Tips for Preventing Knee Pain When Exercising

A lot of people suffer from knee pain. Whether it be injury, overuse, degeneration - a lot of that is resultant from faulty mechanics. weakness at the hip can also cause a lot of stress to be placed on the knees. A bad squat loses tension from above, and the knees are now coming together. We want to make sure that you develop tension from up higher. We're gonna push those knees out so that when you come down, the hip is in line with the knee, and the knee in line with the ankle. That is a great squat. Hips sitting back, and knees in line over the toes. So we're gonna give you three exercises to help you to strengthen the glutes and help to maintain alignment of the knee. And this is just a strengthening for the glute muscles. So you are going to go ahead and lift up your hips into the air nice and tall till your body's in a neutral position, and back down. So you're just gonna want to perform that until you feel a nice burn through the glutes. The next exercise is just to lower down from a stair. We want to see that you do it with a lot of control. Again, we're trying to keep the knee from tracking too far in or out. We want it to stay right over the toes. So you're going to drop one foot down towards the floor, just really slow and controlled down and back up, and what you get is that your knee that's lowering you is not wiggling about. We want to make sure we're tight in the gluts again, trying to keep the knee aligned. So for that exercise, you would, of course, want to perform it on the opposite side. Work until you feel the point of fatigue, which is where the muscles burning, but we don't want you to be feeling pain. And for the last exercise, again we're targeting the outer hips. We're going to be placing a band around the ankles. These bands you can get at any sporting goods store. From there, you're going to be taking some side steps, making sure that the shoulders aren't swaying much. We really want to isolate this to the hips, so just nice and steady steps until you feel fatigue on the outsides of the hip. ![exercising-with-bands.jpg](

) You may find the band is kind of trying to pull the knees in, and what you're wanting to do is be active and pushing the knees out so that we're strong through the hips. Try these exercise as best as you can and you may find relief with knee pain.