Good morning everyone. Dr. Alex Hernandez, Chiropractor from Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture. I’m here with Janelle, my office Manager, and we’re going to go into part 2 of strengthening your knees. We did a segment on part 1, and this is part 2.
How do you strengthen your knees?
People always wonder, how come I feel weak when I’m going up the stairs? How come I get tired when I’m walking at the mall? I need to find a place to sit, or more importantly when they go up and down the stairs, they have a lot of difficulty and a lot of pain in their knees and their lower legs. So we’re going to show you how to strengthen your knees, and we’re going to do this with lunges.
Lunges are a very basic exercise where you step forward and bend the knee forward. You can hold yourself here and that helps to strengthen your whole leg, your knee, your shins.
We are going to go ahead and demonstrate a proper lunge. We’re seeing here that she has her quad, very activated, her knee, most importantly of all, is right above her toe which is where you want it to be.
Alright, let’s switch the leg, and now let’s talk about the back leg, so the back leg here is bent properly, she’s got her toe here, and she’s got good form, her back is straight, this is what we want to see in a proper lunge. Those are the two things that you want to be considering when you’re doing a lunge.
Now the advanced version, once you get strong and you’re able to do these lunges, you could use the bosu. And again you’re going to bring yourself in, it’s more challenging, you’re going to feel a little wobbly but that’s okay, this is what challenges your muscles, your tendons and your ligaments, so let’s show them how to do this one. And again you come for the middle of the ball, you bend in and same thing, see she’s wobbling, that’s good, that means it’s challenging. Alright let’s do the other side, and here we see her struggling a little bit more, so we can tell her left knee, her left leg is a little more difficult. This is an advanced version, I don’t recommend that you do this until you’re able to do the very basic lunge without problems. So this is your second way of strengthening your knees so you can do your jogging, your running, and be comfortable going up the stairs. And you want to work yourself from one set of 10, two sets of 10, to three sets of 10. And then if you can work yourself up to doing two sets of 15, and then ultimately one of 30, that would be the ideal amount of repetitions. This is how you will strengthen your knee.
