Obtaining crutches or a walker and practicing walking with these before your surgery is very helpful. With an arthritic hip or knee joint, exercise may be painful. You may have developed muscle atrophy due to disuse. No special preoperative program is needed. Swimming, water exercises, elliptical and exercise biking are usually the best tolerated exercises with an arthritic joint.

After your surgery, we will recommend a period of light activity while you start to heal and then allow you to increase progressive exercises. In most cases, muscle atrophy is reversed by one year after the surgery. Arthritic joints also become very stiff (loss of motion). There is not much you can do about this prior to surgery.

Physical therapy (PT) has no proven benefit. If the knee gets very stiff prior to surgery this is only partially correctable with extensive postoperative PT. In the hip, on the other hand, motion returns spontaneously without PT and near normal range of motion is recovered by one year postoperative.