Part of Total knee replacement rehab
Stiff knee after a knee replacement: how to improve the bend
Warning signs, and when to get help
Why is your knee stiff after a knee replacement?
Because the joint is swollen, the tissues around it are healing and laying down scar, and the thigh muscle that normally carries the knee through its range has been switched off by the operation. Those improve, which is why most stiffness in the early weeks loosens off as the day goes on.
It is worth pulling the word apart, though. Readers use stiffness for three different situations, and only one of them needs a phone call.
The first is a knee that feels set after you have been still and frees up once you move. That one is ordinary and it settles.
Then there is a bend that is short of where your team wants it, while still creeping forward week by week. Workable. That is what the bending and straightening work is for, and in the early months it is the bulk of what rehabilitation after this operation actually is.
Last, a range that has stopped changing, or one that is going backward. That is a reason to contact your physio or physical therapist (PT) now rather than waiting, and the warning lines at the end of this page say it in full.
The surgical side comes at it the same way round. The review of stiff knees after this operation makes the point that infection, how the implant sits, its size, instability and other causes are looked for before the stiffness is put down to scarring in and around the joint (arthrofibrosis), which is the answer left when the others have been ruled out rather than the first one reached for (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026). The assessment also separates a knee that will not bend from a knee you cannot bend, because a thigh muscle that is not firing, a stiff kneecap or pain on its own can all look like scar tissue from the outside. Some of those causes exercise cannot change, and none of them can be sorted out from your living room, which is the practical reason a stalled knee gets assessed instead of stretched harder.
Whatever your surgeon or physio has told you about your own knee, their plan comes before anything written here.
What to do this week
Two things stop the week before it starts, and they come first because a stiffer knee is not always a knee that needs more stretching.
If the knee is hot or red, if the pain keeps building while you are resting rather than only when you move, if the wound is leaking, or if you have a temperature or feel hot, cold or shivery, that is medical advice the same day and not a change to your exercises. 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, so a normal temperature is not an all clear. And if your bend or your straightening has not changed from week to week, is going backward, or the knee feels unstable or gives way, that goes to your physio or surgical team within the next few days rather than at your next routine appointment. Both have a warning line at the end of this page with the full wording.
With those settled, the week itself. The review of stiff knees after this operation describes the package that works as pain-adapted physiotherapy with frequent short bouts of movement, alongside pain relief, ice, elevation and compression, in preference to forceful stretching or aggressive passive bending (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026). In practice, that is five things:
- Bend the knee in short goes, several times a day, using the exercises and the numbers already set for your stage on total knee replacement rehab. This page deliberately adds no second set of numbers.
- Do the straightening work every day, even though it is the dull one. The section on it below is there because it is the part that costs the most to skip.
- Keep the swelling down, because a swollen knee bends less: ice and elevation, with the leg supported from thigh to heel and nothing under the knee. How long swelling lasts after a knee replacement has the method.
- Take the pain relief you were prescribed, in the way it was prescribed, because a knee you cannot get comfortable on does not get moved. Never stop or change a prescribed medicine on your own.
- Write one thing down once a week, the same task at the same time of day. Direction over weeks is the only honest measure of a knee, and it is what makes the phone call useful if you end up making one.
And the thing not to do, all week: do not force it, do not hang weight from the shin, and do not let anybody lean on the knee.
How do you improve the bend, and how hard should you push?
By bending it often, in short goes, instead of saving it all for one hero session in the evening.
The exercises and their numbers live where they can be kept in one place. Stage 1 of total knee replacement rehab carries the bending and straightening work with its starting doses, including heel slides, seated knee flexion and the assisted seated knee bend for when the leg needs help. Knee replacement exercises after 2 weeks covers the window where visible progress flattens out, and knee replacement exercises after 6 weeks covers how long to keep going. Many programs spread the early bending across several short sessions in a day rather than one long one, and your physio will adjust that to your knee. This page adds no second set of numbers, because two doses for one exercise is how people end up guessing.
On how hard to push: a stretch into the range is meant to be felt, and the program carries the full version of that permission with the pain rule attached to it. South Tees puts the boundary plainly, asking you to "only work within what your pain allows". The test most of us use in clinic is the morning after. Soreness that has settled by then was a reasonable session. Pain that climbs with every repetition, or a knee that is hotter and more swollen the next day, was too much, and the answer is to drop back a step rather than to stop. The pain monitoring model is the clinician-facing version of that rule, if you want to see how it gets written into a program.
Nobody should be forcing it. Hanging weight off the shin, getting a relative to lean on the knee or working through sharp pain are not faster routes to a bend. The surgical review of stiff knees says the same thing in its own words: frequent short bouts of movement, with pain and swelling kept under control, are preferred to forceful stretching or aggressive passive bending (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026). A knee that has stopped moving needs looking at, not overpowering. If your team has given you a brace, a machine or a particular technique, theirs is the one to follow.
The straightening nobody does, and why it matters more than it looks
Ask a physio which exercise gets dropped first and most will say the straightening one. It is the least interesting thing in the program: lie or sit with the leg out, let gravity do the work, wait. Nothing to count, nothing visibly improving, no satisfying stretch to finish on.
Here is why it earns its place. A knee that will not come flat leaves you standing and walking with it slightly bent, so the thigh muscle never gets a moment off, the leg tires early in the day and the limp outlasts the pain. Straightening is also harder to win back once it has gone than bend is, which is why the program asks for patient, low-effort holds, built up gradually, rather than short hard ones.
South Tees describes the method: rest the leg out in front of you, let gravity passively straighten the knee, and "slowly build up the length of time in this position". It attaches its own limit to that, which is worth keeping: do not sit in the position for too long or the knee will stiffen up, and only work within what your pain allows. Build the time up in steps rather than settling in for an afternoon. On this site that is the knee extension stretch and the seated heel prop, with quad sets and short arc quads for the muscle that has to hold the position once you have it.
Two habits undo the lot. Propping the knee on a pillow at night, which the NHS tells you not to do. It gives no reason for that instruction, and the reason is the whole of this section: a knee left bent for seven or eight hours is a knee that spent the night going the wrong way. And sitting all evening with the foot up on a stool and the knee half bent. If the leg is raised for swelling, support the calf and the ankle and leave the knee straight.
Why is the knee stiffest in the morning and after sitting?
A joint that has not moved for hours sets. Fluid settles in it, the tissues cool and hold the position you were lying in, and the first few bends of the day feel like ground lost overnight. Twenty minutes of moving about usually hands it back.
The same thing happens in miniature after a long sit: a film, a desk, a car journey. Most people notice it getting out of the car, not getting in.
So do not measure a cold knee. Whatever you use to judge your range, do it at the same time of day and after you have moved about, or you will keep recording your worst reading and conclude you are going backward. And move before you have to. Standing up and bending the knee a few times every hour of a long sit costs nothing and stops the knee setting in the first place.
Morning stiffness that is getting worse week by week, or that no longer frees up once you are moving, is a different conversation. That one is in the warning lines below.
How far should the knee bend, and by when?
The number is your surgeon's or physio's to give you, because it depends on your knee, the operation you had and what your range was before it. OrthoInfo makes that last point itself: better movement is a goal of the operation, getting full movement back is uncommon, and the movement a replaced knee ends up with can be predicted by the movement it had before surgery. Still, it helps to know what is generally expected. OrthoInfo, the patient information service of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, describes an average of 115 degrees of motion as generally anticipated after surgery, and says most people can expect to almost fully straighten the new knee and to bend it enough to climb stairs and get in and out of a car. Two things about that 115. It is a figure for the range of movement, which is measured from how straight the knee gets to how far it bends, and not a bend target on its own. For a knee that straightens fully that works out as the same number as the bend, while for a knee that stops short of straight the range is smaller than the bend reading, so the two are not interchangeable. And it is an average across the people who have this operation, not a pass mark your knee has to clear.
The markers patients find more useful are the ones they can test at home:
- getting a sock on without hooking the foot up onto something
- sitting down into an ordinary chair and standing out of it without pushing on the arms
- the passenger seat of a car, with the foot in and the door shut
- coming down a flight of stairs one foot after the other
- reaching the pedals comfortably, which your team has to clear before you drive anyway
Kneeling sits past the end of that list, and whether it comes back depends on the skin and the scar at the front of the knee as much as on the bend: kneeling after a knee replacement takes that one on its own.
On the by when, there is less to go on than the internet suggests. No national guidance puts a date against a degree of bend, and the week-by-week range protocols you will find come from individual hospitals and surgeons rather than from a guideline. The NHS does give you a booked point for the question, a follow-up appointment about 6 weeks after the operation, and the recovery timeline sets out what usually sits where. If the bend is worrying you before that date, it does not have to wait for the appointment.
When has the range actually stalled?
Use the week as your unit, not the day. Day to day a knee is unreliable: it depends on how swollen it is this morning, how far you walked yesterday and what time you are reading this. Over a few weeks, direction is honest.
A stalled knee is the one described in the warning line at the end of this page. It is not bending or straightening any further from week to week, it is getting stiffer, or it feels unstable or gives way. If that is your knee, the line below says what to do and how quickly, and the short version is that it goes to your physio or surgical team within the next few days rather than at your next routine appointment. The review of stiff knees makes the same point from the surgical side: working on a stiff knee without an operation is the right first phase, but it has to be reassessed often enough that a program which is not working does not quietly use up the period when a stiff knee is most treatable (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026).
Make the call easier in two ways. Write something down once a week, the same task at the same time of day, so you have more than an impression to offer when you ring. And know who you are ringing. NICE's joint replacement guideline says you should be given clear goals for doing your rehabilitation yourself, along with a point of contact for help with it, so if nobody was named for you, asking for one is reasonable.
There is a second recommendation in the same guideline that readers of this page rarely know exists. NICE says supervised rehabilitation, as a group or one to one, should be offered to people who are having difficulty with daily activities, who still have problems with function and specific rehabilitation needs, or who are not meeting their goals on their own. A bend that has stalled on a home program is a fair fit for that last one, and it is worth naming when you ask.
What is a manipulation under anesthetic, and why does the date matter?
It is a procedure where the surgeon bends the knee through its range while you are asleep or numb from the waist down, to break up the scar tissue and bands of adhesion that have tightened, and it is considered for a knee that has not gained movement with rehabilitation. Most knees never need one, and there is a figure for that: the review of stiffness after this operation reports that stiffness with no other cause found affects roughly 3.6 to 4.0 percent of knee replacements, and that a manipulation is needed in roughly 2.6 to 3.6 percent of knee replacements (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026). It is not a treatment for a sore knee or a slow knee, and whether it is on the table at all is a call your surgeon makes with your knee and your imaging in front of them.
Why timing comes up at all: the review of stiffness after this operation reports that where a knee does have to be freed up this way, doing it earlier was associated with regaining more movement than doing it later, with real qualifiers attached about who is suitable, how stiff the knee was to start with and the rehabilitation that follows (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026). The warning line at the end of this page carries that window and those qualifiers in full. It is the reason the advice here is to raise a stalled knee now rather than at a routine review.
It is a real procedure rather than a stretch under a different name, and that cuts both ways. The force is put in close to the knee with the thigh held, so that as little leverage as possible passes through the bone above and below: the aim is to tear the scar without injuring the bone, the tendon at the front of the knee or the implant. Problems are uncommon, reported at roughly 1 to 2 percent overall, but the rare ones can be serious, which is why it is done under anesthetic by a surgeon and why nothing here, and nobody in your house, should be forcing your knee. There are also knees where a manipulation is the wrong answer until something else is dealt with: a suspected infection, a mechanical block, trouble with the straightening mechanism at the front of the knee, or a bone thought to be at risk of breaking (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026).
If you have already had one, your team's own plan for the weeks afterward replaces everything on this page. The movement a manipulation gains is held on to by moving the knee straight away, so the first days usually carry supervised range work rather than a wait, and some of the range gained during the procedure is normally lost before it settles at its final level (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026). A knee that keeps closing up after a manipulation is in the warning lines below. If a manipulation does not hold, the steps after it are larger operations, releasing the scar through the knee or revising the replacement, and the review is plain that neither reliably gives back a normal knee: both leave many people needing further treatment. That is an argument for raising a stalled range early, not for living with one.
In practice this is an appointment question, not a dramatic one. Four questions are worth having ready: is my range where you expected it by now, do you want to see me sooner than the appointment I already have, is anything other than scar tissue being considered, and what would make you think about freeing it up. A team that is happy with your knee will tell you so, which is a useful answer in itself.
Can the bend still improve after six months?
Often, yes, although late gains tend to be smaller and slower, and anybody promising you degrees at this stage is guessing. Arthritis UK puts the window generously: a new knee can keep improving for as much as two years after the operation, as the scar tissue heals and you work the muscles. Several of the things that limit a bend are still movable late on. Swelling that has not finished settling. A thigh that never got its strength back. A kneecap that has stopped gliding freely, which South Tees notes can limit the bend by itself. Plain disuse in a leg that has been favored for months.
What does change at six months is the value of another month of stretching alone. By then, what is actually holding your knee is a question for an assessment, not for more guesswork, and the NICE recommendation above is the route to it. Knee replacement exercises after 6 weeks covers how long to keep the work going and what the later months are for.
One caveat applies whatever month you are in. Improving slowly and losing movement you had are not the same thing. A knee that is going backward belongs in the warning lines below, not in a longer stretching program.
Stiffness that is not stiffness: swelling, pain and the signs that need help
A swollen knee bends less, for the plain mechanical reason that fluid is taking up the room the bend needs. So a week when the swelling goes up reads exactly like a week when the range went down, and stretching harder is not the fix. Ice and elevation are the first lever, and total knee replacement rehab carries the method, including the caution about an ice pack on skin that has gone numb. How long swelling lasts after a knee replacement covers the rest of it.
Pain does the same job from the other direction. A knee you cannot get comfortable on does not get stretched, so pain relief and range work are the same project, not competing ones. South Tees makes the point that effective pain relief is what lets you move and exercise more comfortably. The timing of yours belongs with the team who prescribed it. Never stop or change a prescribed medicine on your own.
One exception sits over this whole page. Too much exercise and an infection in the new joint announce themselves in much the same way, with more swelling and more pain, so a bad week is not automatically a training error. The program's pain rule sets out where that line falls. A knee that is hot or red, pain that keeps building while you are resting rather than only when you move, a temperature or feeling hot, cold and shivery, or a knee that is simply not settling, all go to your surgical team the same day rather than into next week's exercise plan. A normal temperature is not an all clear either: OrthoInfo's page on infection after a joint replacement says fever is no longer considered a sign of an infection after a joint replacement, and that the signs can be as little as mild redness and swelling. The same page names increased pain or stiffness in a joint that had been working well among the signs, which is worth knowing on a page about a stiff knee. If your problem is pain on bending rather than a loss of bend, knee pain when bending covers the wider picture.
Read the warning lines below once, properly. The stalled-range line is the one this page turns on, and it is there because the stiff knee nobody hears about is the one that stays stiff.
Related exercise programs
Warning signs
Get emergency help now
- Emergency: since your operation, you suddenly become short of breath, you get chest pain or pain in your upper back that may be worse when you breathe in, you cough up blood, your heart is beating very fast, or you faint. Call emergency services straight away, even if your leg looks normal. These can be signs of a blood clot in the lungs (pulmonary embolism).
- Emergency: after a fall or a knock, you cannot put weight on the leg, your knee or thigh is very painful, or the leg looks out of shape or shorter than the other. Go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. If you cannot get up, call emergency services. A broken bone around a knee replacement is rare, but it needs treatment in hospital. If a smaller fall or knock leaves the knee newly painful, swollen or bruised, even if you can still walk on it and the leg looks normal, stop the exercises, go back to your crutches or sticks and keep your full weight off that leg, and get it checked by your surgical team the same day. A break in the bone around a new knee is not always obvious at first, and walking normally on one can move the broken ends apart.
Get help now, day or night
- Since your manipulation under anesthetic, you have severe pain in the knee or thigh, you cannot put weight on the leg, you cannot straighten the knee or lift the leg straight when you could straight after the procedure, the leg looks a different shape, or the knee is heavily bruised, swollen or tight. A manipulation works by stretching and tearing tissue that has tightened, and although problems are uncommon, the bone around the implant can break and the tendon at the front of the knee can be damaged during it. Contact your surgical team straight away, day or night, and if you cannot reach them, go to an emergency department the same day. Keep your weight off the leg until you have been seen.
Get help today
- Same day: a calf or thigh that is newly swollen or getting more swollen, warm, tender, red or darker than usual, has swollen veins that are sore to touch, or has a throbbing or cramping pain that does not fit your injury or condition, or that feels different from normal muscle soreness after exercise. This can be a sign of a blood clot (deep vein thrombosis), especially after surgery, an injury, time in a cast or boot, a long trip or a spell of being much less mobile than usual. Get medical advice the same day. If you are also short of breath or have chest pain, call emergency services.
- Same day: swelling in the operated leg that is increasing from day to day instead of settling, including swelling spreading into your calf, ankle or foot, pain in your leg or calf away from the wound, increasing pain in your calf, or tenderness or redness above or below your knee. Get medical advice the same day. Swelling is expected after this operation, and it can be moderate to severe in the first days or weeks, but OrthoInfo asks you to tell your doctor about new or severe swelling because it can be the warning sign of a blood clot, and increasing swelling of the calf, ankle and foot, increasing calf pain, and tenderness or redness above or below the knee are all on its list of clot signs. Your clot risk does not end on the day your tablets or injections do. If you are also short of breath or have chest pain, call emergency services.
- Same day: your wound becomes more red, hot, swollen or painful, starts to leak or ooze, is still leaking in the second week or has never stopped, has pus coming out of it or its edges start to come apart, or you have a high temperature or feel hot, cold or shivery. Contact your surgical team or get medical advice the same day. Redness can be harder to see on brown or black skin. If you feel very unwell, go to an emergency department. If you have a very high or very low temperature, shivering you cannot control, you are breathing very fast or finding it hard to breathe, you are confused or your speech is slurred, your skin, lips or tongue look blue, gray, pale or blotchy (on brown or black skin this can be easier to see on the palms of the hands or soles of the feet), or you have a rash that does not fade when you press it, call emergency services, as this can be sepsis.
- Same day: since your operation, the redness, warmth, swelling or pain in your knee is not getting better or is getting worse, for example the knee pain keeps building both when you move and when you rest. Contact your surgical team or get medical advice the same day, as this can be a sign of infection around the new joint. If you feel very unwell, go to an emergency department.
- Same day: at any time after your operation, even years later, new pain in your new knee along with a high temperature or feeling hot, cold or shivery, or a knee that becomes hot, red or swollen, which counts on its own, with or without pain and with or without a temperature. Contact your surgical team or get medical advice the same day. A new joint can become infected long after the operation, and that needs treating quickly. A normal temperature is not an all clear: OrthoInfo says fever is no longer considered a sign of an infection after a joint replacement, that the signs can be as little as mild redness and swelling and sometimes there are none at all, and that increased pain or stiffness in a joint that had been working well is one of them. So do not wait for a temperature before you report new or increasing pain in your new knee to your surgical team.
- Same day: you suddenly cannot straighten your knee or lift your 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 your kneecap, or you suddenly cannot put weight on the leg, even without a fall. Keep your weight off it and contact your surgical team the same day. If you cannot reach them that day, go to an emergency department. A tendon at the front of the knee may have torn, and a repair works better when it is done soon.
- Same day: dizziness, lightheadedness, blurred vision or feeling faint when you stand up that is new for you, does not pass within a minute or two, keeps happening, or has made you fall. Sit or lie down, and get medical advice the same day. This can be a drop in blood pressure on standing (postural hypotension), a type of low blood pressure, which the NHS lists among the causes of falls, and your doctor can check it. Tell them about your medicines, because some can cause it. If it does not settle within a few minutes of sitting or lying still, call emergency services. If you faint, call emergency services, even if you come round quickly, because the NHS says to call them when someone faints while exercising or is badly hurt, and a fall onto a new knee can damage it.
Book an appointment
- Within a few days: since your manipulation under anesthetic, the knee is stiffening up again and has lost movement it had gained, or pain is stopping you doing the exercises you were given. Contact your physio or surgical team within the next few days rather than waiting for your next appointment. The movement the surgeon gains is held on to by moving the knee in the days and weeks straight afterward, so a knee that is closing up again is worth telling them about early. Some of the range gained during the procedure is normally lost before it settles, so this is about a knee that keeps closing up rather than one that has eased back a little.
- Within a few days: your knee is not bending or straightening any further from week to week, is getting stiffer, or feels unstable or gives way when you stand or walk. This is not an emergency, but contact your physio or surgical team within the next few days rather than waiting for your next routine appointment, and keep using your walking aid until they have checked it. A stiff knee is easier to free up early than late: where it has to be freed up under anesthetic, doing that earlier, generally within about 6 to 12 weeks of the operation, is associated with regaining more movement than doing it later, although how much any one knee gains also depends on how stiff it was to begin with, on who is suitable and on the rehabilitation afterward. So the date you raise it matters (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026). If the knee has given way and let you fall, or it gives way on stairs, hold a rail and use your walking aid every time, and stay off stairs on your own until you have been seen.
- Within a few days: you have had a fall, even if you were not hurt, or you keep tripping, stumbling or feeling that your legs might give way. Book an appointment with your doctor within a few days and ask about a falls assessment. Tell them about every fall, even the ones where you were not hurt.
- Routine: pain in your new knee that had settled and has come back, or pain that is getting worse month by month, for example pain that starts as soon as you stand up and begin to walk. This is not an emergency, but ask your surgical team for a review, as the parts of a new joint can loosen or wear over the years. Get medical advice the same day instead, not a routine appointment, if the knee also becomes hot, red or swollen, or you have a high temperature or feel hot, cold or shivery, or the pain is building week by week rather than month by month. A new joint can become infected years after the operation, and the two can feel similar at first.
Common questions
My knee will not bend after a knee replacement, is that normal?
In the early weeks, a knee that bends far less than you expected is common, because swelling, healing tissue and a thigh muscle that the operation has temporarily switched off all limit it at the same time. It usually improves as those do. What sits outside that picture is a bend that has stopped changing from week to week, one that is going backward, or a knee that is getting stiffer rather than looser. That is the distinction worth watching, and it is in the warning signs below. Your own team's expectation for your knee comes before any general answer.
Am I pushing too hard, or not hard enough?
Judge it the next morning rather than during the session. A stretch into the range is meant to be felt, and the knee being sore for a while afterward is expected. If that soreness has settled by the next morning, the session was reasonable. If pain climbs with every repetition, or the knee is hotter and more swollen the following day, it was too much, and dropping back a step beats stopping altogether. Forcing the knee, hanging weight from it or having someone lean on it is not a shortcut. Total knee replacement rehab carries the full pain rule and the starting doses, and your physio will adjust them to your knee.
Who should I contact if the bend has stopped improving?
Your physio or your surgical team, within the next few days, rather than at a routine appointment. NICE's joint replacement guideline says you should leave hospital knowing your rehabilitation goals and who to contact for help with them, so if nobody was named, that is a fair thing to ask for. The same guideline recommends supervised rehabilitation for people who are not meeting their goals on their own program, which is what a stalled bend describes. On the call, say plainly that the range has not changed for weeks, because that is the detail that moves it up the list.
Will a brace or a machine get the bend back faster?
That is your surgical team's decision, not something to buy for yourself. Machines that bend the knee for you have been studied after this operation, and total knee replacement rehab covers where that evidence landed. If your team has given you equipment or a specific technique, use theirs and follow their instructions. Nothing on this page asks you to force a knee, and a range that has genuinely stalled needs assessing rather than more force applied to it.
References
- NHS. Recovering from a knee replacement. Page last reviewed 9 September 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/tests-and-treatments/knee-replacement/recovery/
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Total knee replacement. OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/treatment/total-knee-replacement/
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Activities after total knee replacement. OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/recovery/activities-after-knee-replacement/
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Infection after joint replacement. OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/diseases--conditions/joint-replacement-infection/
- Arthritis UK (formerly Versus Arthritis). Knee replacement surgery. https://www.arthritis-uk.org/information-and-support/understanding-arthritis/arthritis-treatments/surgery/knee-replacement-surgery/
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Joint replacement (primary): hip, knee and shoulder. NICE guideline NG157. Published 4 June 2020. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng157
- Chartered Society of Physiotherapy. NICE recommends rehab on same day as surgery for joint replacement patients. 10 June 2020. https://www.csp.org.uk/news/2020-06-10-nice-recommends-rehab-same-day-surgery-joint-replacement-patients
- South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Post total knee replacement management. Patient information, 26 February 2025. https://www.southtees.nhs.uk/resources/post-total-knee-replacement-management/
- Hosanee S, Elebo N, Sikhauli N, Pietrzak JRT. Reluctant knee: understanding and managing stiffness after total knee arthroplasty. International Orthopaedics. 2026;50(9):2337-2346. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-026-06905-0
- NHS. DVT (deep vein thrombosis). Page last reviewed 30 April 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/deep-vein-thrombosis-dvt/
- NHS. Sepsis. Page last reviewed 14 May 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/sepsis/
- NHS. Falls. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/falls/
- NHS. Low blood pressure (hypotension). Page last reviewed 11 July 2023. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/low-blood-pressure-hypotension/
- NHS. Fainting. https://www.nhs.uk/symptoms/fainting/
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.