Here are the top 10 things people should absolutely avoid doing after knee replacement surgery. I’ll share these things with you in order of those that you should be avoiding in the short term right after surgery to the long term, like if you’ve had surgery six months, 12 months or more, those are things you should avoid in that situation.

In the short term right after surgery, you should avoid sitting for long periods of time. And usually it’s more than about 20 to 30 minutes. Because if you sit still, without any motion, there’s a greater risk of getting a blood clot, which could be absolutely disastrous for you if you’ve had surgery.

This could cause a pulmonary embolism, which is basically like a version of a heart attack, you can get a clot that goes up into your heart or up into your brain which can cause stroke. So you want to make sure within the first couple of months after surgery that you’re moving frequently, if you’re asleep, it’s a little bit different.

But if you’re just sitting all day long, that is not a good thing for you. Number two is walking without something to balance with. Right after surgery, you should be using a walker, some crutches, or at least a cane, you need to have something that gives you adequate balance, because should you fall, or even stumble where you don’t fall, but so you lose your balance and you have to quickly move your legs.

If your knee is not healed enough, there’s a chance that you could re injure your knee and possibly have to redo that surgery you just went through. Number three is skipping pain medications, your doctor probably gave you a regimen of pain medications to take during and after the surgery. And right after surgery, you need to be taking those because you just underwent massive surgery, you had bones replaced, the ends of your thigh bone, and your shin bone had been replaced.

And probably your kneecap too. And that is tremendously painful. So the doctor will give you certain pain medications so that you can tolerate sleeping, and being able to move in ways that you’re supposed to right after surgery.

Now sleep is super important because that’s when you do the most healing possible. So if you’re not getting adequate sleep, because you’re in pain, you might need to be on those pain medications more so than you thought. I see too many people try to tough it out after the surgery and reduce the amount of pain medications they’re taking, for good reason, because they want to avoid all the side effects of pain medication.

But you do need to realize that this is just a temporary time while you’re healing after the knee replacement, that you need to be on those medications so that you don’t have other side effects from not being able to sleep enough or not being able to move as well as you could because of the pain. Now we’re moving into slightly more long term, not quite long term, but mid term.

Number four is you should not be kneeling. Now, it’s not a hard and fast rule, don’t kneel. But generally people that have had a knee replacement are not comfortable kneeling, it just doesn’t feel good. Some can’t bend their knee enough to kneel. And more importantly, being able to get up from the floor if you’re kneeling is a challenge for a lot of people early on after surgery.

So avoiding kneeling is generally a good idea. But even if you’ve been out of surgery for six months, 12 months, or longer than that, you might still not kneel. And that’s okay, I see so many patients that have had a knee replacement in the past that say I can tolerate kneeling for just you know, seconds, maybe at most 30, 60 seconds.

But that’s all they can tolerate. They’re not there very much. And this comes into play with activities like cleaning down the floor, gardening, or other things where you might need to get down on the ground and kneel, you might get some help when you run into these situations if you had a knee replacement.

Number five is doing your physical therapy exercises. Chances are you’re going to be doing a physical therapy routine after you have your knee replacement where you’ll go to a clinic or you might have somebody come to your house and they’ll run you through exercises movements and stretches that you need to do in order to gain your full flexibility back in your knee and get back to walking and activities as normally as possible.

They’ll usually tell you to do certain things at home outside of your appointments. And that’s one of the problems that I see is people forget to do it or they don’t quite understand there’s a miscommunication of how much to do. Make sure you clarify with your therapist, how much exercise outside of your appointments you’re supposed to do because that could help you get better faster than you already are.

Now on the flip side of that it is possible to overdo it. So make sure that you’re not in pain, you’re not running into any problems and communicate well with your physical therapist so that you’re moving forward at the right pace that’s best for your situation. Now let’s begin to talk more long term. Now number six is maintaining your long term fitness.

After you’re done rehabilitating with a physical therapist, this is usually at least three months out from having your knee replacement surgery. What I see many patients do is drop off doing any sort of exercise. Now they’re typically more active at this point.

They’re on their feet, they’re getting back to chores, errands normal daily activities, of course getting used to the new knee, but they’re not exercising like where they make muscles tired. They even break a little bit of a sweat like they were in physical therapy. And so what happens very gradually, almost unnoticeably is strength and endurance decline over time.

And then this leads to other problems later on, it may take months to develop these problems, possibly even years. But because there’s a decline in strength, and endurance, and it’s so gradual and subtle, this can set up other problems later on. So it’s important for you to make sure that you maintain some sort of regular exercise routine, so that you can keep up your fitness for the long term.

Number seven is contact sports. Now, this might seem kind of obvious, but for some people, it does need to be clearly stated, contact sports should be avoided. Now we’re talking even incidental contact sports like basketball, soccer, you know, they’re not true contact sports, but you might incidentally bump into somebody or somebody might bump into you, if there’s any activities, or sports where there’s potential to have contact or there’s definitely contact, you need to avoid those and just scratch this off the list of things that you’re going to be keeping up in the long term.

And the reason is this, if somebody does fall into your replaced knee and damage it, you’re probably going to need another surgery, there’s a high chance that you’re going to need to have a revision done to your knee replacement. Number eight is variable impact sports. Now, let me break down what I just said there.

Variable just means that there’s a changing variable like you can move this way you can move that way, you might need to step this way or that way. Impact means that there’s going to be some sort of force that’s suddenly going to go through your leg and eventually through your knee. And it’s typically a sport.

And I’m talking about things like skiing, any sort of jumping activities, especially things like a trampoline, where you can’t always control the exact direction that your leg is going to go in, there’s a chance that your foot might go this way or that way. And it’s not super predictable. In those situations, you want to avoid those because you might twist or hurt your knee.

Now, the reason why I’m not saying all impact sports is because some sports or activities might be seen as impact sports, the one that comes to mind specifically is weightlifting, because you’re putting more pressure through your joints. I’m actually an advocate that you should be doing weightlifting.

Many surgeons will agree that doing some weightlifting gradually can help you strengthen your bones, tendons, ligaments and joints. And it’s very doable in somebody that has had a knee replacement. And I would even go to the extent to argue that it’s necessary in order to fix other problems that might have led to you getting the knee replacement, so that you can protect your knee replacement for the long term.

More on that in just a minute. But there are some impact sports, like weightlifting, that I think you should look forward to doing you should be putting into your routine. But the variable impact sports like skiing, any sort of sport where you’re having to cut and change directions, those are not a good idea to keep doing. And number nine is doing too much too soon.

Even if you’re doing a good exercise or something that’s very controlled something that’s overall healthy for you something that’s worked for you in the past, but you’re increasing the resistance to it, the amount of time that you’re doing it or the frequency, the amount of time that you’re doing it in a day or in a week, and it’s tending to hurt you more than it could just be that your body’s not ready for that it’s a good thing.

It’s just that you need more time to adapt your muscles, tendons, ligaments, even the bones, the bones or the attached to the parts that were installed for your knee replacement that needs to adapt as well so that you can tolerate doing those activities at a more frequent or more intense amount without getting irritation or inflammation without hurting yourself more, be sure to build in rest days, so that you can have time to recover from the activity that you did.

That’ll give your body a chance to adapt so that you can go back to doing those activities at a greater intensity gradually over time. And number 10 is assuming that the surgery fixed everything. Now the surgery just replaced the ends of the bones where the arthritis was. So all we did was take out the arthritis and replaced it with a joint surface that now moves normally and isn’t going to cause you problems.

You can’t get arthritis again in there. But what is still there likely is something called muscle imbalances. Or another way to look at it is muscle compensations where you’re using muscles inappropriately around the leg, and this ends up causing excessive forces around the knee joint.

This can still set you up to get irritation and ligaments, tendons, even the bones, the muscles as well and nerves and can cause you pain and problems even though your knee joint has been replaced.

So it’s a fallacy to believe that if you had a knee replacement surgery that you could get back to doing whatever you want walking as long as you want being able to exercise as frequently as you want.

But if you have those muscle compensations or muscle imbalances, then there’s a chance that if you’re exercising the same way you were before, it’s just a matter of something else beginning to hurt, possibly even your knee replacement becoming loose or damaged in some way over time. I talk extensively on this channel about how to address these muscle imbalances that cause problems in those that have had knee replacements.

In fact, I’ve got a playlist of all our videos that have to do with knee replacement help, link’s down in the description below here. I’ve also got a program called the failed knee replacement recovery program. For those that have had a lot of trouble with chronic pain after a knee replacements. You can go check that out, learn more about it down in the description below.

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