By Fitness Plus
Format:Paperback
I'm always keeping my eye out for knee arthritis treatments and found this book. It's written by a physical therapist and is divided up into 9 chapters:
-Chapter 1 is "Here's What's Going On In Your Knee". It explains the structures of your knee that are involved in knee arthritis. This chapter is about 20 pages long and contains about 20 pictures- so there's not a lot of boring reading, but rather simple explanations coupled with great illustrations. Trust me, you'll know what's going on in your knee in pictures after reading this chapter.
-Chapter 2 is "What's Likely to Happen to Your Knee Over the Long Run". This is the chapter where the author talks about the course that arthritis takes. It's filled with studies that have followed people over many years with arthritis- and come to find out arthritis doesn't always take a downhill courses. In fact its highly variable from one person to another.
-the next four chapters are the meat and potatoes- the treatments. Here the book shows you how to make your knee stronger, more flexible, improve its position sense, and endurance. The exercises here are designed to target specific problems that arthritic knees have been found to have in research studies.
-Chapter 7 pulls the exercies together into a six-week program. Now this was something you don't see much. You get workout sheets for six-weeks, and the sheets contain the pictures of each of the exercises and a place to check off that you've done it for that day. I liked this because there's absolutely no confusion as to what to do, and it keeps you on track everyday. But perhaps the best part is that the whole program takes just a few minutes a day to do, aside from the endurance exercise.
-Chapter 8 contains a questionnaire to help you measure your progress, and the last chapter is references.
My overall recommendation is to get this book if you have knee arthritis to get better educated. There's a lot of confusion sometimes as to what's going on in your knee, and as the book points out, knee arthritis if far from just a case of worn-down cartilage- you've got a lot of other structures affected, and perhaps more importantly, a lot of vital knee functions are being lost you probably weren't aware of (like proprioception which helps protect your knee joint). Use this book to restore them.
