Top 5 Calf Muscle Exercises For Knee Pain

Fixing the problems thoroughly means you need to take care of your calf strength. It’s often one of the most overlooked muscles when it comes to strengthening your leg muscles for a knee problem. And in today’s video, I’m going to go through five exercises that you need to be doing to strengthen your calf muscles to support your knee problem, as well as possibly fix a foot or ankle problem that you might be dealing with that’s connected to the knee problem, though sadly, too.

Many people deal with knee problems and they’re looking at strengthening their thigh muscles or their hip muscles, when the biggest problem could be coming from the calf muscles and even the foot with some of these muscles will influence so we’ll talk about all that today.

Real quick. My name is Dr. David Middaugh, and I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is focused on helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery injections for medications, please subscribe to this channel so you don’t miss out any of the helpful videos we put out every single week. Before sharing these exercises.

Let me just review the five muscles of the calf area and you won’t be able to see them on our model if you’re going to look around. Okay, I’m just going to point to where they’re at and just kind of how they run so that you know where you’re at on your own leg when you go do these exercises.

So on the most superficial part of the leg, you have the gastrocnemius muscle and right below that you have the soleus muscle both of those muscles run down together to the Achilles tendon down here.

A lot of times people will have Achilles tendon pain, Achilles tendon issues even ruptures or tears that could be setting up a knee problem appuyer below that you’ve got some deeper muscles. There’s three main ones flexor digitorum longus. flexor halleck is longest and post here

To be honest, the flexor muscle talyc as long as and flexor digitorum longus help you to curl your toes, the longest halleck is is for the big toe and then the digitorum one is for all the other four toes. The post your tip go ahead and turn around this way please, is to help you to raise your art.

It’s an art supportive muscle sore the flexor Holic is longest and flexor digitorum muscles. But the flex the post your tip is one that directly attaches on the inside of the arch and it’s one of the main ones responsible for pulling up the arch, which is a big deal for setting up the right position for your knee joints so that you can decrease the pressures in your knee joints and set it up to heal for the long term.

You can heal from problems like arthritis with this meniscal tears, meniscal injuries, ligament problems like ACL tears, ACL tears, LCL, and PCL tears. So let’s patellofemoral pain syndrome and other cartilage problems that happen inside the knee. The first exercise that I want you to do number one, we’re going to get familiar with doing a proper toe curl exercise because this one is going to connect over to the rest of the exercises.

So once you have a seat here, when it comes to strengthening your toes, having full range of motion and strengthen a toe curl is very important. So I’m going to switch your leg up here on my knee here. So what I want you to do here is curl your toes as far as they can go. And what I want you to pay attention on yourself at home is do these knuckles right here pop up and do all the knuckles bend in your toes just like your fingers can relax.

They have knuckles here that’s in line with these and Knuckles throughout and of course your thumb only has two so does a big toe it only has two right here. When you curl your toes, I want you to do a hold as long as you’re not cramping. So good hold right there. And you can see her she’s having trouble bending these joints out here go and relax for a second.

But if I then hurt her foot, she can actually bend those a bit better. Good. Hold it right there. Try not to let it go. And here’s your first exercise right here. I need you to curl your toes and hold it for 10 seconds and try to get these joints right here to bend as best as you can as well as all the other joints in the toes.

So I’m going to give you your leg back here. And let’s do it on both sides at the same time. So curl the toes all the way and work on getting these to bed. A common problem here is getting cramping in the arches of the foot or sometimes in the calf area. If you’re getting cramping or feels like it wants to cramp back off on the intensity.

Ideally, you want to go 100% on this toe curl exercise. But if you’re getting a cramp, say at 70 or 80% just back off right before the crab starts and hang out there and hold the exercise for 10 seconds and we’ll do this for 10 reps at a time so that you can warm up those flexor hallucis longus flexion digitorum longus muscles and a little bit of the posterior tibialis muscles in your calf.

Let’s do one more here at home. We’ll do 10 of course, and I’m going to show you how this translates into the Rest of the exercises, we’re going to do a good job. And you should be feeling the muscles work in the mean of the foot like usually the arch area, and usually in the lower part of the calf, not so much the upper part of the calf.

Once you’ve gotten an idea of how to curl your toes, now what I need you to do is just practice it in standing just like this. So without curling your toes on your foot, just press your toes down flat of it. So go ahead and do that. Yep, you got it. And that engages those toe curly muscles, you’re going to do this in preparation to do a heel raise where you’re lifting up your heels. so relaxing for a second, the time to turn around and hold onto the wall for supports at home.

Find a sturdy surface like a couch or a counter a wall, as she’s doing here is perfect. And before you start lifting up your heels, grab those toes, go ahead, there you go. Hold your toes, just a bit grabbed here, and then you’re going to lift up your heels.

Yep, hold it there for about 10 seconds, and you’re trying to go as high as you can to make sure that you use those big calf muscles, the gastrocnemius in the sole use, after about 10 seconds you come down the whole time that you’re holding, you need to be grabbing with your toes, just a bit doesn’t have to be 100%.

You don’t want your toes to curl. If you wanted to remain flats and do 10 reps like this at home as well, we’re going to, we’re going to speak to them just a bit when I do all 10 want to make sure I show you the rest of the exercise. So you’re working on getting as high as you can. Perfect. We’ll do just a few more reps some of the highlight a couple of things for you here.

So watch when she comes up how the heel bone here just tips inwards, a little bit on both sides. That’s good. For me as a physical therapist, that tells me that she’s using her posterior tibialis muscle one of those calf muscles, the one that supports the arc, she’s using it well.

If you can have somebody watch you do this, or you can set up your camera on yourself and do some heel raises like this, and see if your heels are coming slightly in. Because if they’re not one of the exercises I’m going to show you in a bit is going to be really important for you.

So make sure you watch the little video to catch that exercise. Good job, we’ll do one more year. So make sure you grab toes first, then come up and count to 10 slowly, and you should be starting to get tired in those calf muscles. Fantastic.

So once you’ve done that you might hang out here, if you’re weak and you got you had some difficulty doing that, if you couldn’t come up all the way you felt like you’re missing some height, then you might need a press on the countertop that you’re using or find a couch to kind of help you with your hands. But if you can go up all the way in hang out up there for 10 seconds, you’re ready for the next one.

Let me show you that. So they’re going to stand on one foot, and I’ll show you between the second but let’s have you just pick up one foot completely for a second. then same thing, we do a single leg heel race he’s holding on for balance, go and grab those toes, and then come on up. And she’s fighting to come up, up up up all the way, use this muscle grab with the toes a little bit. Perfect.

And the key on this one is making sure you come up all the way it’s a lot more effort on that one leg on this next rep if you can turn to your right and do the same thing just to get a side view here. So you can see here, she’s going to grab those toes perfect. And then do a heel raise all the way she’s holding up for some balance.

And she’s using those all the muscles now working really well in the cafeteria. Yay. All right, so So let me show you how to modify this if you’re strong enough to do the two legs coming up. But you can’t quite do a single leg face the semi Face the wall here again. And what you’re going to do is think of this in percentages. So if standing on both feet is 50% body weight on each side, and standing on one leg is 100% on one leg and zero on the other.

That’s fine, 60-40 70-30 80-20 and so forth. So let’s have you just lean over to your left to your right leg here. So put about 60% here, it’s okay, you can kind of just err on your toes or you lift your foot slightly. And you’re doing 6040 grab the toes on the right foot and then go ahead and come on up. There you go.

This is the third exercise for you you’re you’re offloaded here, but you’re still doing more work on one side than the other side. So you can get this stronger. You need to find the right percentage mix so that you can come up all the way here without dropping and you’re still using the right muscles in the calf and you’re grabbing with your toes.

If you feel you can do 6040 then go ahead and go to 7030 or 8020 or 9010 or whatever number in between you feel like you need to be working at the keys here are you need to have your toes grabbed and you’d be coming up all the way if you’re only coming up halfway here or 70% up which you can do all the way

You’re not working out your calf muscles, all five of those that I talked about as efficiently as you can, and it could be leaving your knee at a disadvantage. Whenever you go walking or using it to exercise, do the things that you need to do that could be setting up your knee for that pain that just doesn’t want to go away. Let’s do one more here.

Why don’t we go 90-10. So you can barely be holding the foot down on the left, and doing a lot of the work on this side. Great job. Still grabbing those toes by keeping them flat, not curling them. Yay, good job. And it takes some focus for sure to kind of tune in and make sure you know what your toes are doing. Okay, so just to catch up to where we’re at. The first exercise we covered was those toe curls. T

he second exercise we covered was the heel raises with both hands on the wall 5050. The third one was shifting your weight over like we just did. And I kind of got ahead of myself. The fourth exercise is coming all the way over to one leg and doing 100% heel lift on one leg.

So the fifth exercise I want to show you here next is to fix that little heel position that I was telling you about average heels going together pretty well.

But if you when you come up with original quick is your seal bones deviate outwards or even demonstrated this kind of edge can’t even do it. And I’m going to come back in the bottom left, you will kind of bend downwards here. And it’s usually if you have collapsed arches, you can rest then you do this exercise.

Now I’m going to grab a lotion, little mini tub of lotion that we have here. And I want you to bring your heels around now that you’re going to grab this with your heels. You can use anything like a ball works really well a rolled up towel, and it needs to be a little further back, just about right there. And you’re going to hear

Yeah, okay, so go ahead and grab it with your heels and you’ll do the same he’ll raise grab with the toes first, and then work to pick it up. There you go. He said, You have to push your heels inwards, to be able to grab it. That makes your post your tibialis muscle work better, which is going to help you with your fallen arches because that’s the main one that helps you to elevate your arches.

Great job. And you’ll do this for holds as well. Now, some bonuses that you can do, you can register for saying that is I’ve only covered holds. So it’s where she’s grabbing with her toes and then coming up and holding, I even talked about repetitions where you’re coming up and down repeatedly that that would be the next progression.

So you can now bring your weight on both feet, 5050, grab with your toes, here’s a bonus exercise here. And then go ahead and come on up, all the way good with both heels all the way up and then come right back down. And do this for reps to 10 reps here, grabbing your toes every single time that you come up.

That is the next progression. And then after that, you would go to that off way to the one where you’re putting like 6040 or 7030, whatever mix you want. And you’re still coming up and down. But with the following the same rules making sure that you grab with your toes right before you’re about to come up and on the descent on the way down and you still be grabbing those toes as well.

The job you can rest there. So those are some great exercises to start shrinking your calves. If you’re wondering how often do I do this? How frequently do I do it? It really depends on if you try this out, if you found that you’re kind of weak or you get tired really quick, and you might need to be doing it a bit more often right now, the holds, I would recommend doing them three, four times a day or more.

If you’re not strong enough to come up all the way and sustain it, then you need to be working on the hold so that you can work your way all the way through. So you can work your heels all the way up whenever you do a heel lift exercise, and then work to doing it so that it’s waiting one leg more than the other.

The next advancement after that would definitely be to add weights, you can hold weights in your hands. Or if you have access to like a gym with barbells or some machine at the gym where you can come up and down still grabbing with your toes. That’d be the next level from there, but there’s a lot of strength in that you can get just working with your own bodyweight at home.

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