What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
Let's talk today about knee pain.
If you've been lifting for any length of time, likely you've had some sort of knee pain or
might have knee pain in the future if you're not doing the right things.
Guys, knee pain can debilitate your leg workouts. I know. I've suffered from it, and I know
what it can do to your legs when you're trying to squat and especially squat heavy.
So, what I want to do today is first of all cover a couple of the reasons what might be
causing your knee pain
because that's going to be important to understand the difference, and then show you one that
I think is really common especially for guys that train and lift weights.
So, if we look here, we've got our boy Raymond, and we've got our skeleton, so what you'll
see is that in the knee we've got a lot of different sources of pain.
Now you guys have probably heard about ACL pain and MCL pain and LCL, right. Well we're
talking about tears really
because those are ligaments that get injured sports most often. The ACL and PCL are inside
the knee.
The LCL and MCL are going to be on the inside and outside of the knee, and basically, that's
just one source of injury but we've also got osteoarthritic changes that can happen
where you actually get degenerative changes on the bone, the bone on bone area, or on
the underside of the patella here that grinds up against the femur.
We could talk about that in a second. We also have meniscus issues. Guys talk about that.
It's the cushion between the two bones here, the tibia and the femur,
that gives us that space between the joint that can wear down or tear. But I find that
the most common injury that we get when we train,
our inflammatory conditions from overuse of the patellar tendon. So, the patellar tendon,
this is what you're seeing right here,ok.
And what it does is, it runs over the patella, here it holds it in place, and you can get
inflammation of this a lot of times causing patellofemoral issues,
we've heard that before, and it impacts the tracking of the patella when your knee goes
into flexion extension.
So, as we flex the knee and extend the knee, you want normal mechanics of the patella so
you get this glide.
And it glides right in this groove right here. You can see that it's supposed to glide right
in this groove.
But what will happen is, it starts to get out of position. Well, guess what? This isn't
a knee issue. I've talked about this before, this is not a knee issue.
The knee is a train, and this is its track. Here, and here. So guess what happens when
the track gets twisted?
The knee in the train goes flying off the track. So, when you start looking and focusing
all your efforts on the knee pain and trying to, you know, cure the patellofemoral issues,
or try to cure your patellar tendonitis, and you're not paying any attention to the track,
you're way off track.
So, what you want to do is, you want to start looking for the source and the cause of your
knee pain because most often, 99 percent of the time,
the source of that is going to be somewhere else. And when we look at this, it's either
going to be the track at the bottom, which is going to be controlled by your ankle and
foot,
or, the track at the top which is going to be caused by, or controlled by the muscles
in your hip. So, if you look at what goes on here,
if you're somebody that has flat feet, again, one of my biggest issues, if you have flat
feet, your foot will collapse down and in, ok.
There's no arch so the arch comes down and in. That takes the tibia here with it into
internal rotation.
Well, this stays here, this gets twisted in, now you've got a twisted track. So, now if
this thing tries to move on this twisted track,
you can see, it's off the track already. It's actually being pulled in, you can see. So,
it's off the track. That's not going to move smoothly as we do this.
And with every rep of your squat with a flat foot, that patella is banging up against the
side of the track, guess what happens?
Inflammation. You can get inflammation on the underside of the patella. You can get
inflammation up through the tendon. We have issues though, ok.
So, now, up at the hip, more common because you could fix this. You could use an orthotic
down here to try to boost up your arch
so you can sort of fix the mechanics and reestablish a straight track.
But up here, guys, this is the big issue. Most guys have weak underdeveloped hips. We've
talked about that a lot, too.
If your hip is underdeveloped and it can't control the internal or external rotation
here of your femur, the same thing's going to happen.
This could be all aligned, but if this gets pulled down and in, you've got an issue. If
this gets pulled out too much because of tightness in through your hip, you've got an issue.
But again, I find the biggest issue here is glute medius weakness and that's something
that we can actually address too.
So, I wanted to show you one of the ways that you can address that and even test yourself
and see.
The easiest test, and I know it's going to sound embarrassing, especially coming from
a strength coach, but lay on your side and do the Jane Fonda leg raise up and down to
the side.
Do about 50 of them. Do 50 of them and let me know in this video below if it burns like
hell because I guarantee if you have weak glute medius,
you're going to feel a real burn that might feel pretty damn intense, and you might be
squatting 350, 400 pounds, it might still feel like it really burns.
So, if that happens to you, you got to get that stronger. So one of the ways that we
do that is with a glute medius Hip Bump.
And it's really pretty simple. What you're trying to do is, you're trying to allow your
body to drop, right, in PT we call this Trendelenburg's Sign where you just drop down to the side,
right.
Because you're letting go of the muscles over here that keep you upright. So, here in order
to get it back, we have to contract our glute medius
which is going to pull our pelvis back and over to the side over here. So, what we're
doing is, we're doing a closed chain hip abduction.
We're doing a hip abduction if we're looking at the right leg, and it's just lifting our
leg out to the side like that.
If we were to try to do that in a closed chain with our foot connected to the ground, this
is what it would look like.
I'm just going to let the leg go further away from my midline as I raise my midline to the
right.
So, just after doing this a little bit, I can really feel a burn in that left side glute
medius. Maybe it's not enough for you, all you've got to do is attach a band.
Get inside of it, in here. Put it around your hips. Do the same thing. Get up on your left
leg. If you're trying to work the left hip, you get up on the left leg,
and you face the hip that you're working inside towards the source of the band, the point
of attachment.
You let yourself drop. Just get really lazy. Let your hips drop. From here, you squeeze
it straight over to the side.
Let it drop. Squeeze your hips straight over to the side. This is not an ankle move. This
is not a knee move.
This is a hip move. All your focus should be right here. Let it drop. Squeeze your hip
lateral, straight over to the side.
Hold it for a second, and then come down. I could already again feel this burning, and
obviously working a weak area.
We've had some top major league athletes that had extremely weak hips. And you would be
surprised because they were strong everywhere else.
This can cause knee pain. This can cause chronic knee pain, inflammation and everything else
that it is you're feeling.
So, just because it's small and it seems like kind of a girly exercise, it doesn't mean
that it's not worthwhile, and something you should do.
So, guys, again, knee pain. The take home messages here. There's a lot of different
kinds of knee pain.
As a trainer, I see guys working out a lot of times, they're dealing with a lot of the
chronic inflammatory conditions, mostly of the tendons, patellar tendon namely.
You can fix it, but you've got to look other places. You can't look right at the knee.
You've got to look up and down. Down at your ankle. Up at your hip.
Find out what the cause is. If it persists and you are training with much more than knee
pain, it might be time guys that you have to start looking into other solutions.
We've created the ATHLEAN MECHAN-X Drug supplement for that very reason.
I realize how many guys train in pain. Every time I put up one of these videos, there's
50 other requests for shoulders, elbows, wrists, and neck.
People are dealing with pain. We can fix that, but you've got to look in the right places.
And if you have to, guys, you can take again, find ATHLEANRX MECHAN-X over at ATHLEANRX.COM.
In the meantime, if you found this helpful, leave a thumb's up below, and a comment.
Again, I'll make more of these videos as you demand them, so just let me know what it is
you want to see.
Alright, guys, I'll see you guys back here again soon.