Hi there, I'm Lucy Macdonald, physiotherapist. Welcome back to my
virtual clinic. Today I'm going to be showing you the best exercises for your
knee pain, but before I do I want to say thank you so much for your lovely
messages of support, I'm so glad that so many of you are finding this series on
keeping you and your family healthy at home it's so helpful. Now before you
watch this video please do watch my other videos which include when knee
pain and swelling is an emergency, how you can manage your knee pain yourself
at home and what's causing your knee pain. So let's move on to the best
exercises for your knee pain, so as you will remember knees love movement,
movement helps the knees to recover and reduces your pain, so the absolute
favourite which is incredibly versatile is a squat, now if you're not
particularly strong or fit then it's an excellent idea to put a chair or a stool
behind you when you do your squat so that if you need to you can sit down. So
what you do is you get your feet into a natural position, it might be that your
feet are pointing straight forward or that they're slightly turned out and
then you bend your knees going down into a sitting position, allowing your knees
to move forwards over the centre of your feet and sitting down with your hips. Now
in order to sit down a little bit deeper if you reach your arms forwards as you
do it you'll be able to go nice and low and I would suggest that you go down to
about 80 degrees with your knees so not quite, not quite getting your
thighs parallel to the ground and as you do it make sure that you keep those
knees turned out so they go over the centre of your feet, if you're not sure
what I'm talking about I'd strongly recommend that you watch
the octopus clinic video on squatting, it shows you exactly how you should have
that alignment to really make sure that your knee pain reduces, so go on to the
octopus clinic website put in squatting in the search tool at the top and
I will show you, I will take you through great detail and how to do
squats and then what you can do to progress from there. The next one is
actually an exercise for your calf muscles, that's because your feet have a
huge influence on the function of your knees, if you've got nice strong calf
muscles and nice stable ankles, then that will really help your knee pain, so
holding on to something for support you're going to go up onto your tiptoes
and then slowly down, now to get the alignment right I recommend that you go
to the video, I think it's video number 42 on the octopus clinic website, to make
sure that you're getting your heels behind your ankles as you go up onto
your tiptoes because that's really important and again on there you will
find progressions for that exercise. Third exercise is my absolute favourite
for knee pain is the wall ball exercise, now you do need something like a ball or
for example you could use a rolled-up towel or a small pillow, you take your
ball and you put it between your knee and the wall, now in this instance I'm
training my right leg, now you start nice and square and you bend your knees
slightly and you slightly tip your tailbone back making sure that you're
maintaining curve in your lower back, you then twist your knees open so that
they're pointing over the centre of your feet and you lift your other leg, the leg
that's closest to the wall, now as you do that you push into the ball with
with this knee and you twist the other one out and you should if you're
getting the exercise right feel a discomfort in the glutes muscle here at
the side of the hip, if you're getting the discomfort there that's great, if
you're getting it anywhere else in your knee then please stop this exercise, in
fact I would recommend that before trying that exercise you again go on to
the octopus clinic website because you'll find how to do that exercise in more
detail on there, so it's called the wall ball exercise, put those words into the
search tool and they'll come up but I will also put them in the details in the
description on this video. So those are my top three exercises for knee
pain - your squat or sit to stand and the tip toe stand exercise and the
wall ball for your lateral glutes muscle stability muscles. I hope you found that
useful, the next one I'm going to be talking about clicking, when should you
worry about clicking in your knees and when should you not?
So please do press that big subscribe key there and I look forward to seeing
you next time, bye!