Exercises for Arthritis

Dr. Marni Wesner and Dr. Rosh Wadhwa demonstrate a progression of exercises to help strengthen your leg to help manage your pain related to knee and hip arthritis. These exercises were put together by Declan Norris and Ian Hallworth, two of the physical therapists at the Glen Sather Sport Medicine Clinic.

The goal of this first phase of COMET exercises is to work at getting the leg straight, and to work on getting a full bend to the hip and knee. You will learn to activate your quadricep muscles and how to generate a contraction of the quad muscles. These exercises should be done for 1-2 weeks. You may need a bit more time (maybe 2-4 weeks) working at these exercises before moving on to Phase 2, as the exercises that follow in subsequent phases build on the basic movements and muscle activation you will learn in this phase.

This phase is all about progressing the difficulty of the exercises and more difficult movements that use multiple joints. This also advances the strengthening of the hip. These exercises should be done for a 6-12 week period, but if you cannot do them on a regular or daily basis, and only do them 1-2 times/week, you may need to work on these exercises for 10-16 weeks.

 

This phase of exercises continues to progress strength development with more complex movements of multiple joints in the lower extremities. These are exercises to progress over the 12-24-week period, but as with the exercises in the previous phases, you may need to progress with this work over a longer period of time.