so this is a story of a friend of mine kareem we met while through hiking and at the time he was
experiencing some pretty severe knee pain which luckily we were able to solve almost instantly
with a few basic exercises so in this video i'm going to be telling the success story of kareem
and sharing with you the information that you need to build strong needs to get back
out on trail pain free you'll find very detailed videos for each exercise that work for kareem in
the link in the description let's get into it on the first day we met you had some serious
problems with your knees right yeah i had like some serious problems i like could barely walk
um but i was like determined to continue but it was at that point it's either i get home or like
something seriously needs to change and then i met you actually and um it was quite simple
the stuff you showed me but a week later i'm off the painkillers i'm not wearing any support
and cracking on over 30 k's a day and and the crazy thing is it all happened like in a week
yeah so like the results were like quite fast which i didn't expect first thing stand up
and uh touch your toes for me okay well this is interesting hamstrings are very tight
and so is this yeah so stand up so we want to maintain a perfectly straight back here right
yeah then place one hand on your back yeah and try and keep your ribs tucked now hinge forward
keep coming keep coming keep coming coming already i've been in my back
where is it where's the pain in your back yeah just pain or discomfort yeah
just this comfortable stretching yeah yeah so keep those knees locked engage the quads
and come back up now move from a standing position and only go as far as you can before that back
starts to change and adapt like it's a compliment it's a compensation pattern the back starts to
bend because you're asking the body to come all the way down i'm going to push on the down and
bottom and see down there no dramas yeah remember to keep those knees locked out totally yeah
so you went to the hospital right you actually left the trail
i i left the trail like a weekend went to the hospital because the pain was unbearable
i went there the guy told me you have an inflammation take two weeks of rest and after that
you shouldn't like walk more than 10 kilometers a day and he just like prescribed me like a bunch of
painkillers didn't really tell me anything about my condition whatsoever so i cut the rest in half
and then decided to head back on the trail but instantly the pain just like got back so you
basically ignored all the doctor's advice and then kept doing the same thing you're doing essentially
with a little bit more rest yeah fine do whatever you like what would i know i'm just a doctor
so this is probably the number one exercise that you should be doing daily
so what you're going to do is you're going to like lift this leg up and down right
yeah but you want to lift this this heel and keep the toe pointed down keep this
hip stacked directly on top of this one okay so pull up is that as high as you can go
yep okay so over time we need to go higher okay but just work with strange for now so i'm
going to feel if i can find this muscle that's actually responsible and work yes it's working
it's very tight though yeah
that band is very tight so how hard is that out of ten
five six wow so you need to build up to like 25 or 30 of these okay did he say anything about your
itv he didn't say anything he just like checked if my my acl was intact on meniscus and that i
didn't have any swelling and then just like let me leave yeah after that okay so so um from what you
described to me i was pretty sure from the onset that you had iliotibial bands syndrome itvs which
is super common the way it manifests usually is pain in the knee so do you want to show us just
like bring your knee up and point to roughly where the pain was and you had pain on both knees right
yeah yeah so originally like the pain like started on the left one and then like kind of shifted
on the right one and i had like pain like on this side and on the side here as well and especially
during the descent that i like needed like to take a break every 10 minutes and then walk
for two minutes and then take a break again so that was um quite frustrating and basically i i
couldn't do anything during these breaks i just like sit there in frustration yeah when you're
in that position when you can't go down you have a tool that you can use and that's the trekking pole
and like a series of stretches so what tends to happen is that the iliotibial band
it isn't tired itself it isn't short i mean it's a fixed piece of band it doesn't change in length
but what happens is the muscles around the insertion points of that band become
both weak and tight so if we can break up some of that tissue manually and strengthen the glute
meat which is responsible primarily for the tracking of their knee then we can have some
immediate relief and i was pretty sure that if i got the trekking pole in and this is painful right
man so i had him lining on his head cream lying on his side and i was just
digging into his butt essentially with a checking pole which is like we've known each other for
less than 24 hours at this stage it's probably pretty weird for me to just like jam a trekking
pole into your ass but it works i was at a point that would accept anything yeah yeah just while
i'm editing this video i realized there's an important piece of information here that kareem
actually did a lot of preparation for this hike he was in the gym doing squats lunges and deadlifts
doing what you would think would be the right kind of preparation for a hike like this unfortunately
what happens when you do these basic exercises you end up strengthening the muscles that are
already strong and still ignoring the ones that are weak and tight and that's why training for
hiking specifically is really important you need to strengthen the smaller tight weak muscles so
you don't end up in this situation download the free routine from the link in the description
because this stuff is very complex it's quite nuanced and you need the details to get it right
let's get back to it this is the one thing that we might be able to do that will like fix it at
least give you some of the immediate relief so get back into the same spot that's crazy tight
and just tell me out of 10 how much it hurts yeah 10 being a lot yeah okay big deep breaths okay
i'm sure this is the problem right so you can finish this trick
out of 10 almost then okay yeah back off a little bit
but we had like pretty much immediate relief from that right yeah yeah we did and i
could like like complete like my descent from the mountain had still a little bit of pain
um but yeah but even like the trekking pole like i did not expect such a versatile device isn't it
yeah it's like a portable foam roller it's multifunctional it helped a lot so what i
tell kareem to do is to to foam roll all of these quads and also extend the pole lean on it and like
use that as a trigger point ball to loosen up all the outer glutes that spot that i was getting into
yeah you might be able to sometimes i do this because i've had this similar problem as well
yeah sometimes i'll use my trekking pole and i'll just like really just get it in there and
like ah oh good looks pretty funny you see people on the trail coming past all right
but that's actually really good i'm getting it good okay let me try that out all right so we've
done one leg yeah so this would be a good test piece let's keep going okay knee support no knee
support yeah yeah keep going sixty percent sixty percent better like the pain has reduced like
immensely actually yeah it's not perfect maybe it's the thank you
maybe it's the painkillers but i think like my pain
threshold is way above the painkillers i would need something a lot stronger
i i started having pain also going uphill but now when going up like there is no pain at all
during the descent every half hour and it used to like tension up but just like
just like foam roll around here like that um yeah and just like you continue doing that till
it felt like kind of okay it worked like magic or not like magic i guess it's just science
magical science and it just could continue to go down and and every day i think i could like
have an improvement of course not just like with the trekking pole but including the exercises as
well yeah yesterday you weren't wearing your knee braces either yeah yeah that's amazing i think we
should sacrificially burn those things and throw them out i mean knee braces are again they're like
they're very good to give some extra support to the knee it's not a solution it's a band-aid to
a problem that is going to be permanent unless you change the way that you move and you need
to move regularly you need to strengthen and you need to loosen some of that super tight muscle
you know hopefully i could be a knee pain trail angel again in another circumstance but i'm super
glad that i was able to help you man it's been a pleasure walking with you over the last week so
and i'm really glad that we can keep going at the same pace together and get some more of this hike
time so spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen my crossing the pyrenees series kareem did finish
the gr11 he went from being hospitalized with knee pain through to finishing an 824
kilometer through high he's now gone through three of my programs he's doing mountain proof knees at
the moment and also training for his first ultra marathon so he's really living proof that if you
build strong knees you don't need those knee supports to stay safe and pain-free when you're
out in the mountains so download the routine from the link in the description it's completely free
it's a super valuable resource and remember that prevention is better than cure so don't
wait until you're stuck on a mountain to learn this stuff get the routine i'll see you on the
summit