Treat Your Own Knees: Simple Exercises to Build Strength, Flexibility, Responsiveness and Endurance

This remarkable little book may change the way you think about knee pain. Instead of focusing on pain symptoms and where they originate, the author focuses on what your knee does - and how to improve those functions with simple exercises. The only anatomy lesson you need is to know where your quadriceps and hamstring muscles are - front and rear of your thigh respectively.

He identifies four functions in your knee: strength, flexibility, proprioception/balance, and endurance. If you have unexplainable knee pain, you probably just need to improve your knee function in one or more of the four functional areas. The author suggests simple exercises in each functional category.

To develop strength, the single most important muscles to develop are your quadriceps. There are many exercises you can do to strengthen your quads. The author suggests a very simple floor exercise.

To develop flexibility, the author suggests a quad and a hamstring stretch. The exercises he suggests can be done standing or on the floor.

Proprioception might be a strange word to you. It was to me. It is probably best described as a combination of coordination and balance. Can you accurately sense what your knee is doing? Does it react appropriately to changes as you move? This is what proprioception is all about. The simple and interesting exercise the author suggests to improve proprioception is simply to stand on one leg for 30 seconds. Then switch legs. (It's ok to have a wall or chair to help catch you if you start to fall.) You might find this exercise easy to master. If so, the author suggests doing the exercise with your eyes closed. This may require considerable practice!

The author suggests that you can build endurance simply by walking or stationary bicycling.

And that's the entire program for treating your knee pain. Some readers may feel letdown or short-changed. What about all the anatomy lessons other practitioners give you? What about issues relating to your tendons, ligaments, bones, and cartilage? What is the theory behind this skimpy program?

Chapter 6 gives you the surprising answers to these questions. The author reviews many scientific studies on knee pain. The studies (based on X ray or MRI testing) show that the existence and/or severity of knee pain/disability have little correlation to the amount of knee deterioration. Many people with severe knee deterioration reported no pain, and some had their symptoms decline over time. The factors most closely linked to knee pain/disability were muscle strength, obesity, age, and psychological health. The author is a physical therapist and not a dietician, gerontologist, or psychologist. His knee program does as much for your knee as science suggests physical therapy can do.

The author recognizes that surgery and medications seem to help a lot of people, but the available research suggests that most people will benefit from the low-tech solutions he offers.

This book really made a difference in my life. It's short and to the point. It gives you some background on research and anatomy, then gives you four exercises to do daily for a minute each (some every other day, weekends off to rest the muscles).
Two important things I want to get across. First, these are easy and brief exercises, so much so that even I do them regularly. Second, they really make a difference, and quickly. I had been having wobbly knees when I woke up, and that scared me. I knew I needed to do something or they would only get worse. It took maybe a week or so, and my knees now feel strong, back to their normal. If you are having pain and/or weakness in your knees, I absolutely recommend this book.

On the one hand, the program outlined in this book contains very, very basic exercises that most people who work out would know. In fact, if you wanted to skip the background stuff and just do the program, you'd only need to read about 10 pages. On the other hand, it puts all this basic information into a simple, easy to follow (5 minutes or less some days) program that WORKS. The simplicity of the program is actually a strength, because the exercises will be easy to do forever, not like some high-intensity program that'll burn you out after a month.

I've done the program for two months now, and can definitely see improvement in my knee pain. I've had 3 operations on my right knee, have very little cartilage left in it, and thought I was in for a lifetime of knee pain that would progressively get worse. After about a month of this program, I noticed I could do low impact exercises (elliptical, bike) without a knee brace, pain free, which I haven't been able to do in years. I still feel some pain on a treadmill, but it's less than before, and hopefully will continue to decrease as I stick with the knee exercises.

I highly recommend the program outlined in this book. Because the information is so basic, I could've probably gotten by reading this at a library, but feeling a lot less pain in my knee was well worth $10 for me.

Bought this book for my mother who has had age and weight-related chronic knee arthritis pain for over five years. She has found significant improvements in her knees after doing the exercises recommended in this book. She talks about it all the time.

This really is an excellent book for overall preventive maintenance on knees. The exercises are simple and designed so anyone can do them. Same for the stretches.

The stretching and strengthening routines take less than 10 minutes. Since I started doing them a few months ago in 2013, my knees feel much better, I'm not having as many problems with sore knees when exercising, the weight I use on lunges and squats has gone up by 10 pounds, and even though I started ballroom dancing last summer, I'm more likely to have sore thighs or calves than sore knees after an evening of dancing.

So I really strongly recommend this book.

One caveat is that it is PREVENTIVE maintenance. As the author explains numerous times, he is not a doctor; and even if he was, you can't substitute a book for a doctor's visit. If you have specific problems you want diagnosed, you need to go see a doctor.

But if you would like some general guidelines to help strengthen your knees, improve your balance and knee flexibility, and overall improve your performance in other physical activities, this book is for you. Johnson also spends a bit of time reviewing literature on knee injuries and knee rehabilitation to explain why he makes the recommendations he does, and that is interesting too.

Too small to read.

The author presents his information in an easy to read and easy to understand format. I have noticed great improvement when I implemented his ideas.

The book is readable and I got at a fair price.

I’m still working on it

Ok. Not a lot of good info.