Keeping Your Knee Healthy

Keeping your knee healthy is extremely important for everyone, not just sport athletes and weightlifters. We need our knee for everyday use, especially for us New Yorkers! People in New York City average around 2+ miles of walking a day. And in-home personal trainers probably average about 5 miles :p. So if you have knee issues, it’s not easy to just “fuggedaboutit” :p

As a personal trainer in NYC,  I work with all different types of clients and those that have knee issues generally have really tight IT bands or adductors. This can cause patella tracking issues = misalign your patella (knee cap) causing that knee pain. Before we move forward, I’m not saying that this is for everyone but for our clientele this has been the commonality. With that said, it’ll be a good idea to talk to your personal trainer and doctor before you try any exercise modalities.

Moving on, for Fusion Performance Training clients, we’ve found these specific recovery methods to be extremely effective for alleviating knee pain.

Compression Band

A compression band or “voodoo floss band” is wrapped around a joint and muscle then placed through a range of motion. The premise is to compress the fascia then move around, by doing so it should help alleviate all the “junk” between the muscles and loosen you up. I talk more about recovery method and the compression band HERE.

With that said, to hit your knee issue you can wrap the compression band around the knee and move around like so:

Here’s another one specifically for squat mobility but can also be used to hopefully help alleviate some knee pain. You don’t need the band for this but it can help increase ankle mobility.

Foam Roller and Stretch

The foam roller is a great tool to help expedite recovery and deal with small nagging injuries i.e a knee injury.  As talked about earlier, if your muscles are super tight, it can cause patella tacking issues, therefore potentially cause knee pain. To help relieve this issue, I would recommend rolling out your IT band, quads, and your adductors/VMO. Rolling and stretching the adductor (inner thigh) and VMO (quad right above the knee) in particular seems to make a dramatic improvement with our personal training and sports performance training clients.

What we recommend to do:

Stretch: Adductor Rock Back 

*More info HERE

Foam Rolling: IT bands, quads, adductor and VMO

*At the 34sec marker shows the adductor and VMO being foam rolled.

Activation

It’s important to note that we still need stability and to strengthen the muscles that help stabilize the knee. While multi-joint exercises are great for our overall strength, sometimes we need to do isolation movements to help ensure that specific muscles, i.e. the VMO, are getting the strength work it needs to develop stability for dynamic motions.

Here are few knee stabilization activation exercises that we like:

Free Standing Terminal Knee Extension

Notice that the movement is NOT done in a quick motion, we’re focusing on alignment and activating the VMO. Quality over quantity :p

Banded Terminal Knee Extension

Short Step Down

Personal Trainer Advice Knee Advice

For any modality to be effective you need to be consistent and give it time. Simple doing the above knee saving activities x2-3 a week for a few weeks may not be enough to give you the results you want. For our athletes and weightlifters, we want them to foam roll and/or use the compression band, stretch, and do some type of movement drill on a daily basis. This at first may see like a nuisance, but over time you’ll see the dramatic improvements in your recovery and performance.

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* Any exercise program carries with it some risk and we are not responsible for injuries sustained from this one. You should consult with your doctor and personal trainer before starting any new exercise program.