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What exercise is best for.... (general) issue
What exercise is best for.... (general) issue
Vinny Crispino avatar
Written by Vinny Crispino
Updated over a year ago

What's the best exercise to eliminate my knee pain? And let's just not even answer that with knee pain. It could be back pain, shoulder pain, foot pain, hip pain, pelvis, sacrum, Si, whatever, insert any joint, or muscle or area in the body?


The The answer is really still the same. Asking a question, like, which routine eliminates knee pain, though, makes sense? And is very logical, based on what you're experiencing?

That question alone could keep you spinning around in circles for years. And maybe it has, right because if you're trying to answer, Hey, what is the best exercise for knee pain?

I have to imagine you're in this program, not because this is the first time you've dealt with an issue, I have to imagine you've probably come to a program like this and are even open to trying something radically different, because you focusing on that area probably hasn't actually served you in the way that you wanted it to.

The protocols for your knee pain or hip pain or back pain haven't worked.

So I want to help reframe this question.

Instead of asking which routines eliminate knee pain, it's more about you working through the first phase, and doing the routines, and observing which of those routines helps eliminate your knee pain. Because your knee pain, back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, though it could be exactly identical to 10 other people on this call, it might be coming from a completely different area than those other 10 people. Maybe your knee pain is coming from your foot dysfunction. And if I give you a routine that targets knee pain, but doesn't deal with the foot, it's not only going to set you up for failure, but then what right?

I'm saying, Hey, this is great for knee pain, and it doesn't work. What is your emotional response going to be failure, and it's going to be that quick, immediate, I'm going to lose hope. I thought this was going to work. I thought that he knew what he was talking about. And now I'm spinning and I don't know what to do. So we have to change the nature of the question to actually take a step back.

Remember, we're trying to work on mentality to we're trying to re frame and re approach what your questions are. So we can get to new answers, new questions lead to new answers. And the thing is, we won't know what is the best routine for your knee pain, until you actually work through the routines. And observe what your nervous system finds is actually the most helpful is that the routines have down regulate and calm down the state of your nervous system dysfunction are the ones that take you out of this sympathetic freeze, fight flight mode and actually ease you back into more regulated state.

Are they the routines that really get joints and muscles moving that help you just kind of reinvigorate your system?

The answer is going to be different for each and every person, though your problem could all be sorry, though, your symptom could actually be all the same. So we have to be a little bit more exploratory.

The thing is, is that, you know, like I said, we won't know what the answer is until we work through the routines. We have to answer the question, not only what helps my symptom that can be helpful, focusing on your pain.

However, look, honestly, for some of you, these problems did not happen overnight. These problems have been days, weeks, months, years, decades in the making, it might actually be unfair to just black and white, say hey, are you better or not? Is your symptom better not? Because that's assuming we can actually just change it like that a problem where your physiology has had decades to adapt to the problem.

So maybe instead of hey, what fixes my knee pain? Maybe the actual better question is to set you up for more success is which routines do I find the most value in? Which routines are showing me the most about my body?

Like, holy cow, I came here for knee pain, but I'm realizing I can't move my shoulders worth a darn, I've lost shoulder motion. I wonder what that has to do with your knee pain.

Why these fixed height rounded collapse shoulders are limiting your spines motion, which is limiting your pelvic motion, which is altering your hip motion and probably taking it out on your knee.

Right? It's a kinetic chain.

So an answer that the question that's going to serve you better is going through and observing. Where are the aha moments for you?

These exercises are simple, not easy. They can be very challenging. But these exercises are just asking you to move in minimal human ranges of motion. And if you're noticing, well, that's harder than it looks.

That's harder than I thought. Maybe let's fix that first and watch what happens to whatever symptom or joint problem that you're having or experiencing. Now it's, it's really easy for me to say that because I'm not flared up. And I've worked through back pain, it's really easy for me to say, Hey, don't ask about pain. That's the wrong question to ask. This is where the emotional work comes in. Because it is going to take patience. And it is going to take a level of emotional maturity to just attach just for a moment of the strategy that you've been doing about focusing on what hurts and actually realizing maybe that hasn't gotten you to where you want to be. How can I approach this differently? Focusing on the area of pain, typically, in most people's experience, it becomes the fall guy for your problem. You're only paying attention to the joint that's barking at you, that has alarm bells ringing at you. And the problem area becomes a fall guy while the real problem flies completely unnoticed, untested for and flies under the radar. So I'm just asking you to maybe take a step back from that question and let's approach it a little differently. I hope that makes sense.

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