- Do you experience a clicking sensation,
or maybe even some pain in your knee
every time you kneel or you squat?
What about if you're climbing stairs,
or if you're sitting in a chair and you try and get up,
does your knee click then?
Well, if you've answered these questions as yes,
you might be struggling with
what we call patellofemoral pain syndrome.
Essentially, it's an irritation
at the back of your knee cap.
The good news is is that you can do something about it.
I'm going to demonstrate some exercises to you,
which are really simple and effective,
and you can do from the comfort of your own home,
which will significantly reduce the clicking sensation
in your knee.
Okay, let's get started.
(upbeat music)
So, a quick, 30-second lesson in anatomy,
I won't bore you with it too much.
This is a model of your right knee.
And what you see here is
is you see the upper leg, the lower leg,
and we have the kneecap in the front.
Now, this is the interesting bit.
Look at the upper leg here.
There's a groove here, and the kneecap sits in this groove,
and it tracks it carefully and smoothly.
Now what happens with a clicking knee
is the kneecap doesn't track this groove anymore,
and it's often to do because of muscles imbalances,
so it sits next to the groove, not just right in the groove.
So what we're going to do
is give you strengthening exercises and stretching exercises
that restores the muscle imbalance around your knee,
so your kneecap can track this groove properly anymore,
and you won't be suffering
from a clicking knee or a painful knee.
So one of the most important muscles
that must exercise if you're dealing
with a clicking knee or a painful knee,
is a muscle called the vastus medialis oblique,
and it sits in the inside here, the front of your knee.
Now I've drawn that actually on my knee,
it's this little water droplet shape muscle that sits here.
And this muscle has an important role
'cause what it does is it actually tracks the kneecap,
it pulls the kneecap in the right direction.
Now, there's a very specific way to exercise this muscle,
and let me demonstrate it to you.
What you need to do is get yourself a foam roller
or a towel, so something to bend your knee,
and then, you need to just lay,
put your knee on a resting position on this foam roller.
Now if you straighten your knee,
but the last five degrees, which is from here to here,
you need to push your toes outwards,
so you come up, push your toes outwards,
hold this for one to seconds, and come down again.
And the same thing, so you straighten up,
last the five degrees, push your toes outwards,
hold this for one or two seconds, come down again.
And you need to do about 15 repetitions,
and you do about three sets.
And if you want to enhance this
and make it a bit more difficult,
you could use a theraband.
So just wrap this theraband here around the table.
So pull the theraband on top of your foot.
Same thing now, sort of straighten your knee again,
and last five degrees come up and down again.
And you can obviously, you can obviously vary
the pull of the theraband to make it harder or easier.
And the last thing you could add, as well, on top of this,
is one of these things.
This is called an ankle weight,
so you just push this over your foot, on your ankle.
Again, there you are, the same thing.
On your back, and again, straighten your knee,
and last five degrees really push your toes outwards.
And the same thing here, 15 repetitions,
three sets, once a day.
So that's the first exercise that will help
to reduce the clicking in your knee.
Let's move onto exercise number two.
So this next exercise is a bit of a variation
on the exercise we'd done previously.
What we've done is we have wrapped our theraband
around something sturdy, so you can use a table,
or whatever you want to use.
I'm going to put my right leg,
my affected leg, in here, yeah?
I'm going to place this backwards,
you can see the band is now behind my knee.
You can have it a bit higher, behind the top of your leg,
and all you do now is you extend the knee.
So you go like that.
Yeah, so you bend it, and you extend it.
So you push it back and straighten your knee
as best as you can,
and the best thing is to push it back,
hold it again for three, four seconds, and let go
And again, you hold it again, stretch it,
hold it three, four seconds, let go.
And last one, and the same thing,
you do 10 to 15 repetitions
and you do about three sets once a day.
If you prefer, you can perform these same exercises seated.
Let me do a quick demonstration for you.
So sitting in the chair here, sitting upright,
and all you do is again,
you extend your leg and the last five degrees,
you turn your toes outwards,
you hold this for a few seconds,
and you drop it back down again.
The same thing here, so straighten,
hold it for a few seconds,
and repeat 10 to 15 times, and do three sets.
Or you can do, as demonstrated before, with the theraband,
you need to actually make quite a small loop here.
So wrap it around the,
one your legs of your chair,
put your foot it in, there you are.
Sit upright and the same thing,
so we're extending, and bring your foot out,
and come back in again.
So extending the leg, turn the toes out,
hold for about five seconds, come back in again.
And hold about five seconds, come back in again.
And of course, you can also use the ankle weight
to wrap around your ankle and do the same thing.
So this is the final strengthening exercise
for your knee if you're struggling with a clicking knee.
And after this, we're gonna move
to three stretching exercises for you.
So, this strengthening exercise,
you need to find yourself a door or a wall, whatever you do.
Lean against it, place your feet about 15, 20 centimetres
away from the door,
make sure you've got about 30 centimetres space
between your feet,
and all you do now is you slide down.
It's called a wall slide.
So you slide down, just as far as you feel comfortable,
it might be that 90 degrees is too much for you,
and it really makes your knees ache and hurt,
so you come back up again, come to 45 degrees.
So you come all the way down,
you hold this for about five seconds,
and you come back up, and come down again,
hold it for about five seconds.
Now, the important thing about this exercise is this,
make sure that your knees stay straight over your feet.
So make sure that knees don't come in and do this
because that will hurt your kneecaps even more.
Now, so you come down, knees are straight over my feet,
I'm gonna hold it here for five seconds,
and I come back up again.
And all these exercises should felt here,
where I've drawn this vastus medialis oblique on my leg.
Okay, let's move onto some stretching for you.
So, we need to stretch three muscles around the knee.
The first one is the quadriceps,
which the muscle in front of the thigh, top of the knee.
The second one is the hamstrings.
And the last one is the iliotibial band.
It runs on the side of the knee.
So we need to make sure we stretch them out,
so there's enough ability in the knee,
and not too much pressure on the kneecap.
So the first exercise, the stretch I'm going to show you,
is for the quadriceps muscle, and it's an easy one.
What you need to do is come and lay face down.
Now I'm gonna bend the affected knee,
I'm gonna hold onto my ankle,
and all I'm gonna do now is pull forward
until I feel the stretch in the front of my thigh,
in my thigh.
Hold this for about 10 to 15 seconds, and relax,
and repeat it about five times.
And you can accentuate this and make it a bit harder
by pulling, and then what we need to do
is raise your upper leg up as well, like that.
And you hold this again for about 10 to 15 seconds,
and come down again, and repeat about five times.
So that's the stretch for the quadriceps,
for the front of your leg.
Now when you're dealing with clicking and a painful knee,
it's also important to stretch out the hamstrings.
And the hamstrings sit at the back of your upper leg.
I'm going to demonstrate two versions for you.
I'm going to demonstrate it on my right leg.
So what you need to do is lay on your back,
and then, create a 90 degree angle in the right hip,
and straighten your knee as much as you can,
which might be up till here in my case.
Interlock your fingers, place your fingers behind your knee,
keep your leg as straight as you possibly can,
and pull your leg a little bit towards you.
Hold this now for about 10 seconds, and repeat five times.
So that's one version of what you can do.
The second version you can do,
is you need to use a towel for this.
Place a towel around your feet.
Now straighten your leg from the start,
straight leg from the start, lay on your back,
and use the towel to pull your leg
as far as you possibly can.
Yeah, keep it straight,
hold this now again for 10 seconds,
and repeat about five times.
So these two different exercises,
they will focus on two different parts
of your hamstring muscle.
So the final you need to stretch
when you're struggling with a clicking knee is the ITB band.
And I'll show you two variations.
So the first one, again, I'm gonna use the right side
is sitting, I've got my left leg straight
and my right leg bent.
I'm gonna place my right foot on the other side,
my left knee on the outside here.
I'm going to pull my knee now towards the left side.
I'm gonna turn my body towards the right.
Placing my right hand behind me,
straighten up and pull that knee as far as I can,
and now you should feel the stretch here
on the outside of your hip.
And this muscle runs from the hip
to the outside of the knee,
so it's important we stretch this muscle.
So this is the first stretch I'm demonstrating to you.
Again, same thing, hold this stretch
for about 10 to 15 seconds, and repeat about five times,
and do this daily.
Now, the variation of this one is as follows.
You're standing up, now I'm placing my affected leg,
so my right leg behind my left leg.
Yeah, I'm going to push down my right hip towards the right,
and we're going to accentuate the stretch
with my right hand,
going on top of my head, and on top of my right ear,
and really pushing this to the side,
keeping my body nice and straight and forced,
don't twist and turn.
Hold to the side here, hold this again for 10 to 15 seconds,
and this should straighten out the whole of the ITB band
on the side, so giving you more mobility in that knee
and less of a clicking sensation.
So hold this again for 10 to 15 seconds,
repeat about five times, and do this daily.
I hope you found some value in this video.
If you did, please don't hesitate and comment,
give me a thumbs up, subscribe to my channel,
I love making these videos for you,
and it's works really motivating
if I see, if I get a bit of feedback from you.
So from me for now, I'll say, goodbye,
take care of yourself,
take care of someone else as well if you can,
and bye for now, bye-bye!
(gentle melodic music)