Downhill Knee

The descents from Conic Hill, the final one into Fort William and, worst of all, into Kinlochleven are things to fear if you suffer Downhill Knee but Lynne and I have a story for optimism.
In days BC (Before Children) we did a great deal of walking, including a couple of trips to the top of the big fella itself, Ben Nevis. For over 20 years, our walking challenges were considerably reduced and when we began to test ourselves again, we discovered that, though we could get up the hills, we both suffered terribly coming down again with knee pain. We have chosen routes to avoid severe descents and purchased walking poles which we used to reduce the stress of downhill. We thought that our hill walking days were largely over.
However, a conversation with our son who has had some knee problems in early life and had been researching the subject has given us new optimism and, I believe, a more comfortable future with a return to more taxing environments.
His research suggested that the problem came from the knee being bent inward out of the natural line of the leg movement combined with weak muscle structure which was only made worse by avoidance.
I began to work on this concept, studying my own leg movement and found that trying to hold my knee joint outward resulted in a feeling of being twine toed. Looking carefully at my feet I realised that actually, this unnatural feeling coincided with my feet pointing directly forward rather than slightly outward.
I carried this forward and began to think I was encountering less problems downhill and bored Lynne to the point where she experimented with the idea hersel;f.
We noted that when going downhill, if we looked down, both of us had our feet pointing outward. We began concentrating on making sure that when we walked downhill our toes pointed directly forward. Through all our practice walks, with considerable downhill sections, we worked at this and found ourselves resorting to our poles less and less.
The outcome of all this is that we carried our poles the whole WHW but only used them about 3 times. The slippery section of Conic Hill descent, largely for balance, some of the section to Rowardennan, again for balance on the scramble sections and a stepped descent in woods which I cannot recall where but the length and height of the steps was much easier to deal with with poles.
Neither of us resorted to poles on the horrible descent to Kinlochleven but both concentrated on keeping toes pointing directly forward all the way. We arrived at the town with tired muscles but very little knee pain.
If you try it, stick with it for a while and we'd love to know how you go on via the Comments.