Don’t Make This Common Mistake After Meniscus Surgery: 3 Forgotten Exercises

Meniscus surgery often leaves your leg muscles very weak, recovering strength and mobility is the most important thing right after surgery. But are you doing the right exercises? Are you activating the correct muscles, sometimes even trained healthcare professionals might have you do exercises that hurt your knee more.

In this video I will teach you about a common mistake people make right after meniscus surgery and three exercises frequently forgotten, right after having a meniscus surgery. So here’s the big mistake.

People forget to strengthen their glute muscles and even healthcare professionals forget to have their patients strengthen their glute muscles, see all the focus goes straight to strengthening the quad muscles on the front of the thigh. And what you need to understand about the quad muscles.

Here’s the leg, the quad muscles are on the front of the thigh right here and they attach to the kneecap then that kneecap attaches down to the shin bone. And if the quad muscles get very strong, then they’ll start to pull the shin bone up into the thigh bone and further injure the meniscus.

So strengthening the quad muscles is not a good idea long term. Now right after surgery, it’s very likely that your quad muscles kind of shut down, they don’t work normally like they did before surgery, you may not be able to activate them and engage them like you used to. So if that’s the case for you, then you should be activating your quad muscles right after surgery just for a short time.

Once you feel like your quad muscles are activating normally, you can get them to turn on and turn off. Even if they’re weak, even if they’re not as big as the other side. Or as big as they used to be before surgery that will come. What’s important is that you can activate the quad muscles. Once that’s happening, then your focus needs to shift over to the glute muscles up in the back of the hip.

The mistake is that people often focus on the quad muscles long after they’ve already activated and they’re chasing trying to get symmetry trying to get the sit in the right side looking like the left side of the surgical side looking like the non surgical side. And what you have to understand is that the quads are often a vanity muscle. In other words, it looks good.

It’s the muscle that people pull up their shorts in front of the mirror and take a picture for social media. Or it’s just a pretty lucky muscle in many cases. But it’s not the best thing for your long term meniscus health to get very strong quad muscles, it’s actually better to get glute muscles and hey, glute muscles are a vanity muscle two wouldn’t be a bad idea to strengthen those.

The thing is you’re looking down at your knee and the quad muscles right above it. And at first, I thought it makes sense to strengthen the quad muscles since they attach to the knee directly. But it actually ends up causing more compression. And that’s bad for your meniscus and other parts of your knee to your kneecap.

It sets up osteoarthritis, it causes so many problems when you have overly dominant quad muscles. And simultaneously you have weak glute muscles and maybe even glute muscles that don’t activate. Which leads me to my next thing. I’m going to show you three exercises to get your glutes working better.

And the first one is just a glute activation exercises because chances are you haven’t even been activating your glutes you’re not even able to and that’s what led to you getting a meniscus tear in the first place. Here’s the first exercise you need to just turn on your glute muscles and get them to work. All I need you to do is sit down somewhere comfortable.

Usually a firm surface works well if you’re sitting in a really soft couch, you may not be able to do this as easily, then you’re going to just tighten up your buttock muscles, get them to clench or tighten up and hold it for 10 seconds and take note of what else is activating Are you also activating your thigh muscles.

Because if that’s the case, that means that your muscles in your legs are wired, you’ve trained your muscles you’ve gotten the muscle memory to try to activate your quads every time your glute muscles try to kick in.

And your goal needs to be in this exercise to just tighten up your glute muscles without also firing your thigh muscles or any other muscles in your thigh, not just your quads, but it could be your groin muscles right here on the inside of your thighs or your hamstrings in the back of your thighs. You want to relax your entire thigh muscles while you just tighten up your glute muscles.

Now it helps to open up your knees, open up your legs, spread your feet apart and try to tighten up your glutes from this position. And it’s not enough to just tighten them and relax tie them in relax you need to hold because when you hold the challenges you to relax your other muscles, you’re going to want to kick in all the five muscles, but you have to keep them relaxed. So tighten the glutes.

Hold it for 10 seconds for 5, 8, 9, 10 and then relax and play with the position of your legs. Do it again. You’re going to go for 10 times on doing this exercise and the focus is on making sure that you don’t use your quads your thigh muscles very much.

Now some people do this better in standing. So you could do the same thing. Just stand up, I’m going to give you my side view here, keep the thigh muscles relaxed, then try to tighten up the glutes without tightening up the thighs. And you should feel that these glute muscles begin to tire out or begin to burn a little bit like you’re exercising them.

That’s a good sign, that means that you’re, you’re doing the right thing, you should feel fairly relaxing your thigh muscles. In fact, if you bend your knees slightly, it tends to take your thigh muscles out of it. And the third option for you is to do this lying down on your back just like this. You could keep your legs straight or your knees bent, it doesn’t matter.

One way might work better for you than the other, I’m going to try with my legs straight. And then just tighten up your glutes from right here without using your quad muscles without using your thigh muscles. I say thigh muscles and I really mean the entire thigh but the groin, the hamstrings, the back of the thighs.

But the quad muscles tend to be the main one that people over engage, they’re over dominant and it’s in the direct position to put most pressure on the meniscus and the other parts of the knee joint. So you’re going to hold it for 10 seconds, after 10 seconds relax, and you need to be doing this hourly. If you have not been able to fire your glutes very well.

Then they’re shut down and it’s not enough to just tighten up your glutes once a day, twice a day for a few reps. You need to be doing this very frequently until you can get conscious control over your buttock muscles and make them fire appropriately whenever you need them to. And that’ll lead me to the next exercise.

Once you feel like you’ve been able to contract your glutes well, then you’ve got to be able to use the glutes in normal exercises. So the first one is a bridge in this position here with the knees bent, flatten your back out, then tighten up the buttock muscles. And before you even lift up like you wouldn’t abridge, you need to make sure that you’re not using your thigh muscles here your quad muscles.

If you feel like you are, then hang out here and go to the mental exercise of trying to not use your thigh muscles, relax, flatten out your back, tighten up your glutes, do it to a lesser intensity, don’t go 100% Because that’ll make your thigh muscles work, go 50% or even 10%. Try opening up your feet, open up your knees just like we did in sitting, opening up your legs tends to make your glutes work better. So back flat, but tight.

Once you feel like you’re using your glutes pretty well, they’re starting to burn. Now only then can you start to lift up your hips. Just like that. Once you’re starting to lift up your hips, there comes a point where you’re going to feel a stretch or maybe even the thigh muscles right here working. If you feel that back off, you’ve gone too far and start the reps over again.

But only go as far as you can without the thigh muscles tightening up or working. So back flat buttons tight. Then lift up by muscles are good right here, I’m going to hold here now. So on the bridge, you got to hold it for 10 seconds just like the other exercises because now you’re working on holding it for activation like we did before, but also strengthening it because you’re putting it you’re putting the glutes in a position where they have to hold against gravity, before they were just holding that really against gravity or lifting anything. But now you’re lifting your hips. It’s not your full body weight.

But still it’s worked for your glutes, you should feel your glutes start to burn a lot quicker here than in any of the other activation exercises that we did before. Now, let me tell you about the reps on these last two exercises. So for the glute activation exercises, where you’re just trying to get your glutes working, you want to do about 10 second holds 10 reps every hour while you’re awake, it needs to be that frequency that you get those glute muscles activating properly.

Now when you’re under the bridges need to shoot for 50 to 100 reps daily. If you can do more without hurting your knees without hurting your glutes without overdoing it somehow making sure that it feels good for you, then great, it’s okay to get started just doing five or 10 reps a day. If that’s all you can tolerate before something starts to hurt.

It’s a good thing to fire your glutes, but it’s not a good thing to fire glutes and cause pain somehow, oftentimes my patients they get success with hitting about 50 to 70 reps a day. And they’ll do sets of 10. So they’ll do 10 First thing in the morning 10 A little bit later 1010 10 here, and then they get to 70 reps and we’ll get to 100 or more and they get pretty strong in their glutes, then they’re ready for the next level, which let me go into that next.

And the third exercise I want to explain to you here is glute biased walking. And what that means is that you’re using your glutes, you’re biasing your glutes while you’re walking. And the way this looks is every step you take, you should activate your glutes on the side that you’re putting your weight on.

So if I’m going to step over with my right leg right here and I’m putting pressure through my right foot. As I lean onto my leg, my right glute should activate. This requires you activating your glutes well and being able to fire them on command, you see where I’m going with this after you put weight on this leg and you’re going to shift over to the left leg, now your left glutes going to kick in, and your right was going to relax.

And this is how you should be walking alternating glute contractions as you alternate your steps. So I’m stepping on my right leg right here, right glute kicks in. Left leg, left glute kicks in, right foot, right glute kicks in, left foot, left glute kicks in, and so forth. This needs to be the way that you walk always.

And I don’t mean just going on a walk around the park or if you hit the grocery store, you’re walking with your glutes like this. I mean, you should get out of bed in the morning, and your first trip to the bathroom or the kitchen or wherever you whatever you do in the morning, you should be thinking Glute, Glute, Glute, Glute, every step you take, because when you do that, it takes the pressure off your meniscus and it trains your body to always use your glutes rather than your quads, which is going to depressurize your meniscus for the long term.

This is what keeps you healthy, so that you’re not having a second meniscus tear, possibly a second meniscus surgery. And more importantly, you’re not developing osteoarthritis because that’s what a lot of people run into, if they don’t manage their meniscus problems early on.

Hey, if you’re looking for more help with getting the right exercises after your meniscus surgery if you’ve been having knee pain, and it’s been many months since your meniscus surgery like four or five, six months or more, then I want to let you know about our meniscus recovery program.

It’s a 100% online comprehensive program that teaches you how to fix this muscle imbalance that causes the quads to activate too much and other thigh muscles. And it teaches you how to get your glutes to activate better in a step by step process. It’s all guided by me. You can learn more about this meniscus recovery program in the description below. There’s a link there for you.

We’ve also got a playlist of all our meniscus help videos down in the description to go check that out. Hey, If this video has been helpful for you, please give it a thumbs up and please share this with somebody that you think needs to hear this. Thanks so much for watching and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye