Of all the lower body joints, the knee is probably the one most likely to send you to the physiotherapist.
“It carries most of the weight of the body, and being a hinge joint, it means that it doesn’t have a nice socket structure,” says physiotherapist Dr Jillian Eyles, from the University of Sydney. “It relies on the ligaments and the joint capsules and the muscles around it to really stabilise the joint, and it’s fairly easy to injure compared to another joint that’s more supported.”
Knee injuries, and the associated increase in the risk of developing knee osteoarthritis, are a key reason why more than 53,000 knee replacement surgeries are performed each year in Australia, and that figure is expected to more than double by 2030.
Here’s what experts say about how to keep your knees healthy and avoid becoming one of those surgical patients:
Avoid injury
Knee injury substantially increases the risk of knee osteoarthritis, and at a younger age. One of the most common serious knee injuries is a tear of the anterior cruciate ligament, which crosses diagonally under the kneecap and connects the thigh bone to the shin bone – the same injury that took Matildas star striker Sam Kerr out of the game for over a year.
