Knee bursitis often lasts much longer than it should, because people aren’t sure how to treat it, and it keeps coming back over and over. Normally, it should only be around for two to four weeks. And if you’re doing the right things, you should set yourself up so that it’s not recurring.

Very often people with knee bursitis are guided by healthcare professionals unknowingly to do exercises, or certain treatments that technically make knee bursitis worse, and it stays there for longer than it should be.

In this video today, I’m going to cover with you the top five treatments for quickly healing knee bursitis Chi Minh, number one is rest. And you might think Well, that’s obvious. And I’ve actually been told that by other people. And yeah, I agree it’s, it’s an obvious one, if it hurts to do something, then stop doing it, get off your feet, obviously.

But here’s where people run into problems is they rest for too long, they don’t know when to stop resting always. So what I would recommend that you do if you’re suffering from knee bursitis, is you need to rest enough so that you don’t make it worse. And as you heal more, you should feel like you’re able to do a little bit more before your knee starts to hurt a little bit as we’re starting to complain to you.

And you know, then that that’s your limit. And you can only do that amount of time on your feet or that activity or whatever it is that you’re doing before you need to rest again and let it heal. What people tend to not do is they don’t rest enough first off, so they tend to rest a little bit because it hurts, then they get better enough to where they can tolerate being on their feet and doing some things with their legs with their knees.

But then they go through pain, they force themselves to exercise through pain, or to be on their feet, even though it hurts or they get back to that activity that may have set it off to begin with, like some sport or some gym exercise. And it just keeps the problem there for longer if they don’t allow it to rest enough to where it goes away.

Now included during this rest time would be things that help you feel better like using ice, or maybe heat or any sort of pain creams. Or if you feel like it’s bad enough, and you need to take some pain medication or go to the doctor for prescription strength pain medication, then that’s cool too, you can do that.

But what I would advise you against is taking pain medication or doing anything that’s pain relieving, and then going to go do activity right afterwards. Because that defeats the purpose. All you’ve done is taking something that has allowed you to not feel pain for a short amount of time or at least dull the pain. And you’re supposed to be resting not pursuing activity again and re aggravating the injury re aggravating the bursitis.

Because you’re going to keep it there for longer. So make sure you rest smart, make sure you’re wise about this, you’re not overdoing it, because that’s usually what sets off knee bursitis is you’re overdoing it in some way, or you hit yourself in your knees and you happen to hit a bursa. And that’s what swelled up. And once you feel like you have a good understanding of resting, you’re starting to do it.

Well, here’s the first exercise that you should do. This is number two here, number two treatment, it would be tailgate swings. To do tailgate swings, you’ll just sit like this, where your feet are just barely hanging off the floor. Using a computer chair, something that has a hydraulic lever like this where the chair can go up and down would be great so that you can get yourself up higher.

Or you can find a tall chair somewhere where your feet dangle is ideal. But even if your feet don’t dangle, and you have to kind of slide your feet, that’s fine, that’ll work. The idea here is this gentle movement of moving your legs back and forth, you can move them together, or alternate, it doesn’t matter.

There’s no resistance on you. You’re not pushing against anything. There’s no There’s no worry to go fast. You’re just simply moving, that moves. The tissues around the bursa moves the joint and moves the tendons, the ligaments, everything in the knee moves just subtly in that subtle movement stimulates healing. And because this should be pain free, it shouldn’t hurt you to do this.

It’s not going to aggravate the bursitis more. In fact, it should begin to train your body to tolerate this movement better it prepares it to do more activity that’s a little bit harder, obviously. And so doing this plenty at the beginning is great.

What I’d recommend for you is to work up to doing five minutes at a time of this and looking at doing it hourly, as long as it’s not hurting you because let’s say you do this three or four times, and your knee starts to hurt where you have your bursitis problem, then you need to stop at that point, take a break.

Don’t do it for a few hours, maybe even take the rest of the day off. Once you feel good again and then come back to doing it. The problem is that if you do too much the tailgate swing even though it’s quite gentle, your bursitis your bursa might be so inflamed, that it can only take so much motion right now and so you need to work within the tolerance of what your bursa can do right now today at this moment.

Once you recover a bit by resting and doing some easy tailgate swing some easy motion gradually over time over the next few days, you should feel like you can do a little bit more and a little bit more. And that sets you up to do even more so that you can get back to doing the normal things that you’d like to do.

The third treatment is that you need to start turning on your glutes, your butt muscles, the back of your hips need to begin to activate because especially if your bursitis problem came from an overactivity of something like you ran more than you normally do, or you use the bike more than you typically do.

Or you did some sport or activity, and you just went on a walk, and you ended up walking more than you might have planned to, and that set off your knee and you got bursitis from that, then chances are, you have a muscle imbalance where your quads, the muscles that are in the front of the thigh here are two dominance and too strong.

And when you over did it when you push yourself, your body was not prepared for that. And so it began to use the strongest muscle more and it tends to be the quads and people. Once those quads pull a lot, they start to irritate tissues around the knee joint, there happens to be more bursa on the front of the knee than on the back of the knee, there’s one of the inside of the knee two.

That’s the pes anserine Bursa, jab bursa right above the kneecap, one right on top of the kneecap, one below the kneecap, those are on the front. And then you have one right in here called the pes anserine Bursa, all of these are relatively the three are on the front of the knee, and then this one’s kind of in the front more on the inside of the knee.

But they all get overstressed if you have dominant quad muscles. So to begin to fix the root problem so that this is not coming back over and over again, something that you’re going to have to go through is beginning to fire your glute muscles without making your quad muscles on the front of your thigh work. So the easiest way to do this is to sit somewhere comfortably.

And think about tightening your glutes. Now do it without your thighs tightening, because if you did it right now you probably felt your thigh muscles also tighten up. So think about squeezing your glute muscles back here which are sitting on your butt muscles and hold it and hold it without these muscles here, even the back of your thighs, squeezing and tensioning as well.

So you can go about 10 seconds and then relax. Do it again, tighten up your glutes, keep your thighs relaxed, don’t start to also straighten out your legs. That means you’re using these muscles. And you have to master using your glutes without using your quad muscles too. Now what I tell people to do is do 10 rounds of this where you’re holding your glute muscles tight for 10 seconds and do it 10 times in a row, take a break as much as you need to.

But then repeat this hourly you need to get obsessive about learning how to fire your glutes without firing your thigh muscles. Because if you don’t figure this out, what ends up happening is you’ll eventually get over your bursitis. Hopefully, it’ll come down especially if you rest enough, it should come down almost to the point where you hardly feel it.

And then when you get back to that activity that sets you off like say running or cycling, or some gym exercise some weightlifting that you were doing. Once you go back to that your bursitis is going to come back because if you still have the muscle imbalance, we’re using this muscle too much. It’s going to aggravate the bursa that is swollen, it’s going to cause bursitis again.

But if you can go back to those activities, and you’re using your glutes better, then you’re in a position where you can tolerate those activities in more of a balance within your muscles. And you’re not going to set off the bursitis again. But what everybody struggles with first is this right here turning on your glutes without squeezing the thigh muscles.

The fourth treatment is an advancement on this glute set exercise, you need to start to get your glutes to work a little bit harder. And the best way to do it is to do a bridge exercise, you may have done this exercise already, especially if you went through physical therapy for your knee bursitis.

But you’ll get in this position, I’m going to show you how it’s different you can get in this position. And you’re going to tighten up your glutes again, because you’ve already been practicing at using your glutes without your thighs. This needs to carry over into the bridge. Because what people do all the time is they’ll start to do a bridge and they’re using these thigh muscles on the back.

And they also feel a big stretch or activation of these muscles up here on the front of the thighs. And you don’t want to feel that you want maybe just a tiny bit. But what you definitely want to feel is these butt muscles tightening up and working hard as you’re doing a bridge. And it’s not just go up and down and it’s not go up and down as high as possible.

What I want you to start with is flatten out your back, as if you’re smashing your low back down against your hand right here that will already start to get your buttock muscles to work, but then you have to actively think about getting your glutes to tighten up.

Think about squeezing really hard back here. And then once the back squat the butts tight, now you’re going to start to lift up a little bit and hold it there for 10 seconds, the hold is really important because it makes the glute muscle all the fibers, all the cells within the glute muscle to work better.

So once you’ve held it for 10 seconds, you can come down and repeat that 10 times. So back flat, tighten the but then lift up a little bit. And what I don’t want you to do is lift up as high as possible, because then you’re going to put a big stretch on the front of the thigh. And you’re also more prone to using these thigh muscles and these back muscles.

But if you keep the lifts smaller to where you can concentrate on just using those glutes that’s more productive for you, because now you’re strengthening the glutes without also affecting other muscles in your thighs, that could potentially feed into the near knee bursitis problem. This exercise, I would consider doing several times a day and accumulate 50 to 100 repetitions in a day.

Now, if you can’t do even 50 Yet, start with what you can just try 10 reps today, holding it for 10 seconds. And if you can’t do 10 seconds, just try to come up for a second or two and work your way up from there to where you can hold maybe five seconds seven, and then 10 seconds, then once you feel like you can do it properly, we’re using your glutes right?

Then go ahead and add more reps where you can maybe get in 2030 than 50 reps and then work your way up from there. Mastering the glutes set where you’re just tightening up your glutes. And then mastering this bridge is key to making sure that you take pressure off your knee joints so that you’re not getting bursitis over and over again.

Now the fifth treatment, it’s more of like a don’t do this thing because a lot of people end up doing this as treatment because you’re recommended to do this by other people that have suffered from knee bursitis. All over the internet. People say to do this and even healthcare providers like physical therapists, and doctors will tell patients with knee bursitis to do this.

They’ll say go walk, walk for exercise, walk this off, go start walking at the park get into a mile or two. And what I often see is people that are walking with knee bursitis, they hit a certain point maybe not at the beginning, maybe not even the first 10-15 minutes mile or two. But after a certain point their knees start to hurt. And the reason is, is because they’re not using their glutes properly while they’re walking.

They’re using their quads, the front of the thighs, and it’s putting a lot of pressure on the knee joint as they get tired. As they walk more, it starts to aggravate the bursa. And it causes inflammation on the bursa. And that’s the definition of knee bursitis. So I want you to avoid walking extra until you feel like you have mastered how to use your glutes properly. I want to let you know that I’ve got a video link in the description below that shows you how to use your glutes properly.

While you’re watching. Go check that out in the description below. There’s also a video there that tells you more about knee bursitis like how it happens and how to make sure you get rid of it for the long term.

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