If you walk into most gyms you will hear the music cranked up loud. Most people think this is to help motivate the people working out there, well ok its definetely to help motivate, but another reason is to prevent you from hearing all the knees cracking and grinding. The knees take a lot of stress day in and day out and due to a few different factors generally ache.
When someone tells me they have knee pain, I generally look at their ankles and hips to see if something is causing this pain. The knee is a hinge joint and almost 99% of the time the pain that occurs is due to dysfunction in another joint. Most commonly it’s a lack of range of motion in the ankle or the hips. It could also be tightness in the quad muscles and weakness of the hips as well. Unless you have a trauma injury where there is contact to the knee it is generally refered pain from another area. I know a lot is made of stretching the hips out, but I am going to focus today on the adductors and ankles.
These 5 mobility exercises are created to help mobilize the ankle as well as the adductors. Give them a try before your next workout:
1-Quad smash + Quad Contractions-This is designed to help alleviate tightness in the quad muscles which is in the front of your leg just above the knee and runs all the way up to your hip. I will use a barbell or any kind of stick and I also like to hold the barbell over a tender spot and contract the muscle 10 times in order to create some regenerative blood flow to the area.
2-Adductor stretch-The quadricep is the front of the leg, the hamstring is the back of the leg, the adductor is in between on the medial side of the body. These are generally very tight on people especialy athletes and weightlifters. Stretching these out can open the hips up and allow for a better running gait or better squat and lunge patterns.
3- Adductor smash with foam roller- This is my favorite one because it looks totally goofy when you are doing this at the gym. This is similar to the stretch, except we are massaging the area to loosen it up as opposed to stretching. I prefer to use a high density foam roller as opposed to a soft one because it loosens you up a little more.
4-Lower leg smash-I like to take a lacrosse ball and glide up and down the tibialis anterior (The front of the shin), the peroneal muscles (the lateral side of the shin), and the gastroc and soleus (back of the shin). These muscles get really tight when running, jumping, and squatting. Tightness here can create some compensation patterns with the knee. 5-Banded ankle stretch– This helps with ankle dorsiflexion (moving the knee past the toes) and may take pressure off of the knees when squatting jumping and running. Quick test: go down on 1 knee and push your knee forward, if you cant get your knee past your toes without the heel coming up your ankles are tight. Here is the band I use Purple Monster Band. Here is the prescription for a warmup- [email protected] Like this article? Sign up for mailing list on the homepage Follow my on social media IG-Wollschleger_training Facebook-wollschleger S&C Twitter-CWollschleger