The best exercises to help manage severe knee pain
Researchers found that walking, cycling and swimming were the best exercises to improve knee pain in patients with osteoarthritis.
An estimated 10 million people in the UK have osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease that causes pain, stiffness and swelling when the protective cartilage in the joint breaks down and wears away.
According to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, almost half of people over 50 experience knee pain, leaving many dependent on painkillers in the long term.
While any joint can be affected, the most common is in the knees; About 30 percent of people over the age of 45 show signs of knee osteoarthritis on X-ray, and half suffer from severe knee symptoms.
Exercise is one of the main treatments for osteoarthritis, but current guidelines provide limited information about the specific types of exercise that should be recommended to patients with arthritis in their knees.
“Aerobic exercises such as walking, cycling and swimming are excellent first-line options for people with knee osteoarthritis,” said London-based osteopath Danny Morgan. Independent.
“They improve circulation to the joint, help maintain mobility, support weight management, and can reduce pain over time by strengthening surrounding muscles and improving overall function.”
But he suggests combining different types of exercise is also beneficial. He said: “The most effective long-term approach typically combines aerobic exercise with targeted strengthening, flexibility training and, where appropriate, neuromotor training to improve balance and coordination. This helps stabilize the joint and reduce future flares.”
Researchers from Zhejiang University School of Medicine in China and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US set out to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of various types of exercise in treating knee osteoarthritis, with the aim of helping improve current guidelines.
Published in the study British Medical JournalIt examined 217 randomized trials involving 15,684 participants published between 1990 and 2024. The studies compared common exercise therapies (aerobic, flexibility, strengthening, mind-body, neuromotor, and mixed exercise) with a control group.
Researchers focused on pain, function, gait performance (the way the patient walked), and quality of life, and evaluated these markers at four, 12, and 24 weeks after starting treatment.
Overall, aerobic exercises such as walking and swimming have consistently shown to be the best treatment for people with chronic knee pain.
The study authors recommended aerobic exercise “as a first-line intervention in the treatment of knee osteoarthritis, especially when the goal is to improve functional capacity and reduce pain,” and said that if aerobic exercise is not possible due to individual limitations, then “alternative forms of structured physical activity may still be beneficial.”
Researchers found that aerobic exercises were beneficial in relieving short-term and medium-term pain, improving short-term, medium-term, and long-term function, and improving short-term and medium-term walking performance and quality of life.
This type of exercise also improved short-term, medium-term, and long-term function compared to controls. However, the study’s authors did not emphasize how many minutes of exercise were required.
