limited to a deliberate proportion. Pay attention to your body and stop when you feel your landing getting heavier or you feel pressure in your knees.

2. Reduce speed training: With the same amount of running, higher speed means greater impact force and a greater possibility of damage to the knees. At the same time, at higher speeds, the running posture will be distorted in order to lengthen the stride and increase the speed. The legs unconsciously do not bend at all when landing, and the muscle buffering ability when the joints are bent is lost, and the impact force is directly transmitted to the knees. This is also the reason why many novice runners get injured in the first two months of running when they run very little. Although the running distance is only 2 or 3 kilometers per day. However, when he ran as fast as he could, his muscles were not strong enough to protect him, and the huge impact force injured his knee. For long-distance running and endurance running, even for an experienced runner, speed training generally does not exceed 10% of the total training volume. And there is usually only one interval speed training per week. Beginner runners don't need to arrange speed training at all. One could even jokingly suggest that runners with marathon times outside of 3 hours and 30 minutes don't need to do speed training. As long as you accumulate a reasonable amount of training and arrange your rest well, your results will improve steadily.

This is all we have to say about which exercises do not hurt your knees. In fact, there are many exercises that do not hurt your knees, such as simple upper limb exercises, yoga, etc. Today we will introduce to you a relatively simple and highly operational type of running, which can avoid hurting your knees as long as you pay attention to the method.