Health Essentials - Runners Knee
Hey there. I’m going to give you a couple of exercises to do for runner’s knees. So, it’s a really common problem we see here in the office every day. Basically, your kneecap sits in this little groove here. And every time we walk and move, it slides in that groove. And what happens is there’s muscles on the inside and the outside of the knee that need to keep that kneecap in place. But the way most of us walk and run, the outside of the leg gets a little too tight. Inside of the knee gets a little weak and the kneecap starts pulling outside. It’s also called patellofemoral syndrome, it’s the big word. But it’s really kind of a problem and this is some exercise for you to do. It’s really two parts we have to do. We have to loosen up this outside of the leg here called the IT band. There’s really three ways to do that. This is called a stick. We can buy these on Amazon and use this like a rolling pin. We’re going to loosen up this muscle here just for a minute on each side. Another really common way is one of these massage guns. This is a Hypervolt, the most common one out there. We’re just going to turn it on in a nice low setting. We’re just going to go from the knee to the hip and anywhere where it hurts, we’re just going to hang out there for a couple seconds and let it loosen up the muscles. The other really easy way to do it is a foam roller. So, we’re just going to lay on our side on the floor and roll that foam roller up and down the leg as well. So, that’s part one. Loosen up. Just pick one of those. We’re going to need to do this pretty much every day for a couple weeks. Loosen up the outside. Then, we got to strengthen the inside of the knee. And you can do this at the gym, but one of the easiest ways to get a little ankle weight at Walmart, Amazon. They’re only a couple dollars. Two, three pounds is all you need. We’re going to strap that on the bottom and we’re going to do some leg extensions. But when I see people at the gym, they commonly do these wrong. Want to bring this leg up. But if you put your hand right here, you’ll feel that the inside muscle doesn’t really fire until we get the leg all the way up. So, we’re going to do three sets of 10, but at the end, we need to bring it up and squeeze it a little bit. So, just a little half a second squeeze. So, bring up, squeeze, and release. We’re doing this at the gym with one of those machines with the bar here. Just do one leg at a time. All right. So, what that’ll do is eventually loosen up the outside of the leg, tighten up the inside of the leg, and that’ll keep the kneecap in the center and prevent these kneecap problems. So, if you have runner's knee, patellofemoral syndrome, this is the exercise for you.
