Do you want to improve Knee Pain (3/3)

How to increase proteoglycan to prevent and improve the knee pain
 
The important point to increase proteoglycan is bending and extending the knee joints. The recommended exercise to increase proteoglycan is walking 10 minutes 3 times a day. You don’t need to walk continuously 30 minutes, so even if you don’t have much physical strength, you can continue.

When you walk, lifting your knees as high as possible and walking with wide strides make the production of proteoglycan more efficient.

If you are not used to exercise, the following method helps you get motivated and continue the walking.

1. Prepare a drawing paper, a black marker, a red marker and blue color stickers.
2. Draw an image of the knee on a drawing paper.
3. Paint the knee joint part of the image with a red marker. The red is the image that proteoglycan is lost. (Fig. 3)
4. Every time you walk 10 minutes, apply one blue sticker on the red part of the image. You can visualize that blue proteoglycan increases every time you walk. (Fig. 4)

​Fig. 5 shows the result of 2 weeks walking exercise that a 70s woman who had severe knee pain tried. You can see that after just 2 weeks walking exercise, there is not much red part and there is more blue part. That means her proteoglycan increased. Actually it seems like it became not so difficult to climb up and down stairs and to bend her knees though the knee pain was not completely gone.