What's up guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, AthleanX.com.
Today I'm going to show you how to never skip leg day ever again because your knees are
hurting you.
This is a very common thing.
I know full well myself that bad knees could really interfere with your leg training unless
you have a game plan.
Unless you have a couple big points of understanding here, and I'm going to try to get them across
right now.
First of all, what could be going on in your knees?
Remember, it's a very common thing that everybody deals with in some way or another.
One: you could have an ACL tear, or you could have torn your ACL in the past and had it
repaired, or maybe you never had it repaired.
That's going to have an implication on your leg training.
Two: you could have arthritis.
Especially the older you get, the more likely you're going to get arthritis that comes up,
especially in the knee.
Third thing: you could have a meniscus problem.
If you tore your meniscus at some point, if it's not repaired and it's causing you problems,
it causes big problems with training in your legs.
Finally: you could have patellar tendonitis, which is one of the things I deal with in
a very significant way because my feet are so damn flat there's a lot of causes for it,
or whatever it is; if you have it you know what it feels like.
That knife stabbing feeling in your knees every time you try to step underneath the
squat bar.
So, what is the big issue that you need to understand to be able to start training around
these pains?
You can do it.
You have to think "What is the position of you shin?"
This is my leg bone here below my knee.
What is the position of your shin during the leg exercises that you're doing?
What I want to do is show you what happens to the shin during the different leg exercises
so you could get a better understanding of which ones might be better for you.
The second thing you want to consider is: what is the depth of flexion?
How much flexion are you getting?
If my leg straight, when I go down to a squat, am I stopping at 90?
Am I going all the way down?
What is the depth of the exercise you're doing?
That, too, could have an implication depending on what is wrong with your knee.
So, let's start looking at a couple of the exercises.
First off, we have a common exercise that does tend to cause knee pain in people that
have it.
It's the lunge, but there's two ways you could do.
There's a lot of ways you could do a lunge, but there's two sagittal plane ways that you
could do the lunge.
You could either do them forward as I'm demonstrating here for you, or you could do them backwards,
as I'm demonstrating here for you.
Now, the movement is the same in terms of what happens in you quads and your glutes.
You get a little bit more loading on your glutes when you step forward.
However, if you look at the movement itself what is the position of the shin?
The shin on the forward lunge is really far forward.
It's angling a lot further forward from vertical than it is here, when I show you on a reverse
lunge.
On the reverse lunge I'm taking a lot of the stress away from the front of the knee, or
the kneecap, especially if I had that patellar tendonitis, or patella femoral syndrome.
What is the knee depth?
The knee depth is actually pretty fixed.
It's fixed, especially on the reverse lunge because when that back knee comes really close
or touches the floor I'm done with the movement.
So, if you're somebody that has arthritis, or somebody that has meniscus problems, we
know that the depth – a lot of flexion of the knees – is going to cause a problem.
Especially with meniscus tears.
You're going to get a lot of pain and discomfort when you go to really deep flexion of the
knee.
So, this is a great exercise for you because of that, but the people that have the issues
with the vertical displacement of the tibia – like an ACL.
When we lose our ACL the tibia is no longer really controlled on the femur; it can go
too far forward.
Same thing with patellar femoral syndrome, or patellar tendon inflammation.
You're going to get less of that stretching over the kneecap if that shin stays more vertical
than it does when it goes past vertical.
Next exercise: we'll go to a common one.
The squat.
Here's another two pronged issue.
You can see in a squat my shin does go pretty far forward and it also creates a great degree
of knee flexion if you go ass to grass, which is great if you have the ability to do that.
If your knees are free of discomfort.
If I go with deadlift – which is another great power exercise for the legs – look
at the difference.
Watch how much more vertical my shin is during a dead lift, and it still allows me to load
up.
It still allows me to lift a lot of weight and train my legs heavy without having to
have all that vertical displacement; that forward displacement of the shin that I would
get with a squat.
You do have another option though.
If you're trying to avoid some of that displacement forward and keep that knee feeling a little
bit better you could do a box squat, like I'll show you here.
What we're doing with the box squat, not only are we getting a much more vertical shin at
the bottom, taking a lot of that stress off the knee, we're also controlling the depth.
Again, depth issues are going to be a problem for people that have arthritis, or meniscus
tears.
A box squat will be a great way for you to control that and also keep your knee in that
more vertical position.
Another alternative all together, and still a version of a squat that's my favorite, is
the dumbbell Bulgaria split squat.
With a Bulgarian split squat, again, now I can load up the weight.
I can load even up to 95 pounds, or 100 pounds on each hand, get my knee farther out – the
further out that I jump my knee, when I go straight down I'm going to have a vertical
shin.
If I keep my knee too close to the bench – as I'm showing you here – even this great exercise
can become more problematic for those like the ACL tears, like the patellar tendon problems,
when I go down.
You can see that shin is no longer remaining vertical.
Even how I setup here for this exercise is going to make a big difference.
I get good depth at the bottom, I do get control of it because my dumbbells are going to hit
the floor before I can get all too low, and of course I've got that whole problem fixed
as far as how far forward the shin goes.
I love this exercise.
This is actually one of my favorite ways to train legs.
Not to mention the fact that I could do it unilaterally, which is more athletic.
Finally, another great option for you when you're trying to train like an athlete especially
– we talked about unilateral.
It's great to train your legs unilaterally because we're usually on one leg or the other
when we're functioning.
When we're running, jumping, or again, being an athlete.
So I like the step up.
The step up is another great exercise that allows us to – look at it.
I'm showing you here.
Again, keep that shin pretty damn vertical as opposed to really driving that knee forward
and causing some pain and discomfort in the front, or medial part of your knee.
It even allows me to get really explosive if I want because I can be explosive still
out of that same safe position of the tibia.
See?
I can just explode up off the bench, do this plyometric version of it, but I'm still doing
it out of a good position here of my knee.
So there's really no excuses when it comes to training legs.
You never have to skip a leg day.
Athlean-X is all about that.
I work with professional athletes who deal with knee problems all the time.
Some NFL players who've had 60 surgeries on their knees.
They'd better find a way, or they're going to have to retire.
It's my job to help find ways and find solutions.
We do that all the time.
As a matter of fact, like I said, ass to grass might be great for you if you can do it and
you don't have pain and problems in your knees.
Again, there's a lot of reasons.
Don’t let somebody tell you that ass to grass is the best thing for your knees if
you've got knee problems.
No.
It depends on what's wrong with your knees in the first place.
So, one size doesn't fit all.
Again, that's my job as a PT, to make sure that I get you guys the training exercises
that you need to allow you to keep training, get yourself in the gym, and continue to get
leg gains.
I hope you've found this video helpful.
If you're looking for a complete training system where I put the PT and the science
back in what we do, then I invite you to head to AthleanX.com and get our Athlean-X training
system.
No, we don't skip leg days.
We train you pretty intensely and we get damn good gains as anybody that's done our program
can tell you.
If you found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up below.
Let me know what else you want to see and I will do my best to do that for you here
on our channel each and every week.
I'll see you guys back here again, real soon.