Where to Do Knee Replacement Exercises When Your Bed Is Too Soft
The bed sinks, the couch won't let you lie flat and the floor's hard to get up from. People who've had the surgery found somewhere else to do their homework.
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A knee replacement sends you home with a sheet of homework, and a lot of it is done lying down: slide the heel in, tighten the thigh, lift the straight leg, let the knee hang. The sheet says how many. It never says where.
Someone in r/Kneereplacement had run out of places to try. They had a cheap massage table on offer and a worry it would turn into another piece of furniture that never gets used. So they asked where everyone else did their PT homework.
Most of the answers came down to a folding massage table. A later thread turned up a simpler fix for a soft bed, a tri-fold exercise mat laid on top. A few people got by with neither.
Why a massage table
A massage table is what a physical therapy clinic has you lie on. Someone in that thread never had one at home, and wished they had:
I told my PT that one of the most helpful things at the PT clinic was being able to be on a table. At home, my options were bed or floor, and neither one was particularly practical.
u/Glindanorth, in r/Kneereplacement
If your bed is too soft and getting down to the floor is out of the question, the owners in the thread say a folding massage table did the job. One owner, whose bed is too soft as well, sets the table to whatever height is comfortable.
Another bought a cheap one before the first knee. It's stood in the living room ever since, through the second knee too. Getting up onto it is easier than getting down to the floor, and they get up there three times a day.
Someone who did the first knee without a table says it limited the exercises they could do, so they bought one for the second. Another liked having theirs on the main floor in the early weeks, with no stairs to climb to reach it.
No physical therapy page we found tells you to buy one. The case for it comes from people who tried it. Which exercises you do is still your own therapist's call. The table only settles where.
What you do on it
A table owner started a thread of their own about it. They bought a folding table before the surgery and didn't touch it for the first two days, because using it seemed a bit aggressive. Then it took every exercise they did lying or sitting.
Theirs folds up with a carrying handle and sets up quickly.
The height is the thing to get right. One reply warned that in the first days, lifting the operated leg up onto anything is one of the most painful parts. They reckoned a bed or sofa would be easier to manage than a table unless it can be lowered.
Get one whose legs adjust, and start it low.
One exercise needs an edge to hang the leg off, and the name says so: the prone heel hang. Someone who never had a table couldn't find a substitute that came close, and renamed it the prone hell hang. They tried the tailgate of their pickup, which they admit is crazy.
Someone else runs stretchy bands with handles under the table, one end round an ankle and the other in hand, and gives the knee a nice stretch that way.
Do you need one at all?
A few people say no. For one, the bed worked fine. Another says a yoga mat is perfect and getting up off the floor hurts but you do it. They can kneel now. A third went for a flat weight bench instead.
The bed camp has its own catch, though. In a second thread, someone who just uses the bed got a reply from somebody whose own bed is too soft for some of the exercises.
If the bed is the only problem, there's a simpler fix than a table: a thick tri-fold exercise mat laid on top of the mattress. One person in that thread says it made the bed firm enough to do the home PT. They gave the same tip to someone shopping for a relative with a knee surgery coming up.
Who ends up buying one
That second thread came from someone whose apartment had no hard surface but the floor. They found a table secondhand.
A reply says they couldn't get down to the floor for a month or more, and the table was awesome. Three months out, they still use it for some exercises.
The person who asked the question at the top went ahead and bought one. Their reason was the thread, and the likelihood of needing the other knee done one day. Later, in the folding-table thread, they say it's been useful, though their cheaper one needs a repair already.
Try the mat on the bed first when a soft mattress is your only complaint. A folding massage table is for when the floor is out too, or a second knee is coming.
Buy it before the surgery, cheap or secondhand. Set it low, and stand it in the room you spend the day in. A table settles where you lie down. For the bending, the same sub's answer is a pedal exerciser or an exercise bike.
