Life with persisitent knee, ankle or foot pain, really is a downer! If you’d like to find sweet relief from joint pain. One that is as fast as possible and because it supports the deepest, root causes, aids natural healing and boosts your body’s alround ability to function. One that lasts longer too, because it isn’t just a quick fix and it doesn’t just hide symptoms. Then you’re in the right place!

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Sweet Relief from Joint Pain:

Feel Better, FASTER

Foot, ankle and knee pain can affect everything from getting up in the morning to taking stairs to everyday home activities and more. But are you after quick relief or that sweet relief that actually lasts?

Hi, I’m Alexis Weidland, osteopath and co founder of BlossomingMe and Healthy Learning Lounge. Today, I’m sharing a few tips to help you to achieve relief from aching joints. Relief that supports healing rather than just masking symptoms.

In previous videos, I’ve been discussing the importance of correct diagnosis and of receiving holistic physical treatment that can target the root cause of your issues, improve the way that your whole body works together, and to support your body’s natural healing processes. Today, I’d like to discuss a couple of recommendations to allow you to find that sweet relief for your foot, ankle, and knee pain. as fast as possible.

So first, here are some basics.

Tips to help you feel better fast

Identify and Get Help

1. It’s great to identify any
   • activities,
   • shoes, and
   • previous injuries that you can think of that may be involved in your situation. And
2. seek help from a health professional sooner rather than later.
   • You can give it a few days to even a week, but if it hasn’t improved, then waiting longer will only make your body create more compensations in order to function as normally as possible. And the longer that this happens, the more tissues become involved, dysfunctional, painful, making treatment and resolution of your pain harder and take longer.
   • Continuing with a handful of physical treatments, whatever treatment plan your health professional recommends, to assist your body to heal and to deal with any strains that have increased pressure or tension on those tissues.

Avoid Irritating the Painful Tissues

Outside of physical treatment, we want to make sure not to overstress our irritated tissues. That is:

• to allow rest and time for recovery. And
• if performing regular activities or doing exercises, make sure not to push too hard or too fast so as to avoid any further injury and irritation.
• Perform just a few stretches that might assist those joints to increase their mobility and circulation too.
  • Ensure that you’re being very gentle with these, not to add too much stretch or pressure to any area, especially the area that’s in pain.
• Perform just a few strengthening exercises as well to help to reactivate muscles.
  • Make sure that you perform them slowly, gently, and with correct posture.
  • This ensures that you can activate the correct muscles in the correct way to reduce any risk of further injury.
  • And make sure only to perform just a few repetitions and avoid adding any weights, at least at this initial stage.
• Next, you can gently massage the area yourself, preferably after you’ve warmed the area up first.
• You can also have a 15 minute bath using about a cup of Epsom salts to assist circulation, muscle relaxation, and nervous system relaxation.
  • And if you have an injury or arthritis flare up where there’s actually a lot of inflammation present, then make sure to keep the bath only a bit warm, not hot.
• You can use cold packs and heat packs.
  • If there’s muscle tension but minimal inflammation, then heat is great to increase circulation and relaxation.
  • But if there’s active inflammation, then either use a cold pack or alternate using a cold pack and a heat pack in order to flush the area with fresh blood, clearing inflammatory metabolites and increasing nutrients to the area.
• At the same time as doing your icing or heating, aim to relax and maybe even have that area raised.
• If there is active inflammation, gentle compression of that area can be useful.

Now that the generalizations are out of the way, here are six simple techniques that you can use.

Gently Increase Mobility 

Foot and ankle joint mobility.

So first of all, we want to sit with your foot on your knee if at all comfortable, and of course you can use a chair. Now, what we’re wanting to do is get movement between as many of the joints of your foot as possible.

Movement between the toes

So you want to get the two, the big toe and then toe next to it and just, just move them across each other. And then we want to come towards the two toes after that and just keep going down.

Ability of the Foot to Roll Inward and Outward

It’s really good if you can get movement into the joints here and here. So we can grab hold and just move them around one direction and the other direction. And again, specifically with the big toe. one direction and the other direction.

Toes Mobility

You can move your toes forwards and backwards.

You can even stretch between your toes with your fingers squishing between, and from that position you can also get movement happening.

Heel Mobility (avoiding compression)

It’s also great to try and get movement into your heel bone, so moving just up and down. You can get them around and around.

Muscles and Fascia Relaxation

Now from this position, you can also gently massage your foot.

And you can stretch the toes if you’d like to. Sometimes that will create a crack in some of those toe joints. And that’s fine, but we’re aiming, not specifically aiming to do that, and we want to make sure it doesn’t cause pain.

Knee Mobility

And then to get into the knees, we want to do some knee joint mobilisation.

Small “Joint Play” Rotation needed for knee movements

So you can sit on a low stool, or you can do it on the floor. Feet out, and stretch down. And turn it inwards and stretch up. Foot out, stretch down. Foot in, stretch up.

And make sure to go the other direction as well. In, down, out, back up.

And what this does is just gets an increase in movement of the knee in that rotation and a tiny bit of compression through that heel.

Knee Flexion and Rotation

And finally we want to do some standing knee rotations. So, I will stand and you won’t see my face for a moment.

• So what we’re doing is placing our hands at our knees so we can feel them on the outside as well.
• We’re gently bending a little bit, and then we’re rotating around. Three times one direction, three times the other direction.

Now I don’t know if you can hear it, but my knees have cracked a few times. If your knees are cracking, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just getting a movement of those joints, things lubricating and coming back into a better position.

And sometimes your kneecap will actually click a little bit and then find its safer, happier place. Once it’s in that better place, you’ll be able to move more comfortably and there’ll be a little bit less pain as a general rule.  

Why Seek Assistance & Do these Exercises?

By taking swift action, you can reduce the risk of worsening any injury. You can also support your body’s natural healing processes, reducing pain faster, and optimize complete healing and re-strengthening. This will improve mobility outcomes, speed return to work and loved activities, and reduce risk of re-injury.

Final Tips

• Begin with small, manageable steps. Just adding one or two actions that will take you just a few minutes every day.
• Wear appropriate footwear,
• Avoid painful activities, and
• Keep gently active.
• And on top of that, seek treatment from your health professional.

Consistency and realistic goals are key in maintaining motivation and achieving long term success. But sweet relief really is within your reach.

Take action now to start feeling better fast and to reclaim your life from pain!

Want Personalised Assistance?

• Book our special 20 minute happy feet assessment now using the link below or
• download the Ultimate Happy Foot Guide, link also below. So that’s it for now. I really hope you found it useful. Please remember to leave any comments in the comment section. Like, share and subscribe.

In health, till next time.

Bye for now.

Interested in further reading?

Healthline: 9 ways to improve your gut based on science

Improving the Gut Microbiome and Arthritis Symptoms with Diet 

The Link between your Gut Microbes and Joint Pain

Have Joint Pain… Is it from a Leaky GUT?

The GUT-Brain Connection

About Blossoming Me

BlossomingMe offers a fully integrated approach to your wellbeing. Located on Sydney’s Upper North Shore. Sarah is our Cranio-sacral and Remedial Massage Therapist and health and lifestyle coach. She can help relieve those problematic knots, tightness and other specific ailments to promote a healthy recovery. These complementary massage therapies can be combined to suit your needs, and include: craniosacral therapy, shiatsu, acupressure, reiki, remedial, swedish, and body-mind-massage. 

Our qualified Osteopath, Alexis, offers a drug free, minimally invasive, “hands on” treatment focusing on the musculoskeletal system with its associated muscles, tendons, ligaments, membranes, bones and joints. Alexis takes a functional approach. This means that she focuses on the way a component (body part, tissue or group of tissues) performs its role, as well as the way the body works, performs and integrates as a whole. Our team can support you to improve your posture and therefore your overall health.

ional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health professional before you make any changes to your health regime, before dealing with new symptoms, and, if something you have read here has raised any questions or concerns regarding your situation.