How to Strengthen Your Knees

Here at North Bergen’s Life Chiropractic & Acupuncture, we celebrate the ability to educate both our patients and the general public on ways to enjoy a happy and pain-free life. In today’s video, Dr. Hernandez tackles the subject of weak and painful knees. He provides an excellent tutorial on simple things you can do to both strengthen and eliminate pain within your knees. We trust you’ll find this video very informative.

Good Morning everyone Dr. Alex Hernandez, Chiropractor, from Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture. I'm here with Maria today and we're going to show you how to get your knees stronger.

I get this question asked a lot at the office. My knees feel weak you know when I go up the stairs. I don't feel so strong when I go down the stairs. I have some difficulty or actually have to go one step at a time when I have to go down the stairs. So there are some quick ways, some good things you could do at home or at the gym that we're going to show you.

I’m here with Maria. So, one of the things that we tell people to do is what we call “air squats”. I'm going to demonstrate an air squat and then I'll show you with Maria. So basically, an air squat is you're going to do a squat in the air and this is what it looks like. Now as simple as that may seem, many people get it wrong. So today I want to make sure you're clear, so you don't hurt your knees and you actually get them stronger.

The proper technique of doing a squat is what I’m going to demonstrate with Maria. Maria is pretending that she’s going to sit. Put your butt back against the wall and pretend that you're going to sit. 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.

Let's do a regular squat. So, when I look at Maria that's a perfect squat. You can come on up. So the first step that you want to do is you want to push your butt back. Then 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. This can cause a lot of stress on the cartilage and on the tendon. So don't do that. You can start practicing one set of 30 squats per day. Or, you can do two sets of 15 and then work your way up until you get to one set of 30.

Squats are not a cure all. Some of you out there should strongly consider chiropractic care for your knee pain. Call us anytime! Click here to learn more about our North Bergen Chiropractic Care Clinic.