One of the most common things you hear as you get older is, “Just wait until you reach my age.” Before you know it, stories of knee pain, backaches, and ankle soreness start piling up. The advice usually follows: Stop lifting so heavy, running so far, and exercising so much because you’re ruining your body.
Most of us gym rats tend to roll our eyes at this, knowing that the best way to bulletproof your body is to actually strengthen it. Still, there is some truth to the idea that pain becomes more common as the years pass, especially if you’ve spent decades pushing yourself to the limit.
When it comes to walking, simply changing your gait can relieve knee pain—sometimes even more effectively than taking Ibuprofen daily. In a yearlong, placebo-controlled study of 68 adults with mild-to-moderate knee osteoarthritis, researchers used motion-capture analysis to create personalized gait adjustments. Depending on each person’s movement pattern, participants shifted their foot angle five to ten degrees inward or outward.
“We’ve known that for people with osteoarthritis, higher loads in their knee accelerate progression, and that changing the foot angle can reduce knee load,” lead researcher Scott Uhlrich said in a statement. “So the idea of a biomechanical intervention is not new, but there have not been randomized, placebo-controlled studies to show that they’re effective.”
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By the end of the study, MRIs showed that correcting foot direction slowed cartilage deterioration, while biomechanical analysis revealed a 26 percent greater reduction in the forces that strain the knee joint.
“The reported decrease in pain over the placebo group was somewhere between what you’d expect from an over-the-counter medication, like ibuprofen, and a narcotic, like OxyContin,” Uhlrich said. “With the MRIs, we also saw slower degradation of a marker of cartilage health in the intervention group, which was quite exciting.”
It makes sense. If you’ve been walking on the same part of your foot for years, especially in a less-than-ideal way, it’s bound to put extra stress on your joints. Think of it like a mattress—sleeping in the same spot for years wears it unevenly. Shift your position, and the pressure spreads out, causing less wear and tear.
It’s important to note that this isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, and future studies of this approach are needed before the intervention can be made widely available to the public. Each participant had an individualized angle that worked best for them. But for those dealing with pain while walking (without an underlying injury), simply adjusting their biomechanics made a noticeable difference.
