- Hey there team, it's James here from Kinetic Revolution.
My job is to help you run stronger and run injury free.
If you're new here, don't forget to subscribe
so you can see all our upcoming videos.
We've got a whole lot of exercise tutorials coming up
and lots of injury guides to help you,
whether you're injured right now,
or, even better, to prevent injury in the future.
Today's exercise is all about strengthening those quads,
those thigh muscles.
Now, quite often,
particularly when there's been pain in and around the knee,
one of the first muscle groups to actually start
to atrophy, to start to waste away,
is those quadriceps muscles.
So, there's a simple little exercise we can use
to start building them back up again,
and, in terms of where we put this,
as part of our rehab progressions,
this is a really early-phase exercise.
So, whether you're either just getting back into exercise
after some rest or some treatments,
or if you are early stage post-operative,
so perhaps you've got a meniscectomy or something like that,
this is a great exercise without loading the knee up
to start just building a little bit of quad strength.
So, as exercises go, you'll like this one.
You really can't go far wrong, it's really, really simple.
Get your back up against the wall.
Okay, from there, just shuffle your butt in towards the wall
so you're nice and upright, nice and tall.
What I usually get people to do is either
use a foam roller, if you have a foam roller at home,
or, indeed, use something like this, use a football.
Football itself is kind of just about the right height
to give you a little bit of a prop underneath the knee here.
It puts you a little bit of knee flexion,
takes a little bit of pressure off the knee itself as well.
From there, what I want you to do
is squeeze those quad muscles, so those thigh muscles,
to straighten the knee out,
and you'll find yourself lifting
that lower leg up off the ground.
You're gonna hold this for 10 seconds,
consciously trying to squeeze those quads.
You can even give them a poke, feel them working.
You should feel a bit more tension in the muscle here,
bit more tone in the muscle.
And after 10 seconds,
just allow yourself to come down and rest.
You're then gonna come back up again for 10 seconds,
and again hold, and these first two, three, four, five reps
should feel pretty easy, pretty comfortable.
But once you get to those later reps,
through to eight, nine, 10,
especially if there's been an injury around this knee
and these quads have got weak,
it'll become a lot more of a challenge.
10 times 10 seconds holds is a great kind of benchmark
for this kind of exercise,
and you need very little equipment.
It really is as simple as a football or a foam roller,
even a rolled-up towel underneath the knees.
What we're essentially doing here is working
with the weight of the lower leg
to actually create the resistance for our quads.
It's the lower leg that's being pulled down by gravity
and we're working against that to straighten the knee out,
and those quads for me, I'm beginning to feel it now.
After a while, you might start to feel a little bit
of fatigue, a little bit of shaking creep in,
that kind of phasic recruitment
where you almost see the muscle start to shake.
Don't be alarmed by that, don't be surprised by that.
That really is just a example of neuromuscular fatigue,
a good point for you to start wrapping it up.
You don't need to push beyond that,
but you should find that over the course of,
let's say six weeks, you should see significant improvement.
You get stronger, you can hold it for longer,
and then of course, from there, you're going to be ready
to progress onto the next stages in your rehab.
Do let me know how you get on with this exercise
and of course, if you have any questions,
leave them down in the comments.
Don't forget to subscribe to my channel
so that you get all of the upcoming videos
to help you strengthen yourself,
to help you become a more bullet-proof, injury-free runner.
Speak to you soon, bye now!