How Lunges Can Help Knee Pain
Are you looking to do lunges to help out your knee pain problem? In today’s video, I’m going to explain how ledges can really help some situations with knee pain. And at the same time, they can hurt other situations with knee pain.
My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist that’ll pass so manual physical therapy. This channel is focused on creating videos to help people stay healthy, active and mobile. while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and medications. Be sure to subscribe and turn on your notifications, so you can catch the videos we release each week to help you out with your health.
The focus of this video is to help you decide whether or not you should pursue doing lunges to help you fix your knee problem. If you’re looking for a video on how to do lunges properly, this video is not that but I’ve linked a video where we do talk about that, and it’s down in the description below. And let’s just talk about a lens a little bit a lens, you know, you put one foot up one foot back, and then you’re dipping your knee down.
A lunge is basically a squat, but with one leg up one leg back and you’re putting your weight you’re distributing your weight differently. If on a squat, you’re distributing your weight evenly between both legs 5050 on the lunge, you’re likely going to put a little bit more weight on one foot, it could be the front foot or it could be the back the back foot. Depending on how you like to stand and how you’d like to perform your lunges.
It’s almost like doing the single leg squat. But with one leg down for some balance and supports that you’re not doing all your weight on that one leg, you’re taking off some of the weight. So it’s more like a 60-40 or 70-30, or some variation like that some percentage where you do put more weight on one leg.
Now, if you look at it that way, then that leg that you’re putting more weight on needs to be quite strong in order for you to effectively bend your knee and bend your hip and support your ankle and foot and then bring you back up out of that bent position. So technically, to do lunges, right, your legs have got to be stronger than they would need to be if you were just doing squats.
If you’ve had trouble doing squats in the past, if you’ve run into knee pain or back pain or pain somehow with doing squats, then chances are lunges are not going to be for you at this time. But most of the time people have pain in their knees, because of muscle imbalances. And just to briefly explain that a muscle balance is simply when there’s muscles on one side of the leg that are stronger than on the other side.
For instance, on the on the front of the leg is the most common imbalance the quads, the muscles in the front of the thigh are stronger than the muscles in the back of the thigh and the hip, the hamstrings in the hip flexors.
Now, they don’t have to be equally strong, but they should be in the proper ratio so that the muscles are in balance. And the pressures that are going to be created inside the knee joint are normal for what the knee joint is supposed to take.
Because when you go to bend that knee during the lunge or a squat, or any sort of motion, where you bend like that, you want the pressures to be normalized so that the cartilage within your knee, the meniscus, the ligaments, all the structures, all the tissues inside the knee can operate the way that they’re designed to without becoming irritated or inflamed over time, and then causing chronic injuries or chronic situations, of course, like arthritis, or patellofemoral pain syndrome or degenerated cartilage.
If you’ve got a muscle imbalance, and you’ve been having some knee pain, then I need you to think about your knee pain this way. Is it more on the mild side on the moderate side or possibly more on the severe side. And the way that you can define this is if you’re more on the mild side, then your knee pain probably isn’t going to be constant, it’s probably more likely it comes and goes it’s not there every day, certain things might set it off.
But you can do other things that your needs don’t really bother you on, there’s generally nothing that you can’t do because of your needs. It’s more so you run into some pain here and there or you have some delayed pain later on after you’ve done some activity. But you should be able to do everything that you normally can.
That would mean that you’ve got mild knee pain. If you’re more on the moderate to severe side of knee pain, then you’re going to have pain that’s more consistent. Maybe it happens every day.
Maybe it’s even constant throughout the day and even at night maybe even wakes you up at night, that would be definitely a more severe situation. In a moderate case, there’s usually an activity or two that you just avoid doing or you know that you’re going to pay for it.
If you do it like going up and down stairs, or exercise. In a severe situation. You’re probably limping, you’re probably completely avoiding several things not just going up and down stairs, but maybe even walking being on your feet too long, can set off the knee problem that would be definitely a more severe irritation level of your knee problem.
If you’re more on the moderate to severe side of knee pain, then lunges are probably going to worsen it even more. I mean, think about it, you’re having trouble going up and down stairs if you can exercise and you decide to go do lunges, which are a harder version of squats. It’s just going to make it worse. If you’re more on the mild side, then it could help you out because it might allow you to strengthen the muscles that you need strong.
In order to get out of knee pain and be able to prevent it from coming back. Let me give you two things that you can test on yourself two things to look for. To get a little more clear on whether or not to do lunges to help your knees. The first thing is try doing 10 lunges on each leg. Just however you do lunges, you know, you can look at the other videos that we have in the description below.
If you want to learn how to do lunges just right, but just the way that you typically do lunges doing right now is put one foot forward and one foot back and start going up and down just on one side and then switch into the other side. And if it hurts, don’t keep going just do what you can, you know a little bit of pain might be okay, as long as it’s not biting your you know that you’re not going to pay for a lot the next day.
If you can do 10 lunges, and the pain isn’t too bad and you don’t think that it’s going to make you worse, then that’s a good thing that’s a that’s a good, there’s a good chance that you can continue to do some lunges as part of your workout routine that wouldn’t make it the main thing. But you can include some lunges in your workout routine, so that you can get your muscles stronger and help out your knee.
Now the second thing is if you need to do this, again, do the ledgers again, see if you can get your butt muscles to work during the lunch. Because the butt muscles are the main muscle that you should be using in order to perform the lunge motion. And if you can, if you can feel your butt muscles working, even if other muscles are working a bit harder.
If you can get your butt muscles to work, then there’s potential to make it work more so that it can help your knee more. Because a big key to helping knee problems is getting muscles in the butt area stronger. And if you can’t use those butt muscles on a lunge, then you’re going to run into some problems, your knee is going to get worse.
Because you’re going to be using other muscles that throw you into an imbalance and increase the pressures at the knee joint and start to irritate the tissues, the cartilage and meniscus, the ligaments, all those things that I mentioned earlier, maybe keep doing that over time, it’s just a matter of before.
It’s just a matter of time before something gets torn or so irritated, arthritic, you’re just going to run into issues. So if you can do these lunges, with little to no pain, and you can activate your glute muscles, your butt muscles, then you’ve got an excellent shot at being able to use lunges in your workout routine to help your knee pain. And you probably have mild knee pain in that case.
Now let’s use common sense if you had knee pain consistently on those lunges, and you really couldn’t feel your glutes working, you couldn’t get them to work. Or if you’re not sure if they worked or not. That happens a lot of times people are like, well, I think it’s working but I’m not.
I don’t really feel it. I’m kind of confused, I err on the side of it, they’re not working, you should be very certain that your buttock muscles are working, you should be able to feel it with your hand back there, you should feel the muscle burning after you do so many reps.
If you don’t get that sense that you can feel the muscle tightening up. Whether you’re feeling it with your brain, you know with thinking about it or feeling it with your hand outside on your butt, then you’re probably not using your butt muscles correctly and it’s going to make you worse. If you do lunges to exercise lunges should feel good on your knees.
If you have any problem and you go do lunges as part of your workout, you generally should not feel worse in your knees, you should not be paying for it the next day, you should feel like you tired out the right muscles, and your knees should be happy to do it. You shouldn’t have any after Effects besides being tired in your muscles.
Hey, if you’re looking for some professional help, if you’ve tried lunges before and you’ve thought I’m getting mixed results, if you’re confused on which which exercises you need to specifically do, we can help you out. I want to invite you to apply for a discovery visit just scroll to the bottom of this page and you’ll see a button on there that says request a discovery visit.
Click on that button and you’ll see a form that pops up that pops up that asks you for all your details. enter your details in there and you’ll be able to apply for a discovery visit which is a 20 minute appointment with a specialist physical therapist it can be virtual or in person.
And at that appointment, we’ll hear all the details about your knee problem so that we can help you form a diagnosis about your knee issue and make a plan for getting a better will by hand check out your knee we’ll check out other parts of the body that could be contributing to the knee issue like the hip, the foot the back and give you a thorough diagnosis, a good explanation for what’s going on.
And we’ll tell you what you should be doing and what you should be avoiding for your specific knee problem. And if it’s right for you to become our patient, we’ll invite you to become our patient and begin kick off the treatment plants that you can get this neat issue resolved and avoid having to take medications having to get injections and definitely avoid having to have some unnecessary surgery in the future.
Just leave us your details on that form. One of my staff will call you back as fast as possible and let you know the next steps. Thank you so much and I hope that we can be a part of your success story real soon. Bye.
