If you have chronic pain in your knees, if they “snap, crackle, and pop” when you bend or extend them, or if they tend to hyperextend, you may have improper tracking or “dislocation” of the kneecap. This misalignment causes the most common kind of chronic knee pain and damage to the knee joint, which develop slowly over time. Yoga knee therapy might be able to help.

Here’s a simple anatomy lesson: The kneecap is designed to slide along a groove in the femur, and it has to move smoothly within that groove to do its job well. If it goes “off track” (and it often does), it grinds away at the cartilage underneath and destabilizes the knee. The ensuing wear and tear is a key reason for knee replacement surgery, which a lot of people believe is necessary because they think the cartilage is “gone.” But the truth is that cartilage can grow back, albeit slowly. The main problem is that if we don’t correct the imbalanced pull of muscles on the kneecap, we will continue to grind our cartilage down faster than our body can replenish it. (Read More at YogaInternational.com)