Swimming is a low-impact exercise that builds up muscles around your knees and could help to ease symptoms and have you feeling better all round. While swimming, the buoyancy of the water supports the body weight, meaning less stress is placed on joints, this reduces the knee pain.

If you suffer from knee arthritis, your doctor may have not recommended from doing heavy exercises that may lead to excruciating  pain and possibly cause further damage to your knees—like trail running, jumping, or doing squats and lunges. However its recommended to do moderate exercise to ease your knee pain from arthritis and prevent weight gain, which can put more strain on your knee joints.

Why does swimming help ?

Swimming for exercise can help you maintain your weight Weight loss can help decrease your pain by reducing stress on weight-bearing joints, like your arthritic knees. If you find you’ve experienced a lack of energy or more fatigue since you’ve had arthritic knee pain—and perhaps you haven’t been as active—gaining weight or inactivity itself may be the reason you’re feeling lethargic. It’s very important to maintain your activity level when you suffer from knee arthritis for optimum overall health and to help reduce joint pain.

Swimming can improve your health and fitness without hurting your joints.

1. Strengthen the muscles around your joints
2. Help you maintain bone strength
3. Give you more energy to get through the day
4. Make it easier to get a good night’s sleep
5. Help you control your weight
6. Enhance your quality of life
7. Improve your balance

Though you might think swimming  will aggravate your joint pain and stiffness, that’s not the case. Lack of exercise actually can make your joints even more painful and stiff.

That’s because keeping your muscles and surrounding tissue strong is crucial to maintaining support for your bones. Not exercising weakens those supporting muscles, creating more stress on your joints.

 

Following are the exercises you can try in water to reduce your knee pain :

 

#1. Water Walking

As with swimming, the water takes some of the strain off your knees, minimising knee pain. Many people also find the temperature soothes their joints. With water walking, water offers increased resistance but takes the pressure of your knees.

 

#2. Water Aerobics

Water aerobics (also called aquatics or aquatic exercise) is popular among people with arthritis because classes offer an effective but low-impact workout.

 

#3. Hydrotherapy

Hydrotherapy is physiotherapy that you do in a warm-water pool. The water supports you and the temperature can help your muscles relax.

 

#4. Hip & Lower Leg Exercises in Pool

These involve Forward Lunges , Squat Jumps , Hip Kickers & Frog Jumps in water of waist height in Swimming pool. These exercises have to be done slowly and under supervision.