3 Quick Tips for Healthier Knees

    A lot of people deal with knee pain either acutely during exercise/physical activity or chronically during all activities in their life. Due to the knee pain, those same people will ignore training their lower half, missing out on a wide range of benefits that training the lower body can bring. Now admittedly there are cases where severe structural damage has occurred and there is no other option than surgery first followed by re-hab. Even so, strength training should still be performed, if applicable, before the surgery in order to strengthen the surrounding muscles of the knee joint, to facilitate a quick and less painful recovery. The point being, you need to be training the areas below the belt line.

    With that said, here are 3 quick tips for healthier knees:

1. Avoid Machines and instead Perform Squats- This first tip encompasses a lot, so I'll try and hit the bullet points.  Machines for one, work the muscles through a fixed range of motion (ROM). This prevents the skeletal system from performing natural movements such as internal/external rotation and abduction/adduction. This fixed path also increases the stability of the exercise.  Whenever there is an increase in stability through out the body, there is less activity in the synergistic and stabilizing muscles. This puts a greater load on the prime movers. Which sounds great, we want to hit those quads right? Well, this increase in load doesn't only impact the muscles, it impacts the joints involved as well.  Thus the joints are being forced to move a load that they are not physically capable of handling (This is not to say I oppose super overload in all scenarios). The answer to these problems and the many more out there is squats.  If performed properly, the body is allowed to move as it was designed to move, and the entire body is utilized to produce force and move the weight.
2. Reduce the Range of Motion- Simply put, reduce the ROM to the point where you stop the movement just before the pain point. Focus on increasing your strength through that ROM and gradually over time try to increase the ROM.
3. Perform Terminal Knee Extensions-I wish I had a video for how to perform this exercise, but if you head over to YouTube and search it, you will get plenty of videos of it. Terminal Knee Extensions or TKE's work the last few degrees of knee extension. The prime mover for this is the vastus medialis oblique(VMO), one of the quadriceps muscles. The VMO is an often dormant muscle in individuals due to imbalances between it and the vastus lateralus. Activating and strengthen this muscle can help balance strength throughout the quadriceps, and if the source of knee pain is poor patella tracking, it can help reduce and often remove the pain.

No Nonsense Knees,

Kyle Bohannon, CSCS

Owner/Head Trainer

kyle@trainstrive.com

www.trainstrive.com