Good morning everyone. Dr. Alex Hernandez, Chiropractor from Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture in North Bergen, NJ. I’m here with Maria. Today we’re going to show you how to get your knees stronger. I get this question a lot at the office: my knees feel weak when I go up the stairs; when I go down the stairs I have some difficulty; or I have to take one step at a time when I go down the stairs.
Here are some quick and easy things you can do at home and at the gym: Air squats. Proper technique when doing a squat is to pretend that you’re going to sit. Put your butt back and pretend that you’re going to sit, and then you travel all the way down, making sure that the knees are right in front of your toes. You don’t want to go forward.
Now I will show you with Maria. So when you look at Maria, that’s a perfect squat. The first step is to put your butt back, and then you’re going to bring yourself down, you could go a little further, and you want to make sure that the knees are not past your toes. This is the common error that people make.
Why don’t we show them how some patients do the squat wrong. They go forward about 2 inches in front of her toes. This is causing a lot of stress right here on the cartilage, on the tendon, so don’t do that. Alright come back up, and now let’s break it down into 2 pieces.
Easy way to do it, butt back and then you’re going to squat down. In the beginning if your knees are weak, this is not going to be so comfortable for you. As you start to do this over and over again, you’ll start to gain some strength along the cartilage here, you want to gain strength along what we call your shin muscles, this is your tibialis anterior muscle, and you also want to get the inside part of your knee strong, as well as your ligaments. This is what’s going to allow you to be able to go up and down the stairs without pain, without discomfort. So, hopefully you can start practicing, start doing one set of 30 squats per day, if that’s too much for you, you can do 2 sets of 15 and then work your way up until you get to one set of 30.
