Knee pain exercises

In the above video, Anthony from Physio K runs you through a couple of exercises that are great if you're suffering from any knee pain or knee tightness.

1. Hamstring stretch

For this stretch, you're going to sit on the floor, ideally on a mat. Start by straightening one leg and bending the other one and letting that fall down directly to your side. Now slowly, you're going to crawl your fingers along the front of your shin, until you reach your toes. If you can't reach your toes, don't worry about it, working your way there nice and slowly is the important thing. We don't want to put you under too much pain at the start of these ones, this should be a nice stretch as you go throughout. Now once you're in this position, we'll get you to hold it for 30 seconds and you're going to repeat that three times.

2. Hip flexor stretch

For this one, get into a lunge position. It's important to remember to keep a nice 90 degree angle at your knee. Now what you want to do from this position is rotate your pelvis backwards. You're imagining tucking a tail between your legs, then you're going to tense up your glutes, shifting forward just a little bit. The next step is to cross your arms across your chest, reaching for your opposite shoulders and then you're going to rotate slowly about 10 degrees to your left, holding there. We're looking for a 30 second hold and we're going to repeat this one three times.

3 . Calf stretch.

To start off with this exercise, we're going to have you standing in front of a wall, placing both of your hands up against the wall. The next thing you're going to do is extend your right leg back and bend your left leg taking it closer to the wall, just slightly. Now we're going to bend that left knee forward whilst keeping that right leg extended. You should feel a nice stretch right through the back of the calf. For this exercise, you're going to hold for 30 seconds and you're going to repeat that three times.

The second part of this exercise is in a very similar position, you're just going to bring your right leg forward just a tad more and you're going to bend your right knee. As you do this, squatting down through both of your legs at the same time. Whilst performing these exercises, we want to make sure that your heel stays in contact with the ground at all times, and we're looking at holding this for 30 seconds and repeating three times.

4. Quad stretch

Stand up and grab your left ankle with your left hand and gently pull that back up towards your hips. Now from this position here, we want to make sure that your leg is in line with the other leg and we want to stop the pelvis from rotating forward by shifting it back just slightly, imagine you're tucking a tail between your legs as you do this. Finally for this exercise here, you're going to be holding for 30 seconds once more and you're going to repeat three times.

These are the four exercises that we recommend if you have any knee stiffness or pain. If you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out to us or come in for a clinic visit!