Is there really a way of increasing knee range of motion without force?
I know the conventional medical model focuses on strengthening the legs and forcing the knee joint to be stretched in order to increase the range of motion in the knee and relieve pain.
What happens though when you’re religiously committing to your physical therapy regime and the knee pain only gets a little better or the range of motion in the knee only increases slightly?
This is a pretty helpless and hopeless place to find yourself in especially when you’ve been in knee pain for weeks, months, and sometimes even years…
Can You Increase the Range of Motion in the Knee without Force?
My own experience…
It was around 2001 and I was desperately trying to return to training Judo again. Even though my ACL surgery took place in June of 2000, I was still struggling with pain and range of motion in the knee. Kneeling was absolutely out of the question as the surgery scar was still too painful. When I bowed into the class it looked something like this…
(Insert me kneeling with leg out to the side Image)
Anyhow, I’d been desperately learning a style of bodywork called “Ortho-Bionomy” in an attempt to speed up the healing in my knee and get my body feeling normal again.
During the classes anytime the instructor did anything remotely close to working with the knee joint, I volunteered to be on the massage table as a “guinea pig”
In this one particular class, the instructor was demonstrating an “external femur rotation” on my left leg.
Increasing Knee Range of Motion
The demo took no more than 2-3 minutes. I got up off the table and stood feeling in my knee, leg and body something was different.
Then I looked down at the surgery scar on my left knee. It had shifted 1/2″ to my right!
(Insert knee scar image)
Next, I knelt right down “heel to butt”…The tears flowed down my face as the relief was palpable in my body…
I hadn’t been able to do that since before I injured my knee skiing in December of 1998.
Questions that didn’t make sense…
As a result of this experience, I was completely baffled.
“How could I have worked so hard in physical therapy the past 2 years and gotten only marginally better?“
“How could increasing the range of motion in my knee happen without force?“
“Where did such significant results come from in such a short period of time with just a slight rotation of the upper part of my leg in a ‘position of comfort.‘”?
None of this made sense
I made a huge choice in my healing journey at that point…
I stopped trying to figure out why that happened to my knee and accepted the fact this is how my body was designed to heal itself.
The more I trusted in this process of my body’s own self-healing of my knee the easier the process as been.
The really cool part is I don’t need to know!
The more I create comfort in my body and allow it to feel safe, supported, and listened to the faster I upgrade my nervous system to heal faster.
SPOILER ALERT: This works for every part of the body NOT only the knees! 😉
The best part is I was able to turn the tragedy of the worse injury of my life into my life’s work!
Bill Parravano is “The Knee Pain Guru” and has been called, “the best in the world at eliminating knee pain without drugs, shots or surgery.”
He brings over 26 years of martial art and bodywork experience understanding movement and tensions patterns that lead to physical pain.
Bill believes the nervous system is the key to the body’s healing, and bridges the gap between what we currently know and the infinite possibilities of what we don’t know the body is capable of. Coupled with comfort, this combination creates the shortest distance between a life riddled with pain to a physical life fully mobile and self expressed.
“You can’t think your way out of pain. Pain is not rational and doesn’t care what you think. You must feel your way out of pain through comfort. Through the weeks, months and years of injury and compensation patterns built up in your body limiting your movement and making you feel older than you are.”
His unique ability of identifying the blocks that keep people stuck in pain and skillfully removing them allows for lasting change, and a new reality for his clients…
