Knee strengthening exercise or Knee stability exercises are to help your knees be as stable as possible in all three planes of motion (frontal, saggital, transverse), do these progressions. Each video from top to bottom goes from easy to hard. You must master each with perfect form and without joint pain to progress onto the next one below.
The knee stabilization exercises videos will be broken down into group 1,2,3,4. Try to progress in ascending order. To be safe start at Group 1. If you can do all the exercises without pain, with perfect form, and for 2-3 sets of 20, then progress to group 2. Repeat that process.
Knee stability exercises to build strength
This knee stability exercise program is not just about build strength. Strength is just one third of knee health. There is flexibility (see the very bottom) and propriocepetion (stability skill). This program will enhance all three aspects of your knee.
Like martial arts, you must master the basics first. That is how this knee stability exercises program works. You go back to the beginning and master the basics. Then you “rebuild” the knee from the ground up to teach it new stability skills. Good luck and fill out the survey at the bottom for more help!
Videos:
Group 1 exercises for knee stability
For this knee stability exercise we will start with bending one knee, knee towards your chest bring your foot flat on the table. You are going to keep your stomach tight throughout the exercise. You will need to keep this knee totally straight and locked out point your toes towards your shin.
I want you to raise this knee off the table and raise to the height of your opposite knee and you slowly lower it down, its very important to keep that abs down. So this is position one for the hip 4 way.
So position 2 after you repeat the number of repetitions on this side you would come over and do the opposite leg, same thing. So position 2 you will roll around to your side so keeping your bottom knee bent. This knee is going to be straight. I want you to grab on to the edge of the table to kind of support and stabilize yourself and your hips need to stay forward towards the stabilization exercise.
People have kind of tendency to roll their hip backward. For this exercise you will maintain your body alignment with the hips forward. And this top leg should be back, you are going to be lowering the leg towards the floor and raising it up. That would be the position 2 for the hip4 way.
Now position 3, cross over your knee and plating the foot on the table like this, the bottom knee is gonna go straight. And you going to bring this bottom leg back behind your body. You are going to need to maintain a straight line and torso. Everything should make one straight line.
Again you will be pulling toes up towards the shin and you will be contracting the muscles in your inner thigh and raising your leg off the table, just few inches. This would be the position 3 for the hip 4 way.
Final position, position 4 would be laying on your stomach and you want your feet’s to be hanging over to the edge of the table. For this exercise again you want to maintain your stomach tight. You do not want to allow your body or torso to rotate.
So stomach tight, legs again locked out straight. You will be contracting your gluten muscles, lifting your leg above the table. You will lift your leg very few inches. Very common mistake is that people wanna lift the leg too far. What happens is that they end up compensating rotating their waists.
You want to avoid that you want to hold everything down and yo only going to lift my hand till you feel my hand and then lower down slowly.
And that would be the Hip 4 way, one of the first knee stability exercises that you would be doing.
There are great ways to improve posture for doing squat!
This is called the stick squat, basically its for the people who are having hard time controlling proper posture as you are squatting. The goal of this exercise is to teach you how to hold your spine in the perfect alignment. A overall knee stability exercises to build strength and to increase knee strength.
It is extremely important because if you are not in direct alignment with your spine as you are squatting and round your chest forward. Its adds to the compression of your lower back and it can damage in the long run.
You want to get a broom stick or any kind of stick. You are going to put it behind your lower back. Basically the back of your wrist is across your lower back and the bottom of the stick is going to touch your tail bone. The middle of the stick is going to touch your mid back and your back of the head also gets the stick.
This is the starting position, from this position you want to lean how to go down and squat keeping those three points of contact always together. Your tail bone, the mid back and the head. So you wanna go down into the squat position and not round your back so the point of contact are broken. Maintain those points of contact and come back up.
You would do this for specified number of repetitions that your therapist recommends. You want to make sure that as you are doing this your stomach tight and braced and your posture perfect.
The next knee stability exercise or knee strengthening exercises we are going to use a cord and do side to side walk. For this particular knee rehab exercises you are going to be assuming a squat position or athletic stand. You are going to be standing knees bend, your hips are going to be out behind you, your butt up behind you.
Your chest would be up, your back maintaining a neutral position of the spine. Your abs will be tight the entire time.
You will take four steps out to side while maintain this pose. So step out to the side 4 times, and you are slowly controlling the resistance. Now on the way back, you got to fight the way back don’t let it pull you in.
So you will slowly walk back in 4 steps, and you are making sure that you are not twisting or rotating your torso. You do not want to be rotating, all the things would be tight at the stomach maintain the curve in your lower back.
Stiff leg dead lift with better posture for knee
Stiff leg dead lift with a stick across the back, it’s a great beginner core exercise to teach you how to hold your spine in the right position as you learn to hinge forward, bend forward through your hip joint. You just need a broom stick of some sort, you wanna put the stick across the lower back. Basically want to maintain points of contact. This core exercise also help you stabilize and strengthen your knees.
Your tail bone, your wrist, your mid back and your head should always be against the stick. Now first thing you are going to do is keep your knees soft, slightly bent. Have your core sucked in and braced maintain those points of contact and then learn how to bend forward maintaining those contact. You don’t wanna drop your chest or round your lower back to the points of contact would be broken.
You want to maintain those contact and feel your hamstring flexibility. One you feel a good stretch on your hamstring, you can stop there and come back up.
It’s a great knee stability exercise and overall awesome leg exercise and a pre requisite for you to be able to do anything where you are bent over, picking up things rolling things or exercise. It teaches you how to hold your spine in proper alignment to minimize the pressure throughout your spine.
We will demonstrate a unilateral or one legged stool bridge. For this exercise your legs will be elevated on a stool on a mat. Doing it at home you can use a piece of furniture such as a low chair. Your arms will be at your side, you will be pushing your body all through the table on one leg.
So one leg will be raised up in air like this, now you will push your body off the table maintain your stomach tight. The entire time you will not let any movement go through your trunk, your pelvis, you are keeping a neutral spine curve.
So no rotation through the hip and pushing on one le. Most commonly you will hold this position for 5 seconds.
Group 2 of Knee stability exercises
In single leg squat or unilateral squat you will stand on one foot with your knee bent behind your sort of like this so the foot comes behind you. You gonna reach down to your opposite foot with your opposite hand. So you will go down in a squat position, you are going to touch mid shin and come back up.
So like a regular squat you are making sure that your chest and shoulder up. You are going to drop down not going to roundup your lower back so you are not gonna do this. You maintain that curve in your lower back.
Few other things to look for and make sure that going into your squat your knee isn’t traveling forward past your toes so the knee won’t be going in forward. Its just going to stay on top your toes or behind your toes. You gonna have to bend from your butt, your butt up behind you.
We will do through the unilateral stiff legged deadlift or aeroplanes but with a trunk rotation. A slandered one legged dead lift you balance on one leg, keep this leg straight back keeping that gluten muscles tight. Then keeping your chest up you would bent forward. Now the version of this is the twist.
You are going to open up this hip, keeping your balance. Close the hip and then come back up. I will give you a side view of this. Balance on one leg, glut tight, good posture. You are going to go forward and opening up the hips.
As I am opening up my spine and my pelvis stay together, you do not want to twist your spine. So with every degree my chest is turning my pelvis stays together and turns at the same time. What I mean by that is you do not want to have your pelvis down here and your chest rotating.
You want your spine and your pelvis to rotate together. If you have the skills you can have your hands apart it will be easier to balance like this and then open and close.
*Lateral Lunge (no video yet). Lunge to the side and keep core in line over the pelvis as if you are squatting with the stick down the back)
Knee stability exercises featuring the Bosu ball. Yes, we will demonstrate to lunge on the bosu ball. You will stand with your feet even with your hip. So you try and maintain this distance for your feet when you do your lunge. So you are going to do one foot at a time. You will go into the lunge position, plant your foot right into the ball. You want to drop your weight down, your back knee bent and you are gonna come up.
So, few things to look for when you do this lunge. You want to make sure your knee traveling forward as your toes. You are going to drop your back knee straight down, lower your weight down so your knee won’t travel past your toes.
You also want to make sure that when you lunge you are not dropping your body weight forward. You are not rounding your lower back. So you are not going to do this. You will keep your chest up and in line with your body.
The premise of this knee stability exercise is not to see how high you can jump but how well you can decelerate or absorb the forces, the shock impact forces of the jump. When you first do this exercise you will only really jumping about an inch high and it’s all about how you land.
First I will demonstrate the typical wrong way of jump and there is a loud thump and your joints are really bending and absorbs the forces. The correct way to do is nice and soft. If you notice when I go down my feet, my toes come in contact with the ground and then my heels hit, nice and soft. When you do it right, you don’t hear yourself landing at all.
This way you are using your muscles to absorb the forces of gravity landings in your joints skips spare the excessive rubbing and stress. Again if you wanna jump land in a perfect squat position and avoid that hard something giant landing sound.
The right proper deceleration jump is about again declaration and absorbing the forces when you land. When you land you wanna make sure look at your knees don’t let your knee buckle in. if your hips are weak you knees will have a tendency to buckle in. so you can actually look down to prevent that. You want to keep your knees right over your toes.
In a side view you will see my butt immediately sits back down. You don’t want your knees to go forward so if your upper body is too upright. If you land sort of like this and your knees go forward, that’s wrong. You want your weight to shift onto your heel in a very progressive and gradual fashion as you absorb the forces.
The reason your want that is you are now using your hip muscles to help decelerate and not your knee or quad muscles like this. That will minimize sheering, sliding, rubbing forces in your knee. So the proper technique when you land from a deceleration jump again is a same as a good squat position.
Where your chest is over your knee, which is over your ankle. Like if I draw straight line down from my shoulder in my chest. Its intersecting connects to the knee and ankle, that’s perfect alignment. And when you go down you want to make sure your back round forward. You keep the neutral spine or your back doesn’t move.
Make sure your core is braced and that’s the deceleration squat jump.
Group 3: Knee exercise
For this knee exercise the progression of the stool cap, this is a stool cap with a twist. You will balance on one leg and take and basically tap the object that is on the opposite side. Going down and when you tap you wanna make sure don’t just bend your spine and twist.
To avoid that you want to keep your chest up and tapping by shipping and turning with your hip. This is the right way. Wrong way is twisting with your spine like this. So one rep to one side then switch hand and tap to this side. You see I am tapping with my hips facing it not twisting this spine and bending over like this.
In side view you can see, when I go down the small of my back, the lower back stays arched and I shift, I don’t round and twist. Okay?
In this knee exercise tutorial video we are going to go over the rotation deceleration jump. This adds one other aspect of dynamic hip stability to this, because when you turn and jump your momentum of your body wants to keep turning and your hip rotator and your core have to help contract and stabilize so your body does not twist when you land.
Just like the regular up and down deceleration jump you want to make sure you land softly. You want to make sire when you land your shoulder, chest is directly above your knee and your ankle based upon in a perfect squat position. Your back is not rounded nor it is too upright which allows your knees to go forward. You want to land in a perfect squat position.
First time you do it, may be just turn 30 degrees and jump back and as you get more progressive, better, stabilizing you can turn 90 degrees, 120, eventually 190 degrees.
In this example I will demonstrate a 90 degree turn landing and stabilizing the knee not letting the knees buckle.
You can recommend that frequency that we write for you and this will help train stabilizing your hi and knee so you avoid excessive motions like this. So controlling multiple planes of motion of your knee, ankle, shoulder, back stabilized during any kind of dynamic movements
We are going to go over the squat jump side to side, a great knee stabilization exercise. Once you have mastered the proper squat jump deceleration technique you can now progress to more dynamic movements jumping side to side.
Same as the regular squat jump, you want to make sure three key things from happening when you land your knees don’t buckle in. Second when you land you don’t wanna keep your upper body too upright so bend forward. If you draw a line from your shoulder it will intersect your knee and ankle,. So when you land in the position (in side view) and not in that position.
And lastly you want to make sure that as you land your ankle land softly so tis toe -> heel. So from a side view if you look at my foot, this toe then heel. So you are using all of your joints like a spring loaded absorb the forces so you can explode out of that position again. Your hand placement should be in the front, keeping your knees wide. Don’t buckle in, don’t round your back and don’t be too upright either.
So when you land, perfect technique like this. Your shoulder is over the knees, over the ankle. Landing soft, when you do this correctly you should not hear your body thump like that. It should be almost no noise, that’s when you know you are decelerating perfectly absorbing those forces and not letting the forces travel up your body through your joints and rubbing and putting stress through your joints.
Group 4: Knee Stability Exercises – the rough ones
In this video we will show you the one legged deceleration jump as a knee stability exercise. Once you have mastered bi-lateral jump progression of static, side to side and rotation now you can progress to one legged deceleration jump.
Balance on one leg, squat down slightly in a proper mechanics where your chest bents forward and your butt goes back. In a side view, you are going into a proper squat position hands on your hips, jumps off and lands and often stick to landing.
Now when you land, if your hip is weak then if you look down your knee wants to buckle and ends like this. So you want to make sure that you keep your knee over your ankle. Don’t let the knee buckle in and try to decelerate the ankle and land soft.
Avoid landing hard where forces travel up the body and its harmful for your knees, for your hips and as well as your back. Do not get concern with how high you jump, first master your technique of absorbing the forces, landing soft getting the weight back on to your heels.
Once you master that 10, 15, 20 in a row then you can work on more height. For now the first couple of repetitions to just get the technique down. May be just jump an inch and nail that down before increasing the distance or height.
In this video I will teach you how to do one legged jump rotation. Basically you will jump on one leg and like the bi-lateral squat jump, you will decelerate het forces, getting your chest over your ankle and knee land in this position the except you are going to twist.
You are going to squat down and I will twist 90 degrees and stick the landing. And when you stick the landing make sure you knee doesn’t buckle in, it stays right over your ankle. Your chest is up don’t let your lower back round.
Its all about landing soft, try to avoid landing hard this way your muscles absorb the forces not your joints thus eliminating or recuing injury to your hip or knee or back, remember it for this knee stability exercises.
Welcome, in this video I will show you alternative one legged hops. If you have mastered the previous knee stability exercises like the one legged jump just statically and going from side to side. Then you can now do a more dynamic movement where you jump stick to landing and stick to landing. Basically alternating legs and absorbing the forces. Its really not that how far you are jumping its more about how you are absorbing the forces.
Some key pointers while doing this knee stabilization exercise – you wanna make sure your chest when you go down, bends forward and sticks forward and sticks and stays over your knees, your butt goes back. You wanna make sure that your core is tight, you wanna make sure when you land your knee does not buckle in it stays over your ankle. That’s extremely important.
And lastly the leg that’s in air, you want to make sure that it doesn’t swing through like this, when you jump out this leg should still stay bent like this. The reason is when you do sports movement, the leg that’s is in the air needs to be hop out again.
So when you are doing movements it is very unnatural for the other leg to swing behind the leg that you are landing. As you get more proficient at absorbing the forces, not landing hard you can then and only then work on jumping further and further.
Stretches for knee pain
Now Below are common stretches to keep you knee and hip mobile so the tracking of your knee joint is happening correctly. For the stretches the idea hold duration is 30 seconds (confirmed by scientific studies) and do 5 reps for each side.
Know how to stretch your knee from these videos
In this video we are going to go over with hip standing external rotator stretch.
You need a surface around this height, it could be little bit lower, little bit higher. If the height that you are using is too high, you can just stand on a stool or couple of books.
So we are going to use this surface, I wanna stretch my right leg, you wanna bring that leg on right on top of the table. You wanna make sure you get your leg from the inside not outside. It is much harder from the outside than to in.
You wanna place your hips square to the table, your knee should be right in front of the hip. It should not be angled out like this. It should be angled forward.
Now couple of things if your hips is tight, this knee will be sort of up like this, that’s okay. You want to relax, you do not want push the knee down. You always want ot make sure that your hips stay square because if you are tight your body wants to turn away from the side that you are stretching.
In this position you should feel light stretch here. Now if you are very flexible and do not feel stretch in this position then you want to make sure your chest forward and bow forward.do not round yoru chest to bow forward, keep your chest up and bow forward. That will give you a stronger stretch.
Now if you are very flexible you still don’t feel the stretch, you can drop the other foot further back away. That will basically lower your body, increasing the height of this and places a stringer stretch on the hips.
I will show you from the side view to show you what I mean by that. So in this position you will bow forward keeping your back flat to get that stretch. You can also drop your other leg back to get a stronger stretch.
You wanna make sure the intensity of the hip stretch here is not too strong, it should be medium, medium to strong stretch. Ideally you want to hold for 30 seconds and it should not be painful.
We are going to demonstrate the Super Stretch. Another full body workout which works as a knee stability exercixse and also works as knee strengthening exercises. For the Super Stretch you are going to be lying on your stomach with one leg hanging off the table. So the first thing you are going to do is walk the foot forward on to the floor until you feel a stretch on the back of your thigh, hamstring area.
Once you get the stretch on to the back of your thigh on this leg you are going to be using green strap or dog leash, hooked over to the opposite foot, we will give it over to the shoulder and you are going to pull this with both hands and you will bring this leg upfront until a stretch is felt on the front of your thigh. So typically we hold the stretch most commonly for 30 seconds. And this is the Super Stretch.
We are going to demonstrate the Box IT bench stretch, for this exercise we will demonstrate on two inch box. This stretches your IT band as well as works as a knee strengthening and knee stability exercises. So while doing this at home if you do not have a small box you can use phone book. Phone book works excellent.
So you are going to start up standing on a leg that you are going to stretch. So if you want to stretch your left IT band that is running from your hip down to your knee, you will be standing on your left leg.
First thing you will do, your foot will not be totally straight forward, it will be rotated turned out slightly about 10-15 degrees. The next thing you will do is stand up tall and you will shift your left hip to the left. So your hips are both kind of shift to the left and the right leg that you are standing on is going to be straight at the knee. Just trying to slowly lower yourself down until your foot, your heel touch.
Again you are emphasizing standing up tall not bending forward.
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