BAKERS CYST Exercises You Probably Aren’t Doing (But Absolutely Should) | Cause Explained!

so if you're someone who's getting that drain consistently getting injections into it taking pain medications it's very short-sighted if you're not also looking at your meniscus and also taking a bigger step back to understand why that meniscus is a problem g'day welcome back to the channel so in today's video i want to talk you through what you need to do to successfully overcome a baker's cyst at the back of the knee now a bake assist can be a consistent issue for a lot of people and from what i see clinically one of the main reasons for that is that not only are we treating that bank assist but we're often forgetting or neglecting or overlooking the reason why that baker system is there in the first place so if you're someone who's been dealing with a baker cyst or you know someone who is going through a bake assist please make sure that you hang around towards the end of the video so you can have the broader perspective around why that's there in the first place so you don't have to keep getting injections or keep getting fluid removed or taking painkillers and all this sort of stuff before we get into all this obviously if you genuinely go on to enjoy this video if you find it useful and helpful please consider leaving a like rating down below consider subscribing to the channel if you're new if this video genuinely helps you overcome your bake assist please consider leaving a super thanks donation on the video it's just a great way to help support the channel going forward so getting into this obviously the exercises that we're going to go through are going to be calf specific exercises to try and help some of these symptoms the reason for that is is that when you have a baker's cyst that calf muscle tends to be sort of over the top of that as it sort of goes across the back of the knee we're going to go through two ways to try and hopefully get on top of those symptoms but then we're going to quickly go into some exercises that you can work on to improve the function of that area now a lot of people don't realize or it's not promoted enough that if you are someone who has a baker system you've been given that label we need to also attach to that this idea that there's probably also some meniscus dysfunction going on as well so in my experience as a physio if there's meniscal issues and that can be something as as sinister as maybe like a tear or something like that or something as less sinister as some wear and tear and degeneration but the presence of dysfunction in that meniscus tends to be the reason why a lot of baker cysts occur so if you're someone who's getting that drain consistently getting injections into it taking pain medications it's very short-sighted if you're not also looking at your meniscus and also taking a bigger step back to understand why that meniscus is a problem in the first place so getting into the symptomatic stuff getting into the calf specific stuff one of the best ways to decrease calf tightness and calf restriction is with a wall calf stretch what we want to get you to do basically is with your shoes on or off doesn't matter too much is if you try and get your heel as close to the wall as possible we want to keep your leg straight to start with this is going to target the gastrocnemius the the longer muscle in the back of the calf squeeze your butt cheek and then holding onto a door frame or something close by just try and come up over your foot as as far as you can trying to get your hip as close to the wall as possible you'll find that you'll feel a really powerful stretch in that calf muscle up closer towards the back of the knee now to make this very specific to you what i like to get people to do is from this position keeping your butt squeezed just gently twist your hips and your knee rotate from side to side see which angle gives you the best access to your calf tightness if i rotate a little bit more towards the camera i feel it a little bit more in the outside of my calf which is where i tend to get a little bit tight some people when you twist away from the camera might find it a little bit more on the inside of the calf on the inner side make sure that this is very specific to you find where you need to be and then again as we always say in the channel here it's not enough to hold a stretch anymore it's not good enough it doesn't get the results that we want what you have to do to make this highly effective and highly efficient quickly is wherever you feel that tightness from this position we need to tense that tightness up activate the muscle activate the part of the muscle that's tight by activating that when we release that it gives so you can then go a fraction further than you could before so that version of the stretch is a brilliant way to decrease the amount of resistance in that calf muscle that might be reactively and reflexively tightening if there is some irritation at the back of that knee the second way that we can do this is with a foam roller or a tennis ball or a lacrosse ball whatever you feel most comfortable using and what we want to basically do here is we want to try and shear free some of the restriction here so you're not looking to roll around on the roller it does have some benefits obviously in terms of sort of shearing free some of the connective tissue and the fascia and things like that it's definitely a place in the world for rolling on things but when we're trying to improve the mobility of tissue in this particular instance what i find works best is if you move the roller up and down to a point where you feel an air of tightness and tenderness same thing as we did up against the wall if you roll your leg outwards and inwards go looking for the area that feels the most restricted so i've found a little thick knot here just a little bit on the outside you might even be able to see it sort of flicking over a little bit as i roll over there so when i capture that part of the muscle i then want to bend and straighten my foot so what i'm doing here is i'm compressing that tissue and then shearing that tissue past the ball by including movement now this is relatively comfortable for me so i can really get up on top of this and really ask that tissue to shear free faster again if it's too easy again which a lot of people it may not be because it can be quite tender then again put some extra body weight through that put another leg on top of that and then gently bend and flex that cut that ankle until you feel like it starts to shear free now if you have a friend lying around they can definitely put some pressure through this and make it and take it to an extra level as well obviously don't be silly when you do that but just go hunting up towards the back of the knee up and around for all the areas that feel restricted and then when you stand up and walk around again you should feel like there's instantaneously more freedom there it shouldn't feel as tight and hopefully the pain and any symptoms associated with that have reduced to a certain degree so as i always say in the channel please hold me to this if you don't see an immediate improvement in some way with those exercises and we're not just talking about pain but an immediate improvement in how mobile and free you are after doing those exercises you probably haven't made a change so we need to figure out what's going wrong there you deserve to see a change every single time you do these two exercises and any exercise to be fair so the other two exercises that are great to feed some slack into the back of the knee hopefully take some of the symptomatic pain and discomfort out of that back assist but moving on to potentially the more important part of this conversation as to why that bank assist is there in the first place why is that meniscus not happy what's going on with the way that you're loading that knee that's a problem and from what i find clinically personally this is going to sound a little bit strange but often there's too much unwanted rotation in the system so what i mean by that is with the knee the knee is basically a hinge joint where in a perfect world there is some subtle rotation that happens when it's sort of locking and unlocking at end range but in an ideal world a stable knee acts like a hinge joint where it bends backwards and forwards however if you have some restriction below your knee at your ankle and some restriction above your knee at the hip when you're moving in a linear plane it reduces your movement options so if you need to for example when you're walking if you need to take a step but what you find is when you try and take a step you don't have enough range of motion at the front of your hip to extend then what your body will do is it will essentially move around that and rotate around that to complete the task on your behalf the same thing happens at your anchor we've discussed this a lot on the channel before is that if you're trying to bend your knee up and down then essentially what will happen is if you run out of that range of motion before you should then your body has to find a way around that to keep going we can remove some of the restrictions at the ankle and at the front of the hip that will force your leg to rotate more than it should creates that rotational shearing at the knee in ways that it's not designed to handle then we can take the pressure off that meniscus and the consequence of that the the compensation starts to decrease with that bank assist so again if you want to get rid of the vaca cis symptoms at the back of the knee not only do we have to look what's going on at the front of the knee but look at what's going on with the rest of the leg improve the way you're loading that knee so it has a chance to settle down long term one of the best ways that i've ever seen to free up an ankle joint quickly is the banded ankle stretch if you can grab a band attach it to something that's not going to move behind you so again i really like having the band above the ankle joint when we're in the position i'm about to show you i find that gives me better access and my patients better access to capsular stiffness at the back of the ankle joint which is where most of that restriction tends to be but you see a lot of people have the band below the ankle joint again test both out but i'm confident that above the ankle joint even though it's a little bit counterintuitive seems to get the best results at the end of the day that's what we're after so what we want to get you to do take a big step out as far as you feel comfortable be very respectful for how your knee feels obviously we want to work within that take your hips past your foot and then gently bend your back ankle as far as you feel comfortable making sure that when you do this that you're not dumping inwards to go around that restriction so make sure that your knee stays out you may not go as far as what you could if you dumped inwards but try and respect the integrity of the ankle joint and the knee hold this position you should feel like there's a really nice stretch going on at the base of the ankle in a way that you probably haven't felt before hang it here for a minute or two as much time as you feel comfortable and you should feel like it genuinely makes a difference in terms of how you're loading up that knee and again what that gives you is it gives your ankle more movement options so that it's not forcing you to dump inwards and create that unwanted rotation at the knee setting that meniscus and the bank assist up to fail now as we were saying before and we can also see that there's a restriction for a lot of people at the front of that's that hip so again if you spend a lot of time sitting that anterior hip capsule or the hip flexors at the front of the hip can tend to get quite tight and again as i said when you're walking and trying to extend that leg it doesn't allow you to extend in a sagittal or a front in a in a linear plane so it then forces you to rotate around that creating a lot more rotation at the knee so again the best way that i've ever seen to decrease restrictions at the front of the hip is with the couch stretch so please if you haven't done this before if you have a bake assist this might be a very hard exercise to do initially so don't do this on the floor like i'm about to do this on a chair it's much easier it's much safer it's much more comfortable for you but i'll show you it here for the purposes of this exercise and this stretch gets you to place your knee into the back corner of a wall or the back of a chair so if this is the seat of a chair where it meets the back of the chair put it into the back corner of that chair with your legs straight up now the other leg needs to come up now this is what's uncomfortable for a lot of people so if you're up on a chair so if my knee was up here for example this would be much more comfortable for you now we want to get you to start in this position first where you're more sort of horizontal compared to vertical and just press your hip to the ground see if you can find some tightness at the front of that hip see if you can sort of scour around see what's stopping you like we did with the calf stretch against the wall it's not good enough to stay here when we're doing a muscular stretch it's a little bit different with a banded stretch when you're focusing on the capsular restrictions but wherever this feels tight i'll get you to squeeze your butt cheek again and then push your knee down into the ground really try and activate this muscular tightness that you're trying to open up hold that for a few seconds then relax see if you can push that hip a little bit further once you've had enough of that the second part of this exercise requires us to come up into as much of an upright position as possible you'll feel a horrible tightness at the front of the hips potentially down the front of the thighs as well so just come up to the the angle that you feel very safe and comfortable for some people it'll be here other people who are here you can get all the way up to the wall that's fantastic again you can play around with where your hips are in this position but we need to go hunting for and remove any of that restriction to the front of the hips down to the front of the thigh it's going to be acting a is a handbrake on that knee it's going to be pulling a lot of sort of tension in through that knee loading up that meniscus differently but again forcing your leg to potentially rotate more than it's designed for and sacrificing that meniscus so same thing with the first part of this stretch wherever it feels tight try and tense that up you might have to push your foot back into the wall from your knee do whatever you need to do to tense up that muscular tightness hold this for a few seconds relax you better go a little bit further again i urge you to take this one easy you genuinely might have to start more horizontally to begin with just gently work your way up to this over time but what you'll find is it should instantly make the front of that hip feel looser be able to walk better run a bit better it'd be a significant improvement to the function of your overall leg you've got to stop thinking about a baker's cyst as a baker's cyst and think of it as the part of your leg that isn't enjoying how the rest of your leg is functioning that's the thing that's sore and uncomfortable maybe because the meniscus is an issue but that meniscus should not be should not be an issue if everything's functioning fantastically well above and below that so i hope that was really helpful please let me know down below how you find that bake assist is going specifically with these exercises as well once you start to remove some of those hand breaks above and below the knee over the next few days the next few weeks you should feel like things are moving better and i'm hopeful that your symptoms are going to start to settle down relatively quickly so let me know how you go with that going forwards but with that being said thanks for watching hope it helps and we'll see you soon bye

Channel: Your Wellness Nerd

Views: 120,792

Keywords: bakers cyst, bakers cyst knee, bakers cyst treatment, bakers cyst pain, bakers cyst injection, bakers cyst aspiration, bakers cysts behind knees, bakers cyst stretches, bakers cyst cause, bakers cyst drainage, bakers cyst fluid drainage, bakers cyst behind knee, bakers cyst behind knee treatment, posterior knee pain, bakers cyst exercises at home, exercises for bakers cyst back of knee, baker’s cyst, bakers cyst rehab, bakers cyst physio, baker cyst, popliteal cyst

Id: ZscPvYBue7c

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021