Preventing Knee Risk While Running

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In fact, running is one of the easiest sports to begin with because all we need is a good pair of shoes. It is just simple as putting on a pair of shoes, heading out of the house and beginning to run!

However, there is always a love-hate relationship with running. When the avid runners develop their love with the running community, they are bound to sacrifice their sleeping time during weekends. No matter how tired they get after a long day of work, their passion in running never stops them from a night run.

As enthusiastic as these runners can be, arthritis in the knees are the reasons of why they hold grumbles due to discomfort of knees, also the culprits for sabotaging a pleasant run. Knee pain has been a common phenomenon in our expertise. There are a population of runners concern that running is the cause of their knee pain. They are anxious of knee injuries, knee arthritis or the wearing of cartilage if they pick up running as their exercise.

It could be true, or simply an excuse to escape from exercising. Without our realization, practicing a sedentary lifestyle is not only bad for your knees, but causes negative effect to your health, like having sugar chewed up your teeth every day without you taking care of it.

For those who lack physical activity, I’m going to chip in some research study that I came across. 4 years ago, the Lancet medical journal published several studies and reported that one out of every 10 premature deaths around the world are caused by insufficiency of exercise. Similar to smoking, the hazard of not exercising jeopardises your lifespans.

Secondly, not exercising has also proven by numbers of researches that it poses risk of depression or a wide range of mood disorders. Plus, people who don’t perform weight bearing exercises age faster and have lesser bone density, which means possible osteoporosis and greater risk of fracture.

Based on the U.S. department of Health and Human Services, people who practice sedentary lifestyle have a higher risk of contracting major diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, colon cancer and high blood pressure.

Human bodies are amazing. A fully grown adult has 206 bones, 360 joints and more than 500 muscles functioning altogether. The human body thrives on movement, and relies on it. Without the movement, blood and nutrients can’t work together with tissues and harmful by-products can’t be released.

Besides that, soft tissue gets stiff, joints are not able to get through a full range of motion and instead of gliding, the joint surfaces compress and grind. Weight bearing and resistance training exercises such as running, walking, jumping rope, and stair climbing are basic activity to strengthen the bones. Most importantly, having regular exercise is the key to keep a number of health issue at bay.

Running on a regular basis helps to boost your body. To begin with the first step, it may resolve the myth of running causes knee problem.

I understand how much marathon runners love running and would not want to stop doing it. Denial is not a solution but prevention is. If you have diagnosed knee arthritis without wearing a cartilage in your knee, running can worsen the condition.

A study published in year 2013 stated that running and doing other strenuous sports can be purported to increase osteoarthritis (OA) risks. There are over 70,000 runners with an exercise energy expenditure of <1.8MET suggested to reduce the risk of OA and hip replacement. On the other hand, the lighter excises such as walking increases the risk of OA by 2.4% and hip replacement by 5%. Both comparisons have resulted in running which allows better joint preservation.

Med Science Sports Exercise Journal claimed that running has a relatively shorter duration with ground contact and longer length of strides to blunt the effect of high peak joint loads, although the poundings have forces 8 times more into the joint, and 3 times more loads than walking. If we look at the distance that they accomplish in walking and running, running requires lesser strikes on the ground to cover the same distance. It also build more brief contacts with the ground on every stride they take.

The study can persuasively explain that running and walking are essentially indistinguishable as well as it could potentially be beneficial against arthritis. What running can provide, cartilages can too. Some evidences are noted that cartilage likes cyclical loading, meaning, force is applied to the joint and removed, then applied again. This pattern of loading prompts the cartilage cells to divide and replenish, whereas the non-cyclic loading like standing or walking has a continuous application of force, thus overloading the cartilage causes more cells to die than to replenish.

We shouldn’t be overly confident by assuring running is the prevention of arthritis. It is secure to assure that runners do not have an especially high risk of osteoarthritis compared to non-runners.

Keep in mind that consulting a doctor immediately if pain is found during a run or jog. Truth to be told, running injuries have a multifactorial origin that can be subdivided into personal factors (age, sex, BMI), biomechanical factors or psychosocial factors (hip internal/external rotation, muscle imbalances of the quadriceps, high arch/flat feet, tubercle sulcus angle). The fact is, runners are frequently succumbed to knee injuries, but one of the common ailments is Patellofemoral pain syndrome.