♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Howdy, folks.
I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And together we're the most safest physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- So we get the question sometimes, Brad,
I want to massage my knee
because I'm having some, some knee pain.
- Right.
- The thing you don't wanna do is
you don't wanna take a massage gun or a massager
and go right on the knee itself.
- The bony part, you mean?
- Right. - Yeah.
- That's just gonna irritate it.
- Exactly.
- With massage, you want to go upstream and downstream.
In other words, above the knee and below the knee.
These muscles greatly affect what is happening at the knee.
- They're all connected, Bob.
- Yes, they are.
So we're gonna start with the quadricep
and you can manually do this
if you want to, you can massage this muscle.
Quite often, the problem with this muscle,
it's tight.
- It's big, too.
- Yes. It's become tight over time and,
yeah, you can use a lot of different things to do so,
but the best thing is to massage it.
Massage gun, Brad, right?
- Yeah. It, it, they do work well
and they're very popular for a good reason.
It's because they, they take the load off your hands.
I can massage a part for maybe a minute
before I'm getting tired and. - [Bob] Right.
- But with this, you know.
- Especially when you're dealing with big muscles like this.
Maybe in Brad's case it's not that big, but...
- They're kind of fading away as I age,
but here we got different heads.
You have to be aware of that.
We've got, here we got five of 'em.
We got, this one's on there already.
- And part of the reason we're pointing this out is
because we are giving away one of these massage guns.
- Absolutely.
- This week, the T2. - T2!
- That's the T2.
- R two T2.
- (laughs) That's right.
- It's pretty funny.
- Really, it's a powerful gun.
And it's got five heads, like we mentioned.
We'll show you them.
- I got the soft airhead on there.
And with that one, you can get,
approach close to the bones.
And if you do, it's not gonna hurt.
- We'll talk about that next, Brad.
- Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm jumping the gun.
Do you want me to jump with it?
- You're jumping the gun.
- (chuckles) Get it?
I didn't even try on that.
- Right. But first off, again,
the quadricep on a lot of people is tight
and you wanna make sure if it's tight,
it's gonna pull on the kneecap harder than it should
which will compress on the knee harder than it should, so.
- You know, and Paul reminded us last week
the professor, he said, you know,
there's that retinaculum part.
There's that also.
- They're really sensitive too.
- Yeah. Yeah.
- They're really pain sensitive.
So another problem, and this is the problem I had, Brad.
On both knee knees I had it.
Right where the quadricep attaches into the kneecap,
there's a tendon right there.
- [Brad] Ah-huh.
- And this got really fired up on me on both sides.
I was doing split squats.
- Yeah. - You know?
- Well, you gotta be careful Bob.
- Right, at my age.
- You know, we're not 25 anymore.
- So I tried all these things to get rid of the pain.
Nothing worked, Brad.
I mean all these PT things.
- Yeah. Things I, yeah.
And this was a couple years ago.
Right? - Right, right.
- We were just starting to get into these things.
- So I tried a massage gun.
- Show them what you did.
- Yeah. I even took it to the point where I would
go right to the edge of the kneecap.
I would run along the kneecap a little bit.
This thing reduced it by 80%, the pain
within two days.
- [Brad] How many weeks?
- Two days. - Two days.
- It was amazing.
So are you shocked?
- You, maybe you weren't getting close enough
with your other techniques, whatever.
- I don't know.
I was using my hands.
I was also doing knee centric training.
- Oh yeah.
- But either way it didn't work
and that worked very fast.
So the other thing, Brad,
besides the tendon, underneath the tendon,
there's a suprapatellar pouch.
Supra means above the kneecap.
So in there they have the synovial fluid.
And that can get bound down.
So you wanna do the same thing.
You wanna massage it.
So, if it's a tendonitis
or if it's suprapatellar pouch, either way.
- Yeah, you get the same structure.
That's two for one.
- So number three,
you wanna maybe work the hamstrings.
- That's, I put a different head on
because that's what I like to do.
- The hamstrings, all three muscles cross the knee.
If they're tight, they could put stress on your knee.
- [Brad] Yep. So, yeah.
And this is one where I put this head on
and then I'll go on my clothing because it's slippery.
And it really, it works well in the hamstrings.
And this is, you know, options you can,
you'll learn after you work with one of these guns.
- All right.
The next one, Brad, number four is actually the IT band.
Now this is gonna be for a specific knee problem.
If you're having pain on the outside of your knee,
especially with biking or running
kind of repetitive type injuries,
you're gonna wanna massage along the IT band.
Now you're not gonna stretch the IT band
but quite often the IT band is bound down.
It's adhered down and this will help loosen that up.
- And for this, I like to use the round head.
- Sure. - Yeah.
Because if you go directly on, on the IT band,
it's maybe a little uncomfortable
because the femur's right underneath it.
So you gotta have an angle.
This is a little tricky.
And now, now the clothing gets in the way.
So sometimes it's best to do it with it on,
depends on what you're doing there.
Ah, there we go.
- Well, Brad, let's do this next one, too
since you got the round head on there.
Let's say you have pain in the tendon
underneath the kneecap.
That's called the patellar tendon.
- Infrapatellar. Isn't it?
- Yeah. - Below the patella.
- It's from jumpers syndrome or jumpers knee.
- But you don't have to be a jumper for it.
- No.
- But yeah, it happens right there.
- And Brad uses the round head
and he goes at it from a side angle.
And he gets a great crossfire massage on there.
- Yeah. It's so bony there, as, you know.
If you go directly into it, you're gonna make it worse.
So you need to approach it,
this is probably about the only option.
- Yeah. It really is probably.
I think the only head that'll work on that tendon.
- And then going at it at an angle like this.
- Right, right, right.
- And you can really adjust your force
and pressure and intensity.
- All right.
The final one is, I don't know,
I was hesitant to even say this one, Brad,
because it, I don't know if has that much of effect
but the cap also does cross the knee.
- Yep.
- Especially the, the gastrocnemius.
And so it doesn't hurt to...
What do you do?
- I don't know.
I thought you, I, you do your calf a lot more than I do.
My calves are perfect.
- I use the bullet head, actually.
And I think if you, if you've gotta loosen up,
you gotta make sure there's no stress coming
from the inferior part of the knee.
- Right. Yep.
So that, that muscle there
and I don't know if this is the major part of the problem,
it sure seems like it.
- I would start with this.
- Right. I mean, between Paul, you and I,
the three therapists in the last two weeks,
talk about knees, everyone,
our experience says that this is much more common
than below.
- If you want, you can go that far down.
But I, I think in most cases, this is gonna take care of it.
- Exactly.
- All right.
There you go.
- My knee feels a lot better already, Bob.
I'm telling you.
- I wonder if it's a little placebo there.
All right.
- What'd you call on me? - Placebo.
- Oh yeah. All right.
Be careful.
- Thanks for watching.