How To Help Knee Pain And Stop Falling Backwards When Squatting

Today I’ll be showing you how to help your knee pain and stop falling backwards when squatting. I’m 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 unnecessary surgery injections and pain medications. Please subscribe, turn on notification bell and give us a like if you think this video ends up being helpful for you.

Falling back when squatting is one of the most common problems that we help people with knee problems here in the clinic. It usually happens that people get up out of the four position to sit up taller in the squat, but they end up losing their balance and fall backwards.

It’s a huge sign that muscles are not being used properly during the squat. It could be bad technique, bad form, muscle weaknesses, joint problems, even pain going into a normal squat position can be keeping them from having good balance during their squat. What we find is the most common problem with being able to squat properly is a muscle imbalance between the quads on the front of the thigh and the glutes, the butt muscles in the back of the hips.

The second most common muscle imbalance that we find is weakness in the ABS and over dominance of the back muscles overusing the quad muscles in the front of the thigh increases the pressure inside the knee joints and over time can cause serious problems like knee cartilage loss, meniscus tears, and knee arthritis.

Often we’re encouraging people with knee problems to learn how to squat properly, even if they’ve got a knee problem like the ones I’ve mentioned knee arthritis, meniscus tears and cartilage problems. Wait a second, what did you say you’re encouraging people with knee problems to do squats? Wow.

But yes, the reason why we’re encouraging people, even with the history of knee problems to eventually begin to learn how to squat is because as the inflammation is reduced over time, it’s important to begin to load the tissues inside the knee of talking about the cartilage, the meniscus, the tendons, the ligaments, the muscles, everything that’s inside the knee needs to be loaded properly and safely so that it can get stronger over time and be able to better withstand more forces in life.

Being able to run jump exercise, lift weights, do the daily things that we that we do without getting further damaged. It’s important to load those things inside the knee so that they’re healthier in the long term. Think about getting calluses on your hands from lifting weights.

If you lift weights the right amount or you do work with your hands or write them out, you’ll get calluses on your hands that are thickening of the skin, because it’s a protective mechanism of your skin so that you don’t tear your skin.

Of course, if you do too much weight lifting all at once you can rip your skin open and that’s not a good thing. But if you do the right amount of weightlifting if you’re within a safe range, as you rest and recover, your skin will get a bit thicker so that he can go tolerate more weightlifting the next time that you do it. What’s the same thing inside of our joints?

If we load our meniscus or cartilage or ligaments, tendons, etc, all that stuff within a normal range and give it enough time to rest, it will get denser, it’ll have better integrity so that it can take more forces in the future without becoming injured. Here are three tips to avoid falling backwards while doing a squat while using the right muscles to help your knee problem.

Tip number one shove your hips forward, this tucks your hips under your spine and makes you use your glute muscles best so that you can support your spine while simultaneously taking pressure off your knees and taking pressure off your back muscles, which protects your back joints as well.

Another way to think of this is when you go down into a squat. Think about aiming your butt right between your heels on the floor, rather than at the wall behind you or anything behind you, you should be dropping your butt downwards, because that’s going to make you tuck your butt under the rest of your body.

Tip number two, open your knees, you’re trying to push your knees out as wide as possible while simultaneously shoving your butt under your spine. This makes you fire your butt muscles most so that it can take the pressure off your knees and protect your knee joints. So that the loads the forces, all your knee joints are normalized to the way that they’re designed to take them.

And tip number three, hold on to something. If you’ve tried to shove your hips forward and you’ve tried to open your knees and you still feel like you’re throwing yourself off balance or maybe you got worse you feel like you’re falling backwards even more.

Well. I’ve got good news you’re using your muscles correctly, but you’re just not strong enough to stay in that position. So hold on to something and don’t hang on it. You’re just holding on to it for balance so that you can keep your body upright, your spine up right and your butt down between your heels and keep your knees open so that you’re using the right muscles without falling backwards. If you had to hold on something to do this squat correctly.

Stop and think about this for a while. You should not be doing weighted squats. If you can’t keep proper squat form, and use the right muscles, the buck muscles, if you’re having to hold on to something in order for you to keep your knees out and offload the quads and offload your back muscles and force yourself to use your glutes, what the heck are you using whenever you go put weights on yourself in the gym and go squat, you’ve got to be using your quads or your back muscles, and you’re probably not using your glutes because you’re so off balance.

Once you start to stand up, you’re going to be training yourself in correctly. If you go lift weights without using your glutes properly, you should feel after doing so a sort of squat exercise, like your butt got a significant workout a bit more than any other body part involved in doing a squat. If you feel tired in your quads, that’s okay, as long as your butt’s more tired, your back should hardly feel tired at all.

It’s got to be the butt muscles to get most tired. And whenever you’re doing anything, any sort of exercise with the squat, I’m talking back squats, front squats, back squats, squat, anything, even lunges, you should be tired in your butt muscle otherwise, something’s not happening right, and biomechanically the way the joints are designed to move and work altogether, the chain of joints, the hips, the back of the knees, ankles, feet, all that stuff is not going to work properly. If you’re not using your buttock muscles.

They are the key to making sure that your knees are safe. So please, before you add any weights, hang on to the doorway. Hang onto a squat rack, hang on to something sturdy and get your technique right. Make sure you can do that without weight without even holding on anything. Then add in the weights making sure that using your butt muscles, right? Give these three tips to try and drop a comment.

Let us know they worked out for you did they take pressure off or knee joints and were you able to fire your glutes better during the squat? If you’re looking for more exercises, tips and advice for knee problems, check out our playlist all about new videos in the help that we that we’ve got linked in the description below. And don’t forget to subscribe to our channel so you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we upload every single week. Have a wonderful day guys.