How to run without hurting your knees

Since many friends do not develop correct running habits in their lives, they often suffer from knee injuries. Therefore, we recommend that those of you who like sports should control your exercise volume and adjust your running posture, and try to let the forefoot land first. When we run, we try to reduce knee injuries as much as possible, so we should not exercise too much every day to avoid excessive lactic acid production in the knees.

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.

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.

3. Adjust your running posture: First, your foot should land in front of your knee, causing the knee joint to straighten or even lock (every time you stand up, you will find that the knee joint seems to be stuck in the final stage. This is a natural mechanism to increase standing stability). At this time, a considerable forward force is fed back through the ground and impacts the knee joint.

Secondly, the landing point of the foot should be controlled on the forefoot as much as possible, especially the center of gravity should be placed on the forefoot between the big toe and the second toe. This gravity position is the force point for a reasonable arrangement of the legs. Whether the force point is closer to the outside, inside or back of the foot, it will cause lateral impact on the knee and cause injury.

In order to let those of you who like sports understand how to run without hurting your knees, we recommend that you take protective measures for your knees. Generally, we need to do warm-up exercises before exercising, and we should pay attention to our footing and not step hard. We should step lightly and not too fast to reduce the impact on the knees.