Why You Need To Let Your Knees Pass Your Toes

Should you let your knees pass over your toes? I’ll be answering this question and explaining the science behind it. In today’s video, I’m Dr. David specialist physical therapist El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile while avoiding unnecessary surgeries, injections and medications.

Don’t let your knees pass your toes is an old way of thinking that is still very common in the healthcare and fitness fields. Fact research shows that when knees bend between 60 and 90 degrees, the pressures inside knee joints increases tremendously.

But additional research also tells us that when we don’t allow our knees to pass over our toes, we start to stress other joints nearby like the feet, the ankles, the hips, and even the lower back. And there’s even more research that tells us that that changing the position of the hips and knees can change the pressures inside the knee joints and alleviate pressures into the ankles, hips and back.

So they’re actually encouraging us to allow your knees to pass your toes. But wait, this is conflicting. If your knees bend between 6090 degrees, it increases knee pressures. But if you change the position of your hips and knees, then it takes pressure off. How do we do this? It doesn’t make any sense, right?

How would you ever be able to squat down to pick something up or be able to exercise and do squats properly, we see this problem with all our patients with knee problems in the clinic and we get around it by teaching you exactly what I’m about to tell you.

What we found is that if you can bend your knees and squat in such a way that it does not use your quads too much, but instead makes you use your glutes or your buttock muscles way more than you’re keeping pressures low inside your knee joints and saving yourself from problems like meniscus tears, cartilage damage and knee arthritis in the future. And this is critical knowledge to apply especially if you’re trying to avoid any surgery.

Let me repeat that you’ve got to take pressure off your quad muscles, the front of your thighs and use your buttock muscles on the back of your hips. Anytime that you’re doing a standing movement where you’ve got to bend down and bend your knees. Now let me be real with you.

It’s not possible for absolutely everybody watching this video, to be able to do a full depth squat safely and take all the pressures off their knees and use your butt muscles right away. That’s not what I’m saying here. Especially if you’ve already got chronic knee problems like cartilage damage, meniscus tears in the arthritis.

If you’re in that situation, it actually might be helpful for you to avoid doing any sort of squatting motions, any sort of knee bending motions, where you run into pain, I wouldn’t worry so much about your knees, passing your toes just to avoid bending your knees so much that it’s hurting your knees.

Because it’s going to further irritate you’re already torn cartilage meniscus or irritates your arthritis, it’s already flared up. For this individual, you’ve got to take some time resting your knee joint, making sure that you don’t keep aggravating it over and over again so that you can get to the point where you’re more comfortable bending your knees and you can better tolerate doing movements or exercises that are going to help you get your glutes stronger and quiet down your quads in the process because that will help to take the pressures off for knee joints. So you can get to the fun stuff much quicker.

If you don’t have any of those problems right now, then it might be possible for you to do a full depth squat. And if you can do a full depth squat with good form, I encourage you to work out in that motion. As long as you feel healthy, your back’s not an issue. Your knees, of course aren’t an issue or any other joints in the area. But what’s true for everybody is don’t be afraid to let your knees past your toes. Anytime you’re doing any of these motions.

It’s old thinking it’s not proven by science. The only reason why people keep reinforcing it is because it really doesn’t aggravate your knees more if you don’t let your knees past your toes in most cases, but it’s short sighted. And that it’s also giving you a false sense of security, because you’re still using your quad muscles potentially not using your glute muscles, but you’re just avoiding the painful zone.

And you’re missing the boat on fixing the problem at the root of the issue which is working on your glute muscles and calming down the use of your quad muscles. And before you get mad or bothered anybody who’s told you to avoid letting your knees past your toes.

Now just keep in mind that you were probably told by some well meaning healthcare professional or fitness professional or maybe some coach in the sport that you did, to not allow your knees to pass your toes but they they’re doing the best they can with what they know. And they probably just regurgitating this information to you out of goodwill.

They didn’t mean to hurt you in any way. They don’t understand the full long term benefits. But you’ve got to think this through a bit more. You’ve got to apply what I’m telling you there’s no research to prove that not letting your knees pasture toes is going to save your knees from arthritis or from a meniscus problem or having some surgery later on, you’ve got to strengthen those glutes, and you’ve got to quiet down those quads.

Let me tell you the biggest takeaways from this video. If you’ve already got great knees, then just check the using your glutes properly throughout any motions that you do that involve bending your knees all the way, especially past your toes. And if you’ve got knee problems, then you need to start to learn how to use your glutes better, or you might already be using them some, but you need to get them stronger. And if you need help with that, we’ve got some great videos linked in the description below.

Check those out so that you can figure out how to use your knees better when walking, when bending when going up and down stairs, and how to strengthen your glutes properly so that you can activate them when you need them.

If you’ve got a knee problem that you’re thinking about getting our help with, we’d love to check it out and see if it’s a type of knee problem that we can truly make a difference on and keep you from having surgery injections, and being having to rely on medications I’ve got to do is scroll to the bottom of this page and find the button that says request a discovery visit.

What that is a discovery visit is a 20 minute appointment with a specialist physical therapist where we get to hear your story, understand what’s going on. Check you by hand, check your knee joint and all the joints around we do a holistic exam.

That’s very thorough, and then we discuss the diagnosis with you. And in simple terms, we’ll look at the anatomy book and the skeleton and our goal for this visit is to make sure that you can walk out of our clinic understanding what’s going on so that you can make the best decision about what to do for your knee problem moving forward are you going to do is hit that button of formal pop up.

Leave us your details and one of my staff will get that information and give you a call back as fast as possible. And let you know the next steps about applying for one of our free discovery visits. I wish you the best of luck and hope that we can be a part of your success story real soon. Have a wonderful day.