Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp physical therapist, Brad Heineck physical therapist
Together we are the most famous physical therapists on the internet in our opinion of course Bob. I was projecting from the diaphragm there to speak well
I'm gonna start doing that too yeah
All right
Single most important knee exercise before and after total knee replacement or maybe a meniscus surgery really most knee surgeries
We're gonna cover that today and we're therapists and this is our specialty
So if you're gonna have a surgery, this is a really important video to get you prepared for surgery
So the surgery goes better and your rehab goes much better and faster
So Bob, what do you say about that? If you are new to our channel, please take a second to subscribe to us
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Okay
The single most important exercise for a knee is you need to get the knee moving and have full range of motion
It boils down to that. I have this talk with every one of my patients after knee replacement Brad I go
It's a race against scar tissue,
Scar tissue's getting laid down after surgery, and I can tell you your knee's gonna get strong
They always get stronger, but there's no guarantee
You're gonna get the full motion back or
The full bend back or the full extension unless you start working on it right away
So you want that knee to be as straight as you can get it and bend it as far as you can
Not only after surgery but before because the more you get before the better the surgery's gonna turn out
Precisely Bob and with arthritis a lot of times or with knee injuries and a lot of times you're lacking that motion
So we want to start working on it right away and along goes with that is typically whether it's meniscus or
Knee arthritis, it hurts to put weight on the knee and walk and do exercises
So the next best thing is non weight-bearing range of motion
And it just so happens that Bob and I have been struggling with this for years and we decided to actually
We came up with our own answer
We invented we call it the Knee Glide and it works wonderfully for
These surgeries before and afterwards and it's really, you know, it's an inexpensive device
Especially when you're talking a twenty thousand dollar surgery twenty or thirty thousand dollar surgery
Yeah, they keep going up, depending where you have it done at. Yeah
How are we going to get the range of motion? Non-weight-bearing. We can't walk on it easily and put weight on it
so we want to do something in a seated position and you want to get your knee moving and so this
We're actually going to go in three phases Bob
First thing we're gonna do is a mid-range and that's right in here, you know, and if this is going pretty good
it might be tight and you're just gonna work it, what's nice about this too is if you still maybe have some cartilage left you're
starting to promote the
natural lubricant in your knee
Get that synovial fluid going
Which always reminds me of the one patient who called it snowmobile fluid, so it's synovial
But this will actually help promote that and actually create more and it'll get more blood flow to the knee
So it's all just it's good and healthy for the knee
Now once you get you know, if you're doing this for a few minutes in the mid range
We're calling this the mid-range feels good
then you want to go to full extension you could go to bending it, but we're gonna go to full extension first and
So we're gonna go out like this and there's a few little tricks
I'm going to show you you can just simply put your hands above the kneecap there
You're gonna straighten it and we're gonna do a little pressure on
And rough pressure off pressure on he's actually saying the words because it tells you how long to push
Pressure on pressure off and what's nice about an exercise like this is you really should try to do it quite frequently
I mean not just once a day. I mean every hour
If you have the time, especially after knee replacement
You want to go ahead and do
10 or 20 of these and you're gonna get much better results than if you just focus on it once a day
I'm going to show you the
Trick the really nice thing about this device is it's got a handle that actually works as a stilt
So now I'm going to downhill and it's a little easier to get that full extension. And so
That's just one of the cutest little things on this device that we just love and you know
Therapists really enjoy that too because it's something you can't do, we're really proud of it, yeah
We are, you know and the other thing I'm gonna point out is how light this thing is now
I always like to show that I can do finger curls with this. I mean, it's less than three pounds. It's right around three
2.9, 3.1 whatever so you can take it wherever you are going
I mean you can you know
If you're an elderly person you can bring it into your living room and work with it while you're watching
Maude on TV
well here you can put it up on a
Platform like this if you want to it just raises it up for full extension. Sometimes that helps. Yeah
I've had some patients where it works out better for that
So, once you get it so fully straightens then we also want to get it to fully bend now this it does not work well
to use this typically and
Usually I do this one on the flat and then we're gonna work full bend or flexion we call that
And a lot of times you can go like this and help the strong leg is gonna help the leg
So he's crossing around at the ankle then he gets so far back if that gets to be too far back
Then he can actually put the heel on the tip and push it even further back
You know, this was one that was kind of revealing to me Brad
My wife was having problem with her knee and she was working on this
This was not comfortable to her unless she had it up on the stilt
Because the ankle, which way did she do it? The other way.
It was too flat and it was too hard on her ankle
So this you can see this is a little more easier on the ankle as you're doing it
And then you're going downhill which it's amazing what the difference that that makes as far as resistance
There's very little resistance on this it floats really nicely. So we were in her case she wasn't even having a knee replacement
She wasn't having a knee surgery
She had some knee pain that creeped up and I just wanted to get range of motion in there to help get the fluid going
And it helped I mean she's now walking again fine
It's amazing when you get a knee moving full range of motion fully extended and fully flexed that alone can help eliminate
Really decrease the pain maybe we won't even need surgery
Right, right, and we've both experienced that in the clinic, the problem is, you know when the starts to hurt
What do you do, you stop moving it, you guard it
So then it even makes it worse because there's no blood flowing to it
And we've got a number of videos, other little tricks to get a knee to move. Sure
Now once you do get to the point and this may take you're not gonna get full range of motion
Probably in one day it may take a week or so of doing this it all depends on how tight your knee is
But once you get full extension
And you get full bending and it's going pretty good and it's like wow, this is going pretty easy
Now what do I do, I got a week before surgery
Then you can start to strengthen it a little bit, now what really works well
Is you can use this if you want to strengthen your hamstrings going up hill like this
You'll find that you just do this for a couple minutes. You'll feel those hamstrings working more
It's not a big jump, that's more for after surgery, but it still works good for before surgery, it still focuses on those muscles
Yeah, this one focuses on the quadriceps
But if you really want to get more particularly with the hamstrings
You take a stretch band like this and you get a velcro strap. You don't have to have the velcro strap
You can just wrap it around your ankle, but the strap works a little bit better and a lot of the kits, you know
If you get one of the full kits we have one down below in our Amazon preferred list
Is it the Kenzi?
Kenzi yeah
It's got the handles. It's got the ankle straps, it's got it all
And it was 20 some bucks,
Okay, so can you come over here Lonnie?
We gotta show if you wanna you can tie this somehow to the thing
To the bedpost bed to a chair
Wherever, we happen to have a nice wall anchor here that you can also get if you want in our Amazon preferred page
Do write in because we have people ask well, I really can't see how this works. It works really easy
You just pull a little bit and you slide that in there and I'm gonna come up through here
That's one way we could put it in through here and work it around there like that
We try to put on the poster that comes with it that a lot of different ways that you can do it, but they're really
There's a lot of them that we haven't even thought of yet. It makes it kind of fun
so now we got a little resistance
So now we got full range of motion
you're on your final phase before surgery or afterwards and you wanna strengthen it and
this really if you try doing it like this where you're holding your leg up versus
Relaxing it really makes a big difference. This is a great exercise after the knee replacement or the meniscus
I mean just a
low impact but really focused on those muscles and very controlled because after surgery or before when you got knee pain if
Things are controlled you're more relaxed and everything works better. Now we can do this the opposite direction as well
Sneak underneath the chair
And simply get some resistance going the other way and work those quadriceps. Wonderful
It's like magic. Yeah there's you know
just so many ways to get success with therapy and this is one of the newest things on the market
So many ways to skin a cat, wasn't that the saying? Well, yeah, but you know, it's kind of violent
Yeah, we don't want to talk about that. But this is the wonderful thing once again, Bob
We can cure just about anything, we can fix just about anything except for a broken heart
But we are working on it. Day and night.
I'm tired. This is fun, Bob