You might believe that the success of your knee replacement operation and the ease of your recovery is completely in the hands of the surgeon performing your procedure, but that’s simply not true. You play a major role in the success of your knee replacement operation, and if you play your cards right, you can certainly make the recovery process a little easier on yourself. In today’s blog, we share some tips for how patients can make their recovery after knee replacement surgery a little easier.
Tips For Speeding Up Recovery After Knee Replacement
You’re not going to be able to shave months off of your recovery timeline by keeping these tips in mind, but you can speed up your recovery by a couple days or even weeks. That said, the fastest recovery shouldn’t be your ultimate goal, you should focus on making the fullest recovery. You can make achieving this goal a little easier by keeping these tips in mind.
- Start Physical Therapy Before Surgery – There’s no need to wait until your surgery has been completed to begin a physical therapy regimen. You’ll want to be as physically fit as possible during surgery, so start doing some knee exercises in the days and weeks leading up to your operation. This will also make it easier for you to continue PT after surgery is complete, because you’ll have already developed some helpful habits.
- Weight Loss – Another thing you can do before your operation is working towards a healthier weight. Your body weight is channeled through your knees, so the more you weigh, the more these joints have to handle. Losing just a few pounds can take a lot of pressure off your knee, which can also make it easier to walk and move earlier after surgery.
- Do Your Rehab Exercises – After surgery, it’s easy to skip on your rehabilitation exercises because you’re uncomfortable or in pain. That said, early movement and strength training has been linked to a quicker and fuller rehab, so you’ll want to push through this discomfort and do your therapy exercises, even when you don’t want to.
- Walk, Walk, Walk – Once you’re cleared to walk, make sure that you’re going on a number of walks each day. These don’t need to be mile-long walks, but simply getting up and moving for 5-10 minutes a number of times throughout the day will help develop key muscles and improve stabilization in your new knee. It may not be comfortable, but it will be beneficial.
- Get Plenty Of Restful Sleep – A lot of healing and muscle strengthening occurs when you are sleeping, so work to get plenty of restful sleep. It won’t always be easy to fall asleep and stay asleep because of discomfort in your healing knee, so make your sleep environment ideal. Turn off the television and make the room as dark as possible, and try to wake up and go to bed around the same time each day so that it’s easier to fall into a sleep rhythm.
- Trust Your Care To Dr. Botero – A final thing you can do to make your recovery after knee replacement surgery easier is to trust your operation to a skilled surgeon like Dr. Botero. In recent years, there have been improvements to knee replacement surgery techniques. These new procedures are more technically challenging for the surgeon, but they greatly reduce trauma to the patient’s soft tissues and can significantly improve recovery time. Dr. Botero is highly trained at these more technical techniques so that patients can recover quicker after their operation.
If you do all of these things, we’re confident that you will be putting yourself in a great position to make a strong and speedy recovery from your knee replacement operation. For more information, or to talk to a knee specialist about your discomfort and the possibility of replacement surgery, give Dr. Botero’s office a call today at (865) 558-4444.
