I like to jog and walk A LOT. Just check out my daily average from the past year:
I like to walk for an amount of reasons, because it’s a simple exercise that gets my blood flowing without making me sweat, it gets me off my phone (I sometimes stare at it for too long!), and improves my mood and clears my head.
For someone who likes to walk a lot, I was noticing that if I had a day where I walked for too long, my knees would begin to hurt. Instead of getting the cause checked out, I would write off the hurt as just having “genetically weak joints” and that there was nothing that I could really do about it except to wait the pain out. It was frustrating, but I assumed there was nothing I could do about it, so instead of walking around or jogging, and just moving to my heart’s content, I would not exercise.
One winter, I was in NYC when I was looking for a new pair of running sneakers. As I was in the shop, looking for a nice pair of sneakers, a lady came up to me and asked if I wanted to try running in them. Her name was Kathy, and she motioned towards a treadmill in the shop, and explained that I could test out the sneakers in-store to see if they were a good fit.
My first thought was, sneaker stores do this? What an amazing service! I obliged and put on the sneakers, and hopped on the treadmill for about 15 seconds. When I got off, Kathy told me, “Hey, did you realize you might have overpronation?”
I became silent, as I had no idea what that was and it didn’t sound that great. I think she saw my concern, so she quickly explained, “It’s not a terrible thing! Don’t worry. It just means that you land on your feet in a way that makes your ankles shift in, putting more weight and stress on your knees. Have you been experiencing some knee pain?” I nodded my head, completely baffled by how she so easily looked into my life and understood my pain points. She asked me to hop on the treadmill again, this time filming my ankles, to show how I was landing.
And there it was! My ankles were landing in a bent fashion, looking a bit like this:
Finally! I know what is the source of my knee pain, and it’s not that I have weak joints. No more limiting my walking, running, or traveling because of something I for so long thought could never be addressed. After figuring out I had overpronation, I adjusted how my foot lands on the ground using the foot in-sole Superfeet BLUE, so it would alleviate the stress on my knees.
I love Superfeet BLUE so much and they are definitely worth the price! I just slip them into my sneakers, and immediately my stride became a lot more comfortable and of course, no knee pain! During my travels, I wore these in-soles everyday, and had no problems with my knees. I was doing so much better in fact, that while I was abroad, I signed up for my first half marathon and finished it! A feat I couldn’t do had I not directly addressed my knee pain. It made my trips 100x more enjoyable and fun, and was an absolute gift to my experiences abroad.
If you, or someone you know, deals with knee pain regularly, one sign you could look for is on the bottom of your shoes! Your shoe’s in-soles may look as if there is a part that is being rubbed off, frequently people will tell you it’s a sign that you “drag your feet”. Walking irregularly, that your feet aren’t landing properly on the ground, is a sign that could be a cause of your knee pain.
Another option is, like me, getting someone else to take a video of your foot landing on a treadmill, to see if you are landing with your ankle shifting in. It may be worth it to see a professional and see if they can determine if you have overpronation, and they could recommend a solution for it which would work best for you.
You don’t need to deal with knee pain and a super simple solution exists out there! Just by slipping in my in-soles, I’ve been able to expand a lot of the opportunities available to me, and have gotten rid of a major source of frustration.
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, advice, or thoughts– email me at kokumura@kakikata.space! I respond to every email I get!
