Walking sticks and trekking poles do help with knee pain, and the evidence is fairly strong. They reduce the forces traveling through your knee joint, and in clinical trials, people with knee osteoarthritis who used a cane daily reported meaningful pain relief within two months. Whether you’re dealing with arthritis, recovering from an injury, or just trying to hike without your knees aching on the way down, a walking stick or pair of poles can make a real difference.
How Walking Sticks Reduce Knee Stress
Every step you take sends force through your knee joint. Walking downhill or carrying a heavy pack multiplies that force significantly. When you use a walking stick or trekking pole, your arms and shoulders absorb some of that load before it reaches your legs. Research on hikers walking downhill with external loads found significant reductions in the bending forces at the knee and ankle joints when they used poles. Peak power absorption at the knee also dropped, meaning the joint didn’t have to work as hard to cushion each step.
This matters because knee pain, especially from osteoarthritis, is often driven by repetitive compressive loading. The cartilage that cushions your joint wears down over time, and every pound of force accelerates that process. By transferring even a portion of your body weight into your arms and the ground through a pole, you’re giving your knee a partial break with every stride. Your upper body and trunk muscles pick up the slack, while your leg muscles either work less hard or at about the same level as walking without poles.
Pain Relief in Osteoarthritis
A clinical trial of 64 patients with knee osteoarthritis tested what happened when half of them used a cane daily for two months while the other half did not. After one month, the cane group reported noticeably less pain. By two months, the gap had widened further, with a mean pain difference of 2.1 points on a standardized scale in favor of the cane users. The cane group also scored better on physical function questionnaires and quality-of-life measures, and they used fewer anti-inflammatory painkillers.
That last point is worth highlighting. If a simple walking aid reduces your need for daily pain medication, that’s a meaningful benefit with essentially no side effects. The improvement also grew over the two-month period rather than plateauing, suggesting the benefits build as you adapt to using the cane consistently.
One Stick or Two Poles?
A single cane works well for everyday walking, especially on flat ground and around the house. It’s lighter, easier to manage, and sufficient for many people with mild to moderate knee pain. For hiking, uneven terrain, or more significant joint problems, two trekking poles offer clear advantages.
Two poles provide symmetrical support that a single stick cannot. When you plant both poles simultaneously, you distribute the load evenly across both sides of your body instead of favoring one. This matters for your spine, hips, and the knee on your “good” side, which can start hurting if it compensates for the painful one over time. Two poles also give you four points of ground contact instead of three, which substantially improves stability on rocky trails, wet surfaces, or steep descents.
Descents are where poles really prove their worth. Going downhill forces your quadriceps and the small stabilizing muscles around the knee to absorb your body weight eccentrically, essentially braking against gravity. That’s the motion most likely to cause knee pain during a hike. Poles let your upper body take over some of that braking work, and hikers using two poles consistently report less knee pain on descents than those walking without them.
Balance and Fall Prevention
Knee pain often comes with instability. If your knee hurts, you unconsciously shift your weight, shorten your stride, and change your gait in ways that make you less steady on your feet. Research on older adults found that walking stick use improved balance, increased independence, and reduced the risk of falling. Some studies also found that sticks improved walking symmetry, countering the uneven gait patterns that knee pain tends to create.
This creates a positive cycle. Less fear of falling means you’re more willing to stay active, and staying active is one of the most important things you can do for a painful knee. Muscles that support the joint weaken quickly with inactivity, which makes the pain worse, which makes you move less. A walking stick can help break that pattern by giving you the confidence to keep moving.
Getting the Right Fit
A walking stick that’s too tall or too short will change your posture in ways that can cause new problems in your back, shoulders, or hips. The Mayo Clinic recommends two simple checks to get the height right:
- Elbow angle: Hold the stick with your arm at your side. Your elbow should bend at roughly 15 to 20 degrees. If you’re using the stick primarily for balance rather than weight-bearing, a slightly greater bend is fine.
- Wrist height: Let your arm hang straight down. The top of the stick should line up with the crease of your wrist.
For trekking poles, the same elbow-angle rule applies on flat ground. Most adjustable poles let you shorten them for uphill sections (where you’re reaching higher) and lengthen them for downhill (where you need more reach below you). If your knee pain is mainly a problem on descents, lengthening your poles by 5 to 10 centimeters from your flat-ground setting keeps you more upright and lets the poles absorb more impact.
What About Calorie Burn?
You may have heard that walking with poles burns significantly more calories. The reality is more nuanced. On flat ground without a backpack, poles don’t meaningfully change your energy expenditure. One study found oxygen consumption increased by less than 1 ml/kg/min with poles during unloaded walking, a difference that wasn’t statistically significant. When carrying a backpack, poles did have a measurable effect on energy cost, likely because your upper body works harder to stabilize a heavier load.
Nordic walking, which uses a specific arm-pumping technique with specially designed poles, is a different story. That style of walking has been found to be about 20% more metabolically demanding than regular walking, largely due to the sustained upper-body effort. But if your goal is knee pain relief rather than a cardio workout, standard walking stick or trekking pole use gets the job done without exhausting your arms.
Making the Most of Your Walking Stick
If you have pain in one knee and you’re using a single cane, hold it on the opposite side. This feels counterintuitive, but it lets you lean slightly away from the painful leg during each step, reducing the load on that knee more effectively than holding the cane on the same side. Plant the cane at the same time as the painful leg, so the two share the work simultaneously.
Consistency matters. The clinical trial showing pain reduction in osteoarthritis patients required daily use over two months, and the benefits were still growing at the end of that period. Using a stick only on your worst days is better than nothing, but regular use appears to produce better and more lasting results. If you’re a hiker, consider using poles on every outing rather than saving them for the toughest trails. Your knees accumulate stress over time, and the easier hikes contribute to that total.