Sports after a knee replacement: golf, cycling and tennis

What sports can you do after a knee replacement?

The sports you can do after a knee replacement are the ones your surgical team clears for your knee. The published lists are material for that conversation. They are not permission in advance.

Start with the group almost nobody argues about. In a survey of 139 members of the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons, taken at the 2007 annual meeting, more than 95 percent of responses placed no limit at all on walking on the level, climbing stairs, cycling on the level, swimming and golf, across answers given for hip and knee replacement together (Swanson and colleagues, 2009). A separate survey of 120 members of the European Knee Associates, a section of ESSKA, asked about 47 sports across four windows after the operation. Consensus allowed 5 of them in the first 6 weeks, naming walking, stair climbing, swimming, aqua fitness and a static bike. Cycling on level ground and yoga joined at 6 to 12 weeks. The seven the paper names next, as recommended beyond 12 weeks, were doubles tennis, golf, weight training, aerobics, hiking, Nordic walking and sailing, which takes the consensus to 14 activities in the 3 to 6 month window and 21 of the 47 in the window beyond 6 months. Squash was the only one of the 47 the consensus placed outside altogether (Thaler and colleagues, 2021).

The surgeons attached their own caveat, and it changes how any of these lists should be read, including those two. Not one of the 139 respondents in the American survey said there was strong scientific evidence behind their own recommendations. That survey also found knee advice more conservative than hip advice, and surgeons doing more operations a year more liberal than those doing fewer. The European paper labels its own level of evidence as the lowest grade, expert opinion. So where two reputable lists disagree about your sport, what you are watching is clinical judgment differing, not one of them misreading the research.

The research that does exist measures something slightly different from what you want to know. A review of 44 studies found a pooled 82 percent of people returned to some sport after a total knee replacement, with individual study rates from 36 percent to 100 percent, and the figure split sharply by intensity: 76 percent for low-intensity sport and 35 percent for high-intensity sport. The mean time to going back was 20.1 weeks, with a reported range of 16 to 24 weeks, and the review graded itself therapeutic level III (Pasqualini and colleagues, 2023). An earlier review of 18 studies put return to sport after a total knee replacement between 36 and 89 percent, with a mean of 13 weeks, and added that in more than 90 percent of cases this concerned low-impact sport. Three of its 18 studies were at low risk of bias and confounding was inadequately accounted for in most of them (Witjes and colleagues, 2016).

One thing to settle before you take any of those numbers as yours: they describe a total knee replacement. That same review of 18 studies covered partial replacements as well, and found that more people went back to sport after a partial than after a total, including to higher-impact sport, and that their activity level afterward was higher (Witjes and colleagues, 2016). The European consensus was written for a standard primary total replacement, and the surgeons who wrote it say the recommendations should be individualized by your own surgeon (Thaler and colleagues, 2021). So if you had a partial rather than a total, the figures on this page understate what people in your position did, the lists were not written about your operation, and your own surgeon's answer counts for more here, not less.

Both deserve to be read for what they are. They describe the people in those series who went back, and that is not the same group as everyone who had the operation. Neither says anything about whether going back was wise. Nobody has randomized people with new knees to sport or no sport.

Your sport can be treated as a goal instead of a hobby you mention in passing, and there is a route to that. The NICE guideline on primary joint replacement asks that you leave hospital with clear goals for the rehabilitation you do yourself and a named person to contact with questions, and it recommends supervised outpatient rehabilitation for people who are finding daily activities difficult, who have a continuing problem with function that needs specific attention, or who are not reaching their goals working alone (NICE NG157). It also asks for rehabilitation to start on the day of surgery where that is possible and within 24 hours. Tell whoever is reviewing you the name of your sport at the first appointment, not the last.

Can you play golf after a knee replacement?

Golf is golf in all five of the countries we write for, and it is two separate problems sharing one name. The swing is one. The course is the other, and they come back at different times.

Take the swing first, because it is the part your surgeon is actually weighing. The lead knee is the one nearer the target, so the left knee for a right-handed player, and it does a different job from the trail knee. In a study of 13 golfers hitting a five iron, peak forces and moments differed significantly between the two knees, the downswing was the most stressful phase, and flexion and internal rotation moments at the lead knee were the loads that tracked with how skilled the golfer was. The authors noted that some peak knee loads approached those of activities that rehabilitation holds back until late. Spiked and spikeless shoes made no significant difference to peak loads (Gatt and colleagues, 1998). Those were golfers with their own knees, so it describes what a swing does and not what an implant feels.

One small study has looked at the implant itself. Continuous X-ray imaging of 4 replaced knees during a golf swing, and 8 during stationary cycling, found significantly greater rotation of the implant through the swing, from the top of the backswing to the follow-through, than during cycling. The authors suggested rotation of that size could contribute to wear of the plastic bearing, and on that basis they preferred a stationary bike for patients wanting to stay active (Hamai and colleagues, 2008). Four knees is four knees, and the study measured movement, not force and not actual wear. Take it into your conversation as a mechanism to ask about, not as a finding to plan your year around.

The course is a different problem entirely: distance, slopes, standing in a bunker, hitting off a side-hill lie, getting in and out of a cart, and carrying or pushing a bag. None of that involves rotation under load, and all of it involves the thigh controlling the knee on uneven ground for hours. A newer review of golf after hip and knee replacement adds that changes in leg length, alignment and implant type or position can all affect function and play, which is a surgeon's territory and not ours (Spencer-Gardner and colleagues, 2025).

The numbers, with their limits attached. A review of 23 retrospective studies of golfers after hip, knee or shoulder replacement, mean age 66.8 years, pooled the rate of returning to golf at 80 percent across the 13 studies reporting it, and at 70 percent across its 6 knee studies, with a confidence interval on that knee figure running from 39 percent to 100 percent. The mean time to return across the 9 studies reporting it was 4.4 months, not broken down by joint. Handicap was close to unchanged, a mean shift of about a tenth of a stroke across the 8 studies that measured it, and no study in the review identified what predicted getting back at all (Robinson and colleagues, 2023). Every study in that review was retrospective. A confidence interval that wide is the paper being honest about how little is settled.

Something to do with all of this, not only to think about. Ask your surgeon specifically about rotation through the lead knee instead of asking whether you can play golf, because the general question gets a general answer. Then, once they have cleared you to play, build in the order the demands arrive: putting, chipping, short irons off a mat, a full range session, nine holes with a cart, a walked round. Change one thing at a time, and let the following morning tell you whether it was too much. The scorecard will not.

That order needs numbers on it or it is not a plan, so these are the ones I use, as practice experience and a starting shape rather than a prescription. Something like 20 to 30 putts and chips in a first session. Then 10 to 15 half swings with a short iron off a mat rather than off turf. More balls before a longer club, and a longer club before a faster swing. Hitting a full bag and playing a round in the same week is the step most people take too early. Ask a coach as well whether letting the lead foot turn out a little, or letting that heel come off the ground earlier, takes some of the twist out of your lead knee. That is a coaching question and not something to copy off a page, because changing a swing moves load somewhere else as well as taking it off the knee.

Cycling and the stationary bike: what changes between them

Cycling is the head word, and if you are reading this in the United States or Canada you may call it biking or bike riding. The sport sits early in almost every list after this operation, and the reason is mechanical.

Turning the cranks asks the knee to bend and straighten repeatedly while the saddle carries most of your body weight. That is close to the opposite of what a landing does. It is why the consensus survey of 120 European Knee Associates members allowed a static bike inside the first 6 weeks and cycling on level ground from 6 to 12 weeks (Thaler and colleagues, 2021), and why OrthoInfo describes a stationary bicycle as something used in physical therapy, asking you to work for as much bending and straightening as you can get while you ride.

Saddle height is the control, and most people treat it as a comfort setting. A review of 62 published references on bicycle saddle height reported that the majority of the evidence put a 5 percent change in saddle height at a 35 percent change in knee joint kinematics and a 16 percent change in joint moments, with compressive force at the kneecap inversely related to saddle height and the effect on the forces between the thighbone and the shinbone uncertain (Bini and colleagues, 2011). The review names one of its own limits, which is that most of the cyclists in the studies it read had low levels of expertise. The other limit is ours to add, because the review had no reason to mention it: none of this was measured in a replaced knee. What it tells you is the direction of the effect: raising the saddle reduces how much bend the pedal stroke demands and tends to ease the pressure on the front of the knee, and dropping it does the reverse.

Do not set it yourself from a formula. In a study of well-trained cyclists, setting the saddle to the recommended 106 to 109 percent of inside leg length did not reliably produce the knee bend that rule is meant to deliver, and 26 percent of the riders turned out to have knee angles outside the recommended range once they were measured while actually pedaling (Ferrer-Roca and colleagues, 2012). After a knee replacement the person to set it is your physiotherapist or physical therapist, watching you pedal, because the height that eases the front of your knee and the height that gets the bend your team wants are not automatically the same number. We have no exercise page for a bike on this site, so there is nothing to click here: the setting and the build-up are the instruction.

So here is the build-up, again as practice experience and again behind whatever your own team has told you. Start at 5 to 10 minutes of easy pedaling with the resistance almost off, once a day, and get the full circle turning smoothly, with your hips not rocking from side to side, before you ask the bike for anything else. Add a few minutes at a time. Add resistance last, once the time is comfortable. If the front of the knee pinches at the top of the stroke, raise the saddle a little rather than pushing through it, and if it keeps pinching, get your physio to watch you pedal. If the knee will not get round the circle at all yet, rock the pedals forward and back through the range you do have instead of forcing the last part, and say so at your next appointment: the bend is the thing to work on there, and the bike is only where you noticed it.

The road is where the question changes, and it changes for a reason that has nothing to do with load. Clipping in and out, getting a foot down at a junction, traffic, gravel, a wet corner, hills that force you out of the saddle, and standing starts all introduce the one thing a new knee tolerates worst, which is falling onto it. OrthoInfo warns that a fall in the first few weeks after surgery can damage the new knee and may lead to further surgery. So the static bike and the road bike are two separate permissions, usually weeks apart, and once your team has cleared you to ride outdoors, flat pedals and a quiet route are a reasonable middle step. If you are older, have fallen in the past year, or feel unsteady on your feet, treat the road as a balance question as well as a knee question and work through balance and falls prevention first.

Can you play tennis after a knee replacement?

Tennis is called tennis wherever you are reading this. What sets it apart from the other two sports on this page is not how hard the knee is loaded. It is who chooses the moment.

Golf gives you a swing you start when you are ready. Cycling repeats one circle at a pace you set. Tennis makes you stop, turn and push off sideways when the ball arrives, often at full stretch, and then asks you to do it again before you have finished recovering. Add the split step, the serve and the overhead, and you have a sport where the knee is loaded in rotation and sideways at unpredictable moments. The NHS also asks you, while you are recovering, to avoid twisting the knee as much as you can, which is the early version of the same concern.

The doubles and singles question is a real one, and the answer available is thinner than people assume. Doubles tennis is among the activities the European Knee Associates consensus recommended beyond 12 weeks after the operation. Singles is not among the activities that survey's abstract names, so we cannot tell you from it where singles was placed, and we will not guess (Thaler and colleagues, 2021). What separates them is court coverage. Doubles asks for less ground per point, which means less sprinting, fewer hard stops and fewer full stretches, while the serve and the overhead are identical in both. That difference is a reason to ask about them separately, not a clearance for one of them.

Two reviews are worth knowing about, and they land in slightly different places. A review focused on tennis after hip and knee replacement reported that higher-impact activities including tennis are generally discouraged, and then noted that the studies looking specifically at tennis did not show a harmful effect on how long implants lasted, while cautioning that most patients in those studies do not represent the average person having this operation and that careful selection matters (Seyler and colleagues, 2006). A narrative review of sport after knee replacement goes further: a replacement is no longer treated as an absolute bar to higher-impact activities such as golf, tennis and skiing, and what appears to matter more than the implant is the player, particularly how active and how skilled they were beforehand (Hanreich and colleagues, 2023). That same review is also plain that choices made in the operating room change what the joint can take: a more conforming bearing surface spreads the load instead of concentrating it on one point of the plastic, surgeons avoid leaving the components in varus alignment because that raises the stress where the implant meets your bone, and leaving the kneecap unresurfaced is one of the ways deep bending is made easier. None of that can be read off your own knee from the outside, and it is one honest reason your surgeon's answer may differ from any published list. Both are reviews rather than trials, and neither is about your knee.

Readers ask about court surface, and we have nothing to give them. Whether a slower surface reduces what a replaced knee takes has not been answered in research we can quote, so that question belongs with your surgeon and your coach, not in a paragraph here. One more thing to keep separate: table tennis shares most of a name with tennis and almost none of its demands, and it turns up constantly in searches for this subject. Ask about it on its own terms.

The build-up is where tennis differs most from the other two sports here, so it is worth setting out. Once your team has cleared you, the order that works is your strokes shadowed with no ball, then hitting from a standing position with someone feeding to you, then rallying from the middle of the court with a partner who hits to you rather than away from you, then the serve on its own, and then short points on the understanding that you do not chase a ball out of reach. A match comes last, not first, because a match is the one setting where somebody else decides how far you run. Keep the first few sessions to about 20 to 30 minutes of actual hitting, leave a day between them, and judge each one by the next morning rather than by how it felt at the time. Doubles before singles if you play both, and tell whoever you are on court with what you are doing, because nobody can leave you the easy ball if they do not know.

What getting back actually takes

No date appears in this section, and that is deliberate. What your team is judging is how the leg behaves, and a week number tells them nothing.

What follows is practice experience, not a published test, and it comes after your own team's instruction, never instead of it. These are the things a physiotherapist looks at before talking about a sport at all.

• The knee straightens as far as your team is aiming for, and the thigh holds it straight against the weight of the leg without giving up partway.
• You have the bend your sport needs, which is more than the bend that gets you up stairs and into a car. If that is the one holding you up, the daily work on it is on how to improve the bend.
• You can stand on the operated leg steadily, and control it on the way down a step rather than only pushing up one.
• Pain and swelling are the same the morning after a rehabilitation session as they were before it, and anything a session stirs up has settled within a day rather than lasting two.
• You can do the sport's movements slowly and deliberately before you do them at speed.
• You stop thinking about the leg while you use it.

That is the whole set, not a menu. Take what you can and cannot do to your physio or physical therapist instead of scoring yourself. One clear no is the answer, however good the others look.

When one of them is a no, waiting it out rarely changes it, so name the one that failed and work on that. A knee that will not hold the last part of straightening is a range and quadriceps problem. A leg you cannot control on the way down a step is a strength problem. A knee that swells after every session is a dose problem rather than a weakness, and it improves by doing less for a while, not more. Those are different pieces of work on different timescales, which is why the honest answer to when you can play is usually when that one thing changes. If you cannot tell which of them is holding you up, that is the question to take to your physio or physical therapist, and it gets a far more useful answer than asking whether you are ready.

The strength and balance work underneath all of it is stage 3 of the total knee replacement rehab program, which carries the doses, the set-up notes and the depth limits your surgeon sets, and your physio will adjust those to you. The exercises that matter most before a sport are the ones where the knee has to control a load on the way down and on one leg: the eccentric squat, the supported single leg squat, single leg stance, the step up and calf raises. Walking with longer steps and brisk walking are the base underneath walking a course or covering a court. The general build-up through this period, and the question of whether you still need supervised physiotherapy, belong to the exercises for weeks 6 to 12, and the shape of the whole recovery with each source attached is on the recovery timeline week by week.

Then build the sport back the way you would test anything that might go wrong. One new variable per session, predictable before unpredictable, and a practice setting before a competitive one. A driving range before a round. A static bike before a quiet road. A practice court with a cooperative partner before a match where someone is trying to make you run.

How fast is the part people get wrong, so here is what I say in clinic, as practice experience rather than a published schedule, and your own team's numbers come before it. Leave at least one clear day between sport sessions in the first weeks back, because the morning after is the measurement and you cannot take it if you played again in between. Repeat each step at least twice at the same amount before you add anything. Then add one thing only: a little more time, or a little more speed, or a little more unpredictability, never two in the same session. If the knee is more swollen or more sore the next morning, drop back to the last step that left it unchanged and stay there for a week before trying again. If it is still worse 48 hours later, or it swells every time you play whatever you do, stop that activity and contact your physio or surgical team within the next few days, which is the line below rather than something to train through.

Four things change the plan rather than the date on it, and sport advice usually leaves all four out. If you play alone, which most golfers and most cyclists do sooner or later, carry a phone where you can reach it from the ground, tell somebody your route or your tee time, and keep the first few outings close to home or in company, because getting up off the ground with a new knee is harder than people expect and a fall onto it is what the whole of this recovery is working to avoid. If you live alone, plan the evening as well as the session: something cold for the knee, applied the way the total knee replacement rehab program sets out, because the numb skin beside the scar cannot tell you an ice pack has been on too long; somewhere to put the leg up; and a way to reach help if the knee stiffens up overnight. If your other knee, a hip or your back is also worn, the limit on walking a course or covering a court is usually that joint and not the new one, so say so when you ask, and expect a slower build-up. For that joint, cycling and swimming for knee arthritis has the set-up and the build-up, written for a knee that has not been operated on rather than for your new one. And if you are older, have fallen in the past year, or feel unsteady on your feet, the strength and balance work comes before the sport rather than alongside it. Age on its own decides nothing here. How steady you are on the operated leg decides a great deal.

Running, jumping and impact: what most surgeons advise, and why

This part of the advice almost never changes, and knowing why helps more than knowing the rule.

OrthoInfo's total knee replacement page sets out the mechanism without hedging. With normal use and activity, the plastic spacer in every knee replacement begins to wear. It says excessive activity or weight may speed that wear up and may cause the replacement to loosen and become painful, and that on that basis most surgeons advise against running, jogging, jumping and other high-impact sport for the rest of your life after the operation. Two parts of that sentence are easy to drop and both matter: it is a lifelong recommendation rather than a restriction for the first few months, and it does not stop at the three sports it names. The same page also says a knee replacement will not let you do more than you could before you developed arthritis, which is worth taking to the clinic if the sport you are aiming at was already beyond you before the operation. The concern is not that the knee will break today. It is the number of loading cycles the implant has to survive over the years you need it.

If you have had a hip or knee replacement, get the go-ahead from your surgeon before you try running. Many surgeons advise against running and jogging after a joint replacement for good, not just for the first months, because each step sends impact through the new joint. If you have had a hip or knee replacement, get the go-ahead from your surgeon before you try jumping or hopping. Many surgeons advise against jumping and hopping after a joint replacement for good, not just for the first months, because each landing sends high impact through the new joint.

Those sentences are consensus, and it is worth being plain about what that means. One of the sets of recommendations these lists descend from was built by reviewing the published literature and then surveying the members of the Hip Society, the Knee Society and the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons Society, covering hip, knee and shoulder replacement, from which the authors drew consensus recommendations (Healy and colleagues, 2001). That paper does not report how many surgeons answered. That is the best available answer, and it is not a trial. It is also consistent with what people actually do: in the review of 44 studies, only 35 percent went back to high-intensity sport against 76 percent to low-intensity sport (Pasqualini and colleagues, 2023).

If running is your sport and not just an exercise choice, have that conversation with your surgeon before the operation where you can. Our running section is written for people whose knees have not been replaced, so read it with that in mind. The same goes for the gym and lifting, where weight training appears in the later consensus window but the loads involved span an enormous range. The rest of the avoid question, the early precautions and how long each one lasts, is on things to avoid after a knee replacement.

Does sport wear the new knee out faster?

Honestly, nobody can tell you. The sources that worry about it are reasoning from mechanics, not reporting an outcome.

What is on the record. A review of sport after lower limb joint replacement reported that some studies associate higher-impact sport with shorter implant survival, attributed mainly to wear of the plastic and the debris that wear produces, and that studies looking specifically at tennis did not show that effect (Seyler and colleagues, 2006). The imaging study of 4 replaced knees offers one possible route for it, in that rotation through the implant during a golf swing was greater than during cycling, and its authors raised plastic wear as the concern (Hamai and colleagues, 2008). OrthoInfo states the same mechanism as the reason for its advice.

What is also on the record, and gets quoted far less. That same tennis review encourages all patients to stay physically active, for general health, for bone quality and for fixation of the implant. Sitting still is not the cautious choice. It is a different set of risks on a longer timescale. A separate review of 25 studies covering 6,035 replaced knees found the UCLA activity score improved significantly after the operation, with the largest gains in people aged 55 or younger, and sport participation dipping only slightly and not significantly, with the middle and higher-impact sports the ones people gave up (Hanreich and colleagues, 2020). Read the under-55 part as a direction rather than a promise: it rests on 67 patients and its confidence interval is wide enough to include no gain at all. That is the other half of the ledger.

Four things are actually in your hands, and none of them is the choice of sport. Your weight, since OrthoInfo asks you to keep an eye on it to reduce the stress going through the joint. Your technique, which is where a coach earns their money. How gradually you build up, which is what makes the difference between a sore knee on Tuesday and a knee that never settles. And whether you report a change rather than waiting for the next routine appointment. Pain in a new knee that had settled and has come back, or pain getting worse month by month, is the signal to ask for a review, and it is in the warning signs below with what to do about it.

Sports this page has not covered, and how to ask about yours

Three sports are in the title and 47 were in that European survey, so most readers arrive here with a fourth.

Some we can point you at. Pickleball and padel have their own pages on this site, and both involve the stopping and turning that the tennis section describes, so read that section alongside them. OrthoInfo names pickleball among the lower-impact options it prefers to jumping, jogging and skiing, which is a statement about the sport over years, not permission for next month. Hiking, Nordic walking, sailing, weight training and aerobics were among the activities the European consensus recommended beyond 12 weeks, and squash was the single activity of 47 it placed outside (Thaler and colleagues, 2021).

Some we cannot. Lawn bowls, called bowls in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and bowling in North America, is a common question here and we have read nothing on it that we are willing to quote, so we say nothing beyond asking your own team. Skiing is a case where our sources openly disagree: OrthoInfo names it among the high-impact activities it advises against, while the narrative review above no longer treats a replacement as an absolute bar to it (Hanreich and colleagues, 2023). When two reasonable sources split like that, the person who knows your knee decides, and that is not us.

So here is what to take into the appointment, which is more use than another list. First, what does my knee have to do in this sport, and which part of that concerns you about my knee in particular. Second, is there anything about my operation that limits me, and is that limit permanent or for now. Third, what do you want to see me able to do before I start, and who checks it. Fourth, what should make me stop and call you. Four specific questions get specific answers. Asking whether you can play gets you the word "low-impact" again, which is where you started.

When to stop and get it checked

Going back to a sport adds three risks that the rest of this recovery does not carry, and all three are easier to handle if you know them before your first session.

The first is a fall or a knock. A bunker, a wet corner, a court and a bike all offer one. If you cannot put weight on the leg afterward, the knee or thigh is very painful, or the leg looks out of shape, that is an emergency department rather than a phone call and you should not drive yourself. If a smaller knock leaves the knee newly painful, swollen or bruised even though you can still walk on it, stop, go back to your crutches or sticks, keep your full weight off that leg and have it checked the same day, because a break in the bone around a new knee is not always obvious at first. If you take tablets or injections to lower your clot risk, a bang on the head needs urgent advice even if you feel fine. The fall that hurt nothing counts too: book an appointment with your doctor within a few days and ask about a falls assessment, because a sport you have just gone back to is where the next one tends to happen.

The second is a sudden loss of the knee's own mechanism. If you suddenly cannot straighten the knee or lift the leg straight when you could before, often after a pop, a tearing feeling or a stumble, or you notice a dip just above or below the kneecap, keep your weight off it and contact your surgical team the same day.

The third is the knee telling you the sport is more than it can take, and swelling is how it usually says it first. Some swelling is expected for months after this operation, and OrthoInfo describes mild to moderate swelling for about 3 to 6 months, which is precisely why a new pattern gets written off as a hard session. If the knee swells or aches more after every session, or does not settle back to its usual size and comfort between sessions, stop that activity, drop back to what it was handling before, and contact your physio or surgical team within the next few days instead of training through it. If swelling in the leg is increasing from week to week instead of settling, treat that as a clot question and get advice the same day. If the knee becomes hot or red, or you have a high temperature, that is the same day too, because an infection in a new joint can arrive years after the operation. Your temperature is not the test for that, though. OrthoInfo names increased pain or stiffness in a joint that had been working well among the signs of an infection around a new joint, says the signs can be as little as mild redness and swelling, and says fever is no longer considered a sign of one.

Sport also makes an older warning easier to explain away, so it is worth saying again here. A calf or thigh that is newly swollen, warm, tender or darker than usual, or a throbbing or cramping pain that does not match what you did, needs advice the same day rather than another day of stretching it out, because soreness earned in a session settles and a clot does not. The line below carries the full set of signs and what to do about them.

Stop and get advice within a few days if the knee gives way or feels unstable, or if its movement has stopped improving week to week. Stop and get advice the same day if the knee becomes hot, red or swollen, with or without feeling hot, cold or shivery, at any time after the operation and however many years have passed. Ask for a review rather than training through it if pain that had settled comes back, or gets worse month by month. The full set of warning signs is below, each with how quickly it needs attention.

Related exercise programs

• Total knee replacement rehab
• Balance and falls prevention

Common questions

References

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Written and checked by the PocketPhysio editorial team. Last updated 2026-10-17.

This page is general education, not a diagnosis or a personal treatment plan. See a physiotherapist or doctor for advice about your own situation.