3 Expert Recommended Knee Pain Stretches

Are you suffering from stiffness in your knee? Stiffness that doesn’t let your knee bend or straighten all the way? I’m going to cover with you today, the top three stretches that you can do for your knee to increase motion. These stretches are kind of basic. And they might seem like they are pretty straightforward. But there are some small details that you need to pay attention to, to make sure that you are not going to make your knee worse by doing these typical stretches that you find all over the internet.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh, I’m a specialist physical therapist over at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. I’ve got Kevin here with me, he is a physical therapy student. I’ve been helping people with knee problems for years. And one of the biggest issues is not having enough motion, especially if there is swelling involved. It could be from a meniscus issue, or from a ligament problem. There are all kinds of reasons that a knee will swell or lose motion. Another one is arthritis.

Those are common issues that don’t allow you to bend your knee, and if that knee isn’t bending or straightening all the way, it’s going to end up getting weaker really quickly. And walking is going to change, it ends up hurting your ankle, your hip, your back, or the other leg can often get affected as well. Which is why it’s important that you have full range of motion, with both bending and straightening out your knee at all times.

But let’s get into the top three stretches.

I’m going to give you two versions of the first two stretches, because one might be better for you if you are really stiff and just don’t have a lot of motion. And the other might be better for you if you are not that stiff, you actually have a good amount of motion, but you are just missing a bit of motion.

Let’s pretend you don’t have a lot of motion and you want to increase how far you can bend your knee. Kevin is going to demonstrate here, all you are going to do is sit somewhere where your butt is up against the edge of the seat. Kevin is on our treatment table here, this is going to be higher than a typical chair, but you can get on a regular chair. It just might be a little bit more intensive a stretch. Then what you are going to do is, let’s pretend Kevin has an issue on the left foot, you simply slide that foot back up until you have a stretch intensity in that knee, on a scale of 0 to 10 of about a three, no need to pass a three.

The reason for that is, because once you start stretching into a four or five, or in other words of doing mild stretch like Kevin is doing here. But once you get into a moderate, or more severe stretch, you actually can contract the muscle inadvertently. There are little cells within the muscles and tendons in your leg that detect an overstretch sensation, and they cause parts of the muscle to begin to contract. Which is bad because then you might end up stretching your ligaments and your tendons, and that’s not something that can be easily fixed. That can make the problem worse.

It’s better to do a light stretch or on that 0 to 10 scale, where you don’t feel much of a stretch, hanging out at about a three or less. Hang out there for about 30 seconds. I suggest you do this stretch three times in a row, with a little break every 30 seconds at most. You wouldn’t need to do this stretch for more than a few minutes, you get something called diminishing returns, that’s with all these stretches. You don’t need to hold it for longer than about 30 seconds to a minute, because you won’t gain that much more flexibility by hanging out there longer.

After 30 seconds, you just slide your foot out, give it a little break a second or two. If you need more, you can take more. It shouldn’t have been aggressive anyway, so you shouldn’t feel like you need a long break. And then you would just go again, go slide your foot back and you should feel some light stretching in your knee, might be on the back of the knee. If you have a lot of swelling. It tends to feel painful on the back of the knee. You are tight on the back of the knee and also on the front and sides of the knee.

Let’s do version two, this exercise go and lie down on your back. Let’s pretend your knee can bend quite a bit. What you want to do then is lie down and slide your foot up, go ahead and bring that leg up on the left or the right. And go as far as you can. Hold it there using the muscles within your leg. And you don’t want to apply pressure, or some people will tie up a belt or get a towel, or there are specific stretching straps and tools that you can use to really increase the bend.

But if you go into that more aggressive stretch, remember, you might actually stretch the wrong things because you want to get the muscles to relax. So, you are going to hold the contraction here. Your hamstring is working to create a light stretch for about 10-20 seconds, and if you can endure 30 seconds, go for it. Then you just put it out and relax and stretch. Stretch it out.

Then whenever you are ready, go again, go ahead and bend it up. And you are holding your leg with the muscles in the leg in the position to create a stretch, and then put it out. And you would do this 10 times in a row. Usually holding for 10 seconds, doing it 10 times in a row is a pretty good place to start.

But if you find that you keep increasing the motion, you can do a little bit more, but you will hit that level where you get the diminishing returns, you don’t get that much more stretch for doing extra reps.

So, let’s go into the second stretch. This one is to increase how much your knee goes down how much it straightens out. Let’s pretend that you have some pretty good motion here. Then you want to do it seated. All you would do is find that chair again, sit on the edge and then straighten out your leg and put your heel down. Let gravity just take over at first. Just let the knee kind of fall.

If your knee is stuck, it’s going to look like this. And then what you want to do is a combination of contracting your thigh muscle lightly, because remember, we are only going to get to a three at intensity, keep it mild. You are pushing down using your muscles. And then you are going to give it just a bit of overpressure with your hands. But don’t press on the kneecap. Kevin’s kneecap is about right here. So, he’s just above it. Yep, there are the edge of it.

If you press on the kneecap, especially if you have an arthritis issue or some sort of cartilage problem within the knee, it is not going to be comfortable. This is how people often mess this stretch up and make their knee problem worse. So, you would hold this for anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds, and then back off. It shouldn’t be aggressive, it should just feel like you got to stretch the muscle to work a bit here in the front of the thigh.

You can do that repeatedly for up to a few minutes. I would do two or three minutes, literally. Do that one more time there Kevin, just to show everybody. So, he’s contracting his thigh muscle, the quad on the front, right here. And then just a little bit of over pressure, hand over hand, above the kneecap, and just hold there for a bit 10 to 30 seconds.

Now, if you don’t have that much motion, if your knee is stuck, say more like this, it’s not going to be as effective for you, so you don’t have to lie down. So let’s get you to do that here, Kevin. Here’s version two of this extension exercise, you don’t want to I’m sorry, I said lie down. You don’t want to sit up and bend the leg that you are not stretching if you can, if it’s not involved. And then this leg, it’s probably going to be kind of bent, so you can bend this one up too.

Then what you are going to do is very similar, same thing, just lean into it and try to work this muscle, contract this muscle and add a little stretch to it. It’s just a modified version of the one that he did hanging off the edge of the seat here. Same exact setup. Hold it for 10 to 20 or 30 seconds and repeat over the course of two or three minutes. And it should be mild.

But let me show you the third knee stretch. Now this one doesn’t look like a nice stretch exactly, it’s kind of an indirect stretch, but it makes a massive difference in improving the mobility, because you are using muscles to set up a healing environment within the knee. Here we are going to actually do an exercise, but you are going to feel the stretch in it.

Lie down on your back and do a bridge. Where Kevin is going to feel a stretch, and where you are going to feel a stretch at home, if you are doing this is going to be on the front of the thighs. Anywhere from the front of the hip all the way down to the top of the knee, on the front and anywhere in between. What I want you to do though, is use the buttock muscles, the gluteus muscles.

Before anything happens, what I want you to do is to squeeze those muscles back there and not lifting at all yet. You are just squeezing those muscles because then you force those glutes to control the motion. What I want you to do is begin to lift your bottom, while still squeezing those muscles up to the point where you feel that two or three out of 10 stretch on the hips. And you get a hold there for 10 seconds. And let’s do this about 10 times or two or three minutes worth.

I’d say 10 second hold 10 times but it usually takes people anywhere from two to three minutes to do them with a short break in between each rep. So we’re going to come down there and feel a little bit of a stretch on the front. Now what I’m going to have Kevin do is show you an incorrect version of this. So go ahead and squeeze the buttocks and lift up as high as you can.

He has the ability to come up quite high but you bet he’s getting a big stretch on the quads, you are going to come back down, that is going to potentially set off those reflexes, those cells within the muscles and tendons that caused the thigh muscle to contract and eventually begin to stretch out the tendons and ligaments. You don’t want that. That’s going to create a worse knee problem in the future.

Instead, we are going to do this the light version of it where you are squeezing your buttocks, and then lifting up just enough to get a mild stretch in the quads. And this will create more knee bending as you get stronger in the buttocks and create a gentle stretch on the quad muscles here.

Now, all these exercises, if you have a big knee restriction, your knee just doesn’t bend or straighten all the way I would look to do the second of these three exercises at least once every couple of hours until your knee starts bending more. If you have a swelling issue or an arthritic knee condition, typically it’s a process to cure that problem for the long term so that you are not having to get a surgery, to rely on injections or pain medications. This is just going to be the first step in heading in that direction.

I recommend that you seek out a specialist in helping you with a knee problem. Or make sure that you begin to research and find what needs to happen next for you. If you are interested in hiring us to help you with your knee problem, you can hit the cost and availability button right up here on the menu bar, and leave us your details. One of my staff will reach out to you and we want to hear all about any problems so that we can make sure that we’re the best people to help you with it. I hope we can be a part of your success story real soon. Have a great day.

 

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