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Step 1
Know the risks. Treatment for osteoarthritis includes rest during acute flareups. Still, muscle strength and flexibility can help reduce the pain and swelling that come with arthritis.
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Step 2
Understand the benefits. Exercise reduces joint pain, improves mobility and lessens joint stiffness, promote muscle growth to support and stabilize the joints, and endurance. Losing excess weight by exercising may reduce stress on your joints, and being in better shape can give you more energy and help you sleep at night.
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Step 3
Get started. Talk with your doctor and make sure you understand how much and how often your physician feels you should work out.
An easy way to get started is with flexibility exercises, which are basically stretching exercises that will improve your range of motion and help you perform daily activities.
You can move on to weight training and endurance exercises such as bicycling. -
Step 4
If pain blocks your exercise attempts, check with your local YMCA, senior center or community center for a water exercise program. The water relieves stress on the joints and makes gentle exercise more comfortable.
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Step 5
Strength exercises, like weight lifting, stabilize weak joints by increasing muscle strength. When doing these exercises, you don’t necessarily use joint motion, but primarily build the muscle to better support the joint.
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Step 6
• Range-of-motion, or flexibility, exercises help maintain and increase the mobility of the joint, improve joint function, and decrease arthritis pain. They are intended to move a joint only as far as it will go without discomfort, and then stretch it a bit more. Gentle stretching of the major muscle groups is the most common flexibility exercise for people with arthritis.
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Step 7
• Endurance exercises rhythmically use the major muscle groups of the body, increasing heart and breathing rate, and thereby strengthen the heart and lungs, as well as build stamina. The most common examples are walking, bicycling, and swimming.
