(swanky upbeat music)
- I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And together we are the most famous
physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion. - In our opinion.
If you haven't done so already,
you wanna make sure you've subscribed
to our YouTube site because you're watching it right now,
I'm assuming, because we're gonna be doing videos
on fitness and health for those
who are 40, 50 years old and older.
So that's kind of our niche.
We worked with the elderly for a long time.
- Not that you're elderly if you're 40 or 50.
- No, as you're getting older,
maturing gracefully
I would hope. - Sure, and maintain yourself.
Okay, let's go on with what we're talking about.
- We're gonna talk about knee posture,
and you know, you always hear about back and neck posture
and how important that is.
But I've had a lot of patients, believe it or not,
that actually were having knee pain
because of how they were maintaining
their knee posture during the day.
And the main problem area that they were running
into is they were locking their knees.
I had one kid that worked for Subway
and he'd just stand there.
He was kind of an overweight kid
and his ligaments were a little bit lax.
I don't know if you know what that means, Brad.
- You know, they're loose.
- They're loose. - Loose.
- And the way you can tell that
if you've got loose ligaments is actually
you just take your wrist and push on it like this.
And if you can take your fingers
and touch your forearm there,
you've got loose ligaments.
A lot of people call it double jointed.
- Sure, right.
- That's not a good thing, actually.
It's a bad thing
because your joints aren't protected.
They're not keeping your joints stable.
If you're loose here, you're probably loose in your knee
and you're gonna be one of those people
that start back-kneeing
or getting your knees stretched out too far
in the back. - Hyper-extending.
- Hyper-extending your knee.
So let me just show you real quickly
what the wrong posture is when you're standing.
Don't know if you're able see this, Brad?
- Oh god, the women are gonna go crazy, huh?
- So what you wanna do is have a slight knee bend
when you're standing.
What you don't wanna do, and a lot of people do this
is they stand with their knees
locked. - Straight back, right back.
- [Bob] Yep.
- And then some people that are naturally hypermobile,
actually hyper-extended knees,
they're more at risk.
If your knees go backwards and you're one of those real
lax people in their knees, you're more at risk if you stand.
- Well, believe it or not, Brad, I used to stand this way
before I started physical therapy school,
and they picked it out in physical therapy school.
And I was getting to the point I was stretching out.
I mean, I could go way back
and just by the fact that I stopped doing it
it's tightened up a little bit on me.
But this, what this does
and now we'll refer to the diagram,
the diagram's in the same position as my knee is.
So here's the knee cap, here's the back of the knee.
All right, if we go to this diagram,
here's the knee cap, here's the back of the knee.
What is happening here is you're stretching
the structures out
on the back. - What do we got here, Bob?
Let's be a little more-
- This is the upper thigh bone.
- The femur? - The femur.
And this is the tibia or the lower bone, okay?
The two bones that make the joint.
- And the joint space.
- Yep, this is the knee joint.
And what you're getting when you have this position
where you're hyperextending or you're standing
with the knee locked, you're actually getting
too much stress in the front here.
And you're squishing down on the bone
and cartridge, cartilage.
Not cartridge, cartilage.
And you're getting excessive pressure,
and this is where people were getting pain
when I was seeing them.
And all we had them do,
besides a couple other things
that I'm trying to get the inflammation come down,
we just had them to stand with their knees slightly flexed
and that spreads the forces out.
And now instead of seeing this big gap here,
now it's kind of a even all along here.
The forces are even all the way along the knee
and that spreads it out and they stopped having knee pain.
So very important.
The other thing you wanna do,
and can you stand up for a second, Brad,
get out the way (chuckles).
- [Brad] Oh.
- The other thing you don't wanna do,
and I tell my kids this all the time,
you do not wanna sit in a chair
with your foot up on another chair like this
with nothing to support below the knees.
You're actually stretching that back of that knee
and that's promoting that type of posture.
And again, I have two kids that were kind of prone to this,
and so they always remind me now,
"Dad, don't put your foot up on another stool."
You can put a pillow underneath there
or something just to keep it slightly flexed.
- Go ahead and put your knee up again there, Bob.
- What are you gonna do?
- Well, I just wanna clarify.
So, and this point, you know,
here the joint is gapping back here
stretching the tissues here,
and pushing the joint together there.
And those compressed forces are gonna increase your risk
for DJD, in other words, arthritis,
leading to a early knee replacement.
- And the same with this.
- Yep.
- So keep your knee posture.