How To Do Lunges Without Knee Pain

Have you tried lunges to get your legs stronger, to help out with the knee pain? Have you tried different versions of lunges, and you find that you still keep flaring up your knees every time you try lunges, and you’re about ready to give up?

Well, hold on, I need you to try out what I’m going to show you this video today, with lunges, because it might actually completely fix your lunges, and make your knee problem better at the same time.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. I’m a specialist physical therapist and I’m the owner of El Paso manual physical therapy. And here in the clinic, we see people all the time with knee problems that have tried lunges and have just given up on them completely. They just don’t want to try lunges anymore. they’ve just written them off and don’t want to put them in any workout whatsoever.

And we tell them that’s okay If that’s you, but you might open up to doing lunges after we show you how to do them correctly so that you’re not making your knee problem worse, you’re not aggravating it, but you can make sure to use the right muscles so that it actually helps with the forces at the knee and heals your knee problem.

This is especially helpful if you’re dealing with knee cartilage issues, knee arthritis, IT band syndrome, patellofemoral Pain Syndrome, and much more knee problems. This channel is focused on making videos to keep people healthy, active and mobile while avoiding unnecessary surgery injections and medications.

So if you think that this is helpful for you, please subscribe and turn on the notifications so you can get notified every time I release a new helpful video for you. Now, the biggest cause of knee pain during lunges is overusing the quadricep muscles, the quads, and what should be happening instead is focusing on using the glute muscles, the butt muscles.

Now, there’s all kinds of different types of lunges, there’s tons of varieties out there, there’s probably some that I’ve never ever seen before. But I’m going to cover with you three basic lenses that are very commonly done. And in teaching you how to do these lunges correctly, you’ll get the concept here of how to use your glutes better and reduce using your quads.

And then you can adapt this to virtually any lens that you can think of any lens that you can find out there on the internet, or from a trainer or from a friend, you need to put this into your lines every single time you do any sort of exercise that has a naval engine.

Now there’s two key motions, whenever you’re doing a lunge, be sure to start by stepping with your toes out versus in outwards is going to set up your glutes to work better than as you lunge down, push that knee outwards and it should be firing your butt muscle.

These two motions pointing your toes outwards and pushing your knees out are really important to take the pressure off your quads and put it more sore your glutes just to show you on the skeleton here.

When you point your foot outwards, it tends to rotate the entire leg outwards, which shortens the butt muscles and puts it in a position where it wants to help you do the lunge better and it takes it off the quads, then the key thing is you got to make sure that you also keep the knee out because it is possible to let the knee go inwards despite your foot being outwards.

So take a look here when you step toes need to be out. And then as you drop your body into the lunge, make sure that knee comes out so that you force your butt muscles to you to work during the motion. This motion here is a frontline. So you’re stepping forward from words and you’re lunging into the motion or you’re dipping down making sure that knees out and the toe is out and the bud is out.

You can do a bunch of reps on one side and then switch sides or you can alternate whatever you want. But make sure when you step forward with your with your other foot, that toes pointed out a bit. And that knee goes outwards kind of over your foot whenever you come down. And you can see the wobble in the knee here.

You got to make sure you turn on the glutes, keep your balance when and make sure you force your glute muscles to work you should feel like your glute muscles are working. And you’ll feel your quads working too. But it should be less than if you weren’t put pointing your toes out and your glutes.

Let’s talk about how to do reverse lunge, you’re going to step backwards. But make sure that before you step, your toes are pointed outwards, to preset the glutes to fire. So whenever you’re going to step backwards, that front leg, the toes need to be outward and the knee needs to go outwards.

Every time you step back, make sure you’re letting your knee go out over your foot over the front of the foot or even over the outside of the foot. And then as you switch sides. Same thing with the other leg. This just takes some coordination, you got to be careful that you’re not going too low if you’re losing your balance and stand somewhere where you can keep your balance.

Now to do a walking lunge, which is one of the most common lunges, you got to combine all this together as you take steps forward, make sure your knees are out and you step with your toes out. Okay, let’s get on that.

So those are the three most commonly done lunges and that’s how you can implement this toe out knee out motion to it so that you drive your glutes Better. So as I said earlier, it’s possible to preset your foot outwards and try to drive the knee out but let the knees still fall in. And it might happen to a small degree that you may not notice when you’re doing the lunge.

But check this out. When you step into the lunge motion as you did, it is possible to shift your knee inwards and feel the quads work for just a brief moment, you’ve got to make sure you keep the knee out throughout the entire motion, this little inward motion it might be really subtle whenever you’re coming up out of a squat, it’s going to make you fire your quads. So you want to make sure that you are forcing that knee to stay out and not let it wobble in for any moments during your lunges.

Doing lunges this way allows you to primarily use your glutes and shut off the quads and you won’t completely shut off the quads. The quads have to work a bit to get you from a knee bent position to fully straighten out because they are what we call knee extensors, meaning it straightens out the knee.

But if you can shift from making it, the primary muscle that you’re using throughout the entire motion, to involving your glutes and making your glutes work more than what happens at the knee joint is because the quads come in and attached to the kneecap here, the kneecap attaches down here, you’ll reduce the excessive forces going through the knee.

Typically that’s what sets often the Arthritis of patellofemoral Pain Syndrome, tendinitis, the IT band, the runner’s knee issues, the meniscus tears right here. If there’s too much compressive forces, which commonly comes from those quad muscles, then that’s what sets up an injury. And it doesn’t happen the first time you do a lunge or even the 10th or 100th time you do a lunge.

It happens after you’ve been doing lunges for a while and appropriately. And you might say, well, this is the first time I’ve done lunges, but in reality, you do lunges all the time without knowing right every time you walk, it’s kind of like doing mini lunges.

If you go to squat to or kneel or do something like that you do lunges throughout your everyday normal motion without really realizing that you do it. And you may not do a full Outlander, you dip your whole body down, but you do some variation of a lunge in normal everyday movement. And if you’ve been using your quads all this time, then you’re going to mess up your knee, it’s just a matter of time.

This is why you have to use your glutes during this lunge motion. I’ve gotten patients here that have been told by other physical therapists by doctors, by orthopedic surgeons by fitness professionals like personal trainers that if they’ve got knee pain, they need to strengthen their quad muscles.

And this whole concept is just not well understood by people that don’t get the mechanics of the knee they just this is not their specialty physicians and surgeons are focused on medicine and doing surgery fixing things that are torn.

But when it comes to understanding the mechanics, the forces that are put through a knee joint, that’s what the orthopedic manual physical therapist is best at understanding and interpreting into everyday motions.

So take it from my expertise, I’m telling you, if you fire your glute muscles more during the lines, if you do that consistently, as long as it’s not hurting your need to do the lunch, then you’re going to be okay, it’s going to help any problem in the long run.

Now, there’s a couple of situations that are special where I might avoid doing lunges or modified lunges completely. If your knees are very irritated, if you’ve got swelling in your knees, it just hurts to stand or even just walk for a little while, then lunges are probably not for you right now you want to do some other exercise, it’s lower level meaning it’s not as intense.

But you still want to fire your glutes, you want to not overuse your quads, because that’s probably what’s already going on. And that’s what’s got you in this situation. So you might do something like cycling or an elliptical. There’s a bunch of other exercises. And by the way, you’re welcome to search our channel, we’ve got tons of videos about knee problems and what to do for people that are very irritated in with a knee issue.

But if you’re not super irritated, right now you’ve just got knee pain that kind of comes and goes or it gets worse, if you do a little too much, then lunges is a good thing to start to do. Right, you know the way that I’m telling you to do it, and in such a way that doesn’t irritate it. Another tip that you can do is modify the lunch.

If you are having trouble as you go down lower and deeper into the lunch, do a partial and just go down 50% or 25%, still forcing your foot to go outwards a bit and your knees go over outwards, possibly over the outside of your foot or towards the front of your foot as its pointed outwards. As you do that, you’ll use your glutes more.

Now this isn’t a perfect thing. I can’t tell you turn your foot out 20 degrees or 30 degrees or move your knee out so many inches or meters or centimeters. You have got to play with it. And what I would go by is what position of your foot and knee makes your butt muscle your glute work the best. You have to do a little trial and error to figure out what gets your butt muscle to work the best as you’re doing the lunch.

So I want you to give this a try. Leave me a comment here. And let me know how it goes for you incorporate it into your lunches right now and see if we can get your glutes a little sore, make sure that they work and see how your knees feel as a result, drop a comment in here and let us know how it goes. I also want to let you know about our 28 Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program.

This program is comprehensive and exercises, tips, advice, knowledge that you need to learn. In order to fix a knee problem, make it healthier, so that you can avoid injections, surgery and medications and get back to being active and healthy. reduce the inflammation irritation inside your knee. There’s a link in the description below. So check that out.

Hey, if you thought that the tips in this video were helpful for you, if you’re suffering with a knee problem like knee arthritis, meniscal tear patellar, tendonitis, patellofemoral, pain syndrome, IT band issues, that stuff that we fix here in the clinic all the time.

If you’re looking to get our help with your specific need problems so that you can get a customized plan, get hands on or cure in the clinic, so that you can be sure to avoid an unnecessary surgery, get away from having to get injections or taking medications that I want to invite you to apply to get one of our free discovery visits.

Go to the bottom of this page and you’ll find a button there that says request a 20-minute discovery visit and you got to apply there Leave us your information and we’ll call you back as quickly as possible. One of my staff when they talk to you, they’ll just ask you questions about your knee situation. Make sure it’s the right type of problem that we handle here in the clinic. And then we’ll let you know the next steps.

If it is a problem that we can help out with you here in the clinic. We just want to make sure not to waste your time and point you in the right direction. If it’s something that needs to be seen by a different type of specialist, I wish you the best of luck and unique problem. And I hope that we can help you out real soon. Have a wonderful day.