Physical Therapy Advice: Strong Muscles Help Recover From Knee Replacement

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Heard On The Larry Meiller Show

Larry Meiller learns about a recent study confirms the importance of hip and quadriceps strength after total knee replacement surgery. Plus, answers to listeners’ physical therapy questions.

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  • Therapists: Strengthen Hip, Quad Muscles For Good Recovery After Knee Replacement

    Medical advancements have made knee replacements commonplace in the U.S., with about 600,000 of them performed every year, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

    For people who are undergoing the procedure, two physical therapists have some advice: Make sure to pay attention to hip and quadriceps muscles, both before and after surgery.

    Lori Brody, a physical therapist and athletic trainer with the University of Wisconsin Sports Medicine and Spine Center, said that hip and quadriceps muscles play important roles in movement that involves the knee. For example, she said that strong hip muscles “stabilize the pelvis when you’re walking, or getting up from a chair, or going up the stairs.”

    As for quadriceps, they’re a muscle group that “absorbs shock and takes some of the load off of your knee,” she said.

    Going into surgery with strength in both muscles, according to Brody, can give a patient an advantage, speeding up overall recovery and return to normal activity. Brody said that that could mean a patient released to an intermediary care facility can make it home sooner, and or that one who is sent directly home will be able to get out and about more rapidly. It could also mean finishing with in-home rehab and moving to out-patient physical therapy sooner.

    Both Brody and Bill Boissonnault, a senior physical therapist at the Spine Center Physical Therapy Clinic at UW Hospital and Clinics, emphasized that knowing what feels “normal” when it comes to using hips and knees pre-surgery is important. By exercising hips and quadriceps, they said, a patient develops a better sense of what that baseline of “normal” is.

    Of course, some people are in too much pain pre-joint replacement to exercise those muscles leading up to the surgery. For everyone else, both Brody and Boissonnault agreed that more exercise and conditioning before surgery leads to patients coming through the procedure ahead of the game.

    The two physical therapists also said that focusing on those muscles is important after surgery, too. Brody said that a lot of energy is duly spent helping the knee itself recover. Building quadriceps strength is often included in that recovery process, but she thinks that paying more attention to the hip muscles would aid recovery, too.

    Boissonnault noted that strong hip muscles are vital for the phase of recovery that involves regaining function: “There are some people who recover fine from the surgery,” he said. “But they never get their function back.”

    According to Brody, research shows that how successfully a patient regains functional use of the joint is directly related to hip strength. Boissonnault himself said he has seen a shift towards paying attention to hip muscles as well as the knee itself after surgery, and that more patients are able to regain function because of it.

    One final tip from Brody for people about to undergo a knee replacement: Learn what exercises will be prescribed for after the procedure and try them out before surgery.

    “That way, you have experience with them,” she said.

    Correction: This article originally featured an image that was described as being of an x-ray of a knee replacement. That image was actually an x-ray of another type of operation.

Episode Credits

  • Larry Meiller Host
  • Judith Siers-Poisson Producer
  • Lori Thein Brody Guest
  • Bill Boissonnault Guest

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