All About Your Knees

let's talk knees I get a very large amount of emails asking about once one what are two specific questions and so I wanted to address them all within one sort of quick video vlog so the first thing that I'm going to talk about is the common question that once I align my feet as you can see our foot model has here when I bend my knees they tend to go in towards each other and for those of you who are having problems or experiences being knock-kneed or straightening your feet and feeling like you're getting a lot of friction or banging with your knees back and forth I want to explain to you why that's happening so most people walk with their feet pointing out like this to varying degrees some people look like they're actually going and may be completely opposite directions another people have too slight degrees but when you first start you want to go ahead and make sure the outside edge to the defeat line up straight and I suggest that you use a straight edge of a carpet or a yoga mat to get that alignment but once you have your feet straight we're gonna go ahead and take a look at what's going on on the back side of the legs here so as we look at the back of our models legs what I've done is I've gone ahead and I've I've drawn kind of highlighted that hamstring tendons as they pass on the knee now the cool thing about the hamstring tendons is they're like the visual objective marker of how the knee joint is articulating so if your feet are pointing straight ahead but your knee joint is out to the side you can see when you been so there's a full entire other muscle system that's involved in straight legged walking and it's gonna be up at the level of the pelvis it's the deep hip rotators so let's come back here and look at the backs of her knees we're gonna have her externally rotate which means she rolls the thighs out and away from each other and you can see how that external rotation centers everything so that when she bends her knees now they're not going in towards each other but are going straight ahead now go ahead and go back to where you were before you use your pelvic floor and your deep hip rotators and bent you can see how the knees go in towards each other many people think that they're hyper mobile for the knees so that's another question that I get like should I not straighten my legs all the way but let me show you something when you straighten your legs if you don't externally rotate at the same time what happens as you move the bones around and you end up completely bypassing kind of this deep thoughts of the knees so for those of you with more sensitive knees the more you can spend in external rotation then you can straighten your legs all you want and you're not going to go past these ligament barriers so there's another question I often get asked about should how much should I straighten my legs here here in our alignment program we work with a fully extended leg so if I have our model face this left wall it's commonly assumed that we only have two knee positions bent or locked and locked is not really the right term here what lock really means is do you have your patella is lifted up all the way so as our model faces the front you can see that what locked implies are this motion here so you can see her ability to lift and lower her kneecaps if you can lift and lower your kneecaps your legs are not locked so what you want are straight legs with relaxed kneecaps now when you go back to realigning the knee pits in the back when you first start and here's another cool thing about that go back to that internal external rotation you'll see that the heights of the arch of the foot is affected by the position or the activity that's up in these deep hip rotators up along the pelvic floor so if you have really really flat feet then you also are very likely to have really really tight rotators of the pelvis then go ahead give it a couple more times of that when you try external rotation for the first time you're gonna have to come up and check to make sure that while your legs are straight that they're not locked and so as you look up at the kneecaps you want to make sure that your kneecaps are completely relaxed this is gonna be difficult for those of you out there who like to brush your teeth with your kneecaps right if you're that quad strong so now you have a couple more things to practice and I will see you back on the ranch

Channel: Nutritious Movement

Views: 64,562

Rating: 4.8928571 out of 5

Keywords: Katy Bowman, MS, Aligned and well, knee pain, exercises for the knee, biomechanics, pelvic floor exercise

Id: qcGPY4BMdlU

Length: 4min 20sec (260 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2010