Everybody wants you to strengthen your legs, butt, and back by squatting and lunging (including me! Here is an old video exhorting everyone to squat more) but no one seems to have any answers if you have tricky knees.
You may know what I mean. Your knees still “work”, but they hurt alot when you do too much. The problem is that you never know until afterwards that it was too much so what good does that do you?
What can you do before it gets bad, or even after it gets bad and you’ve had a couple of surgeries but you still want to squat and lunge?
To me, knees are not tricky. They are fun. You can look at them from so many different angles! If you look at yourself from a different angle, you can see possibilities that you missed in the past. For most folks, Mobilignment™ Points are not the places they have been taught to concentrate on.
There are three Mobilignment™ Points in your knees:
1) Inside bottom of the femur
2) Top of the tibia
3) Top of the fibula
They are “knee neighbors” and awareness of them can make movement much more fluid, well balanced, and safe for your knees. The simple idea is to allow them to move in their full range without locking them in place, ever. We tend to lock our knees at the beginning or end of our movement. We may brace in frear at the bottom or lowest point in a squat or lunge. When coming back up into full extension of the leg, we tend to either stop the movement before we have fully extended our legs, kind of sagging into our knees and never really straightening them, or we straighten them and lock at the end of the extension motion.
Here are some images that you can use to learn more about your own idea of “knee” – I show one of them in the video but have added more for you to explore. Enjoy!