Everything You Need To Know About Knock Knees

Do you suffer from knock knees? I mean, when your knees are coming together like this, and you wish they were more straight like this? Well, I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about it today.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active, and mobile. while avoiding and unnecessary surgery, injections, and pain medications, please subscribe to our channel and turn on your notification bell so that you don’t miss any of the helpful videos we upload every single week.

It’s important for you to know that there’s two types of knock knees and you’re going to figure out today which one you have, let me just explain to you a bit how knock knees work on this picture. So in this picture on the right, the knees are coming in together. And oftentimes what happens is there can be pain associated with the knees.

Because of that the ankles can hurt, feet can hurt, hips can hurt, this can even cause lower back pain and many people. And ideally, we want your knees to be straight up and down. Whenever you go to stand. The problem is when those knees come in, it adds a lot of pressure to the knee joints, it tensions down at the ankles as well with the arches of the feet collapse.

That’s why you can get foot pain as well. And then it changes the position of your hips. And if that’s how you move in a walk every day, then your hips are going to eventually bother you and the hips are right below the lower back. So the lower back can become affected over time as well. So it’s important to make sure that your knees are healthy by not having knock knees, but not everybody can do it.

As you can see over here on this side of the chart, there’s two types of nominees, there’s genetic and acquired genetic means you’re born that way. And that’s just the way that you’re going to be indefinitely and there’s ways to manage it, you don’t have to have knee pain or all the pains that I talked about, you can still live a very normal life, even if you’ve gotten genetically bent, inwards, knees.

Now, if you’ve got acquired knock knees, that’s the other type right here, then you have an excellent shot at straightening out your knees tremendously, and there’s no reason your knees should be coming inwards together like that. And now if you’re younger, if you’re saying your 20s or younger or 30s, even, then you probably don’t have any arthritis built up.

Maybe you don’t have any injuries either. Some people have sports injuries from school are when they’re younger. But when you’re older, when you’re hitting 40s 50s 60s. And beyond these knock knee problems can set you up for some serious arthritis. So if you’ve got acquired knock knees, or genu valgus, as I wrote, that’s the medical term, then you valgus you need to make sure that you’re managing your knees so that you’re not getting worse the Arthritis over time and potentially needing some surgery like an ear replacement.

So here’s how to tell if you’ve got genetic versus acquired knock knees, all you got to do is find a comfortable place to sit down. And you’re going to look at your legs and just take one knee and you’re going to straighten it out all the way.

Make sure your kneecap is pointing straight forward. And when you straighten out your knee, if your leg looks pretty straight, you do not have genetic knock knees, you don’t have Junior valgus it’s actually genetic for you to be straight, have you straightened up like this in your lower leg kind of goes outwards like that. And then you do have a little bit of knock knees.

Now there’s varying degrees of this. In other words, some people have it a little bit, some people have it a lot. It just depends on your specific genetics. And typically, if it’s genetic, you’ve also got relatives like your parents or close relatives, maybe answer uncles or grandparents that also have knock knees and it kind of runs in the family.

Now let me just speak to how to manage this. If you’ve got acquired knock knees, and then we’ll talk about the genetic part of it. If you’ve got acquired knock knees, that means that you’ve got some weaknesses somewhere, either in the hip or the foot or the thigh muscles or some combination of those three spots that are causing your needle want to go inwards.

And you literally don’t have enough strength or control when you’re standing and moving around. To hold your legs straight. You’re so weak that your leg wants to cave in on one side or both sides. And just to show you this a bit more in detail. I’m going to stand up on the table so that you can see my foot and legs.

I’m pretty straight and obviously I’m a physical therapist. So I think about all this stuff all the time. But when I stand up straight, I do not have genu valgus or knock knees, my knees don’t do this bit here. But if your foot muscles are weak in your arch, then that causes your ankle to collapse. If both ankles collapse, you can see my knees want to come in words like that.

So having good foot strength, very important. Now if you don’t have good but strength, these muscles right here help to turn your leg outwards. So If they’re weak back here, then that’s also going to cause your thighs to turn inwards here, if your inner thigh muscles are too dominant and strong, also the quads, they get too dominant and strong. that promotes the bones of hearing your thighs, coming inwards as well.

So for acquired knock knees, you’ve got to work on your glute strength, you’ve got to work on your foot strength and make sure that you’re not too dominant in your quad muscles on the front of your thighs, as well as the inner thigh muscles, or the groin muscles. I’ll be putting out a video soon on what exercises to do to improve knock knees.

So stay tuned for that when Don’t forget to subscribe and turn on you notifications so that you don’t miss out on that video. Now let’s talk about genetic knock knees, if you’re just bent sideways, your lower legs go out below your knees, that’s okay, that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. That doesn’t mean you’re destined to have a knee problem or knee surgery later in life.

Even if your family members did if you got it running in the family and you had your dad or your grandma that had this issue and ended up having a knee surgery, you can still prevent it, what you need to know is that you’re probably not going to be a marathon runner, you’re probably not going to be somebody who’s doing any sort of endurance sport, because of the shape of your knees, you need to make sure to avoid endurance sports, the repetitive type.

Now you got to be careful about this. Because especially if you’ve got a heart condition, like if you’ve been told that you need to go walk for exercise or do something like that walking is okay, I’m talking, you know, short distance endurance, like within a couple of miles, maybe three miles at most, you should be able to do just fine, you can work up your strength so that your knees, feet, hips, ankles, and back don’t bother you more.

But if you’re talking about running 10 miles, being on a bike for hours on end, or swimming for a super long time, it can aggravate your knees, if you’re training for hours per day or per event that you’re doing, just like I showed you, the foot muscles, the hip muscles, the glutes, and then the muscles to get tight or short on the front of the thighs and on the inside of the thighs.

You’ve still got to worry about these muscles, you got to keep strong glutes you got to keep strong foot muscles because your knees already bent inwards. And if you don’t protect it from going even further inwards, you’re just asking for some sort of injury to develop over time. Or maybe all of a sudden, you just got less margin for error.

So you’ve got to make sure you keep great glute strength, great foot strength, it may be beneficial for you to use very supportive shoes and have a little bit of an art support. Don’t overdo it with art supports a little bit goes a long way. And then also make sure that your inner thigh muscles and your quads don’t get too active or too tight.

I once had a patient who had some decent knock knees, it wasn’t terrible. She was in her 50s she wanted to go start running five K’s and 10k races with her friend It was kind of a bucket list to eventually work her way up to running half marathons. And I told her you can if you want to, but you’re genetically not designed to.

I mean, she was shorter. She was just a thicker frame. She wasn’t a big person by any means she was five foot nothing but just a thicker frame. And that what I said is you’re built for weightlifting and activities that involve a lot of force. And that can see the light bulb go off in her head because she said I’m actually good at that I tend to do better with weightlifting actually enjoy it, I develop my strength pretty fast.

And I don’t really look forward to running a whole lot anyway, I said great, then it’s settled. If you feel like you can let go of this bucket list idea and tell your friend to stop bugging you to go wake up to go run in the morning so that you’re not having to ice your knees every day after your run.

Let it go. You’re just not built like a gazelle, like some of these people that when the Boston Marathon, those people do not have knock knees, they’re genetically designed to be able to tolerate running marathon distances and beyond.

So if you have knock knees and knee pain from it, there’s hope for you, you can fix the problem you you’ve got to figure out first if it’s genetic, or if it’s acquired. Either way, you should be able to improve quite a bit. After you’ve got to just a new one knee and not the other.

That’s a potential problem that you might need to see a doctor for, you might need to I would first try to fix the weaknesses that I talked about on the leg that is bending inwards, see how far you can get, and you might be able to manage just fine without having to rely on some procedure. But there are often cases where something needs to happen invasively you need to have a procedure done.

Or sometimes you can manage with shoes certain ways getting lifts and getting some proper support on one side, but it doesn’t tend to go well if you’ve got it on one side. And especially if you’re older and you’ve got arthritis on top of that, then you’re pretty well on the path to having a knee replacement someday.

And it actually might be a very good thing because if you can straight out straighten out your knee and then you know how to protect it from falling inwards again, then you’re in great shape for the rest of your life. Guys, I hope this video was helpful for you. Don’t forget to give us a thumbs up give us a like and also Subscribe to our channel so you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we upload every week. Have a wonderful day.