How to Alleviate Knee Pain During Golfing

There are more than 100 types of arthritis. Several of them affect the knee joint, causing pain. This includes pseudogout, osteoarthritis, and rheumatoid arthritis. Knee pain is common in golfers. It mainly affects the knee that tends to take maximum torsional loading, which is the lead knee. Most golfers undergo ACL reconstruction and experience stress fractures due to this. Here’s how you can alleviate knee pain while golfing.

Practice Good Knee Control During the Backswing

Most golfers tend to collapse their left knee inwards because of gluteal weakness. It can also be due to the overactivity of the adductor muscles. Unfortunately, this increases loads on the knee joint. As a result, the knee ends up sliding back further onto the left side during the follow-through in the swing.

Having the leg collapse in like this creates several issues. It causes a loss of power due to the reduced separation between the shoulders and hips. To prevent this from happening, you can practice drills that help to keep your left knee a bit more stable during the back swing. This allows resistance to be generated against the left side.

Improve Your Balance

Another way to reduce golf knee pain is to improve your balance. Good balance will not only help you reduce pain but it’ll also help you achieve consistent distance and accuracy. To improve your balance, you can stand on one leg for about 15 seconds. Once that’s done, repeat with the other leg. When you get good at it, try swinging while standing on one leg.

By doing these stretches and strengthening exercises, you can avoid developing further issues in the future. There are several other exercises that you can use to improve flexibility, strength, and coordination. For this, you may need a physical therapist. They’ll first spend some time discussing your knee with you and then they will examine it, too. X-rays are perfect for investigating the severity of osteoarthritis in the knee.

Learn to swing within yourself

Your swing matters. If you try to swing as hard as possible it is likely you will shift your weight to the extremes of the knee joint. This can cause enormous stress on an affected part of the knee. Don’t do this! Learn to swing within your capability, trying to be sure to accelerate at the bottom of the swing. You won’t lose much distance and may even gain distance. The part of the swing that matters is not what happens from the top, but what happens at impact.

Do Shoulder stretching before play and repetitively

If you can (over time) gain more flexibility in your shoulders, you will then feel as if you can generate more clubhead speed without lunging at the ball from the top. Again, this can actually give you more distance, but this takes time to accomplish, and you should make yourself work at this over many weeks.

Braces

Knee bracing also be used to reduce golf knee pain during activity. Knee braces come in a variety of forms and can range from $20 to thousands of dollars. The brace can be a general brace for all patients with knee pain or it can be a specific type of brace, like an offloader that is meant specifically to shift the weight load from one part of the knee to another. The brace can also be a “one size fits all” or it can be fitted to the individual. The next time you are on Amazon, look for knee braces and you will likely see them. Compare what you find to the braces you see on football lineman every Saturday and Sunday and you will see huge differences. This is just an example of two different types of knee braces.

The simplest thing for the average golfer would be to buy a cheap brace at Walmart or on Amazon, perhaps judging from reviews. Many people believe bracing helps relieve pain and you can find these simple braces at an affordable price. Make sure that sizing is correct for the brace you buy and also make sure that the reviews stress comfort. Nothing is worse than buying a brace that you cannot wear because it hurts more, not less.

These are some of the things you can do to alleviate golf knee pain, but there are more. Download our Free PDF “15 Effective Knee Arthritis Treatments“.