For some reason, knees going past your toes have had a bad reputation, but let me start off by saying that it is not necessarily a bad thing. However, I still see patients who say that they experience pain in their knees because they go past their toes. In this blog, I wanted to share the instances when the knees go past your toes and ways to deal with the pain in case you feel it when your knees go past your toes.
Examples Of When Your Knees Go Past Your Toes
When you walk down the stairs, your knees have to go over your toes for you to be able to get down to the next step. If you are also squatting down to pick something up off the ground, your knees will go past your toes. When you are going to sit on the toilet, unless you have a very high toilet, your knees will likewise go past your toes. Sometimes, when you are sitting in a low chair or when you are to stand up, your knees will also go past your toes.
Why Knees Going Past Your Toes Got A Bad Reputation
I am not sure why your knees going past your toes got a bad reputation as I do not know the reason for it. However, I have an assumption, which is when you are at 90 degrees at knee bend, there is a lot of load on your knee, so I think that’s how it got its bad reputation. People might think that when they are getting knee pain from such bend, it was because their knees went past their toes.
What’s Causing The Pain
It’s not actually your knees going past your toes that is causing the pain. It could be several other things and I want to discuss it more here. First, the pain could be stemming from the fear of your knees going past your toes. When your brain does not think a movement is safe, pain will occur. Creating safety for your brain will mean that pain in general will decrease.
The other reason why it is painful sometimes for your knees to go past your toes is if you do not actually have the strength. When you do not have the strength to do that motion, your knee joint will get more load. When you get more load to your knee joint, there will be more neuro activity in your knee and your brain will think that is a problem and that it is not safe, so pain will occur.
Ways To Deal With The Pain
Even if I tell you that it is okay for your knees to go past your toes, your brain will undergo retraining to actually believe that. So, you have to get yourself into a mindset of creating safety so that it is okay for your knees to go past your toes.
To do this, here are some ways I believe will help you. First, when you are walking down the stairs, you can walk down the stairs with every other foot. For example, if you have right knee pain, you can walk with your right foot down first, then your left foot goes down next. You want to go as slowly as possible, and the reason for this is you want to start to activate your quad muscles. This will help take the load off of your knee joint. By walking slowly down the stairs, you are increasing muscular activity, which is going to decrease the load to your knee joint. Anytime that we do a movement quickly, you are using more momentum than actually using your muscles. There is nothing wrong with this, but if you are experiencing pain, we want to start to activate your muscles more consciously so that the brain is thinking about those quad muscles, rather than the brain having its attention on your knee. With this, the brain will slowly realize that it is safe to go downstairs and that knee pain is not necessary when your knees go past your toes.
Another thing you can do is to get a low chair and practice moving from sitting to standing very slowly. It is the same concept as when you are going down the stairs slowly.
Conclusion
So again, knees going past your toes is not a bad thing or something that will break down your knee joint. Your knee joint is very resilient and very strong, but if you have that mindset that knee pain is going to be caused by those motions, then it may happen.
If you are somebody in the past who had an ACL tear or a traumatic event to your knee, the same principles still kind of apply. You want to slowly load the area until you can tolerate your knees going further and further past your toes. This is the same thing we do in physical therapy when someone is having pain in their knees.
So if you try the two exercises I recommended in this blog, it might take a while, around two to three weeks, and you still experience pain, I highly advise you to go to a physical therapist to set you up with a program to progressively load your knee so you can do your functional activities without any pain.