Exercises To Alleviate Arthritis Pains And Stiffness

Moving your joints may help to relieve joint pain. When you exercise, you strengthen the muscles around the joints, which helps to take stress off joints and it also reduces joint stiffness and builds flexibility and endurance. Exercise can also improve your mood and self-esteem and therefore It helps you sleep better, keeps weight under control, and gives you more energy.

In addition to arthritis pain relief, exercise may outweigh other health problems like osteoporosis, diabetes, and heart disease.

People with arthritis commonly discover that if they don’t exercise regularly, they’ll experience more pain, stiffness, and fatigue. Regular exercise helps maintain joint function, relieves stiffness and decreases pain and fatigue.

Older women may be able to prevent or alleviate osteoarthritis pain by getting as little as one to two hours of moderately intense physical activity each week. Feeling tired may be partly the result of inflammation and medications, but it’s also caused by muscle weakness and poor stamina. If a muscle isn’t used, it can lose 3% of its function every day and 30% of its bulk in just a week.

The trick is to keep moving, so work together with your doctor or physical therapist to develop your own exercise program. These exercises will most likely involve three goals, which are increasing range of motion, strengthening your muscles and building endurance.

1. Increase range of motion.
These exercises aim to increase the mobility and flexibility of your joints. To increase your range of motion, move a joint as far as it can go and then try to push a little farther. These exercises can be done any time, even when your joints are painful or swollen, as long as you do them gently.

2. Strengthen your muscles.
An excellent way to provide aching joints with more support is to strengthen the muscles surrounding them. Strengthening exercises use resistance to build muscles. You can use your own body weight as resistance.
One example: Sit in a chair. Now lean forward and stand by pushing up with your thigh muscles (try to use your arms only for balance). Stand a moment, and then sit back down, using your thigh muscles. This simple exercise will help ease the strain on your knees by building up your thigh muscles.

3. Build endurance.
Aerobic activities such as walking, swimming, and bicycling can all build your heart and lung function, which in turn increases endurance and overall health. Be careful to pick activities with low impact on your joints, and avoid high-impact activities such as jogging. If you’re having a flare-up of symptoms, wait until it subsides before doing endurance exercise.

Alternative forms of exercise
Tai chi and water-based exercises have become increasingly popular. And with their focus on slow movement, postural alignment, and balance, they may be good choices for people with arthritis. Water-based exercise places less stress on the joints because it makes the body almost weightless.