Defend Your Knees - Part II
Defend your knees Part II
How to get your knees to keep-up with your training!
As a runner, you’re motivated to improve your performance whether that means running longer, running faster, or simply running without any pain. In an ideal world, all of these things should be possible while still avoiding injury.
Countless running injuries that you may face could be prevented all together. The main rationale for injury prevention in sport is not only to enable your body to gain proper functioning but to further adapt throughout your training. As you advance with your running by gaining speed, strength, and taking on more km’s per day, your knees need to be up to this same challenge!
Let’s Break It Down
Contrary to popular beliefs, building better knees doesn’t actually start with the knee joint itself. Although the pain that’s involved is centralized around the knee joint, such as with patellofemoral pain syndrome, you may be unaware of the true cause of the injury.
Research has suggested that many injuries that develop around the knee joint are actually caused by weak or tight muscles elsewhere (1).
Let’s talk about the hips!
Your hips are mechanically designed to hold your pelvis and thighs in position as you move. The muscles involved are your gluteus maximus (as well as medius and minimus), iliopsoas (hip flexor), adductors (inside of leg), as well as your major quadricep muscle (rectus femoris – front of leg) and most of the hamstring group (back of leg).
If you’re dealing with any muscle weakness, tightness or imbalance in the hips, this is transferred down to your knees. As you run you may be unaware that your knees are drifting inwards, ultimately causing both compression and misalignment of your kneecap. This chronic stress over time leads to knee pain and eventual injury (2).
In order to prevent chronic stress on your knees from happening, we need to start by strengthening our hips and glutes.
Our glutes are one of the most powerful muscle groups in our body. The problem is, our glutes are not as active as other muscles during a run when compared to our quadriceps and hamstrings. This causes these muscles to become disproportionately stronger. Glute weakness will then create more tension on the knees to stabilize your running form (3). This is not what you want! Engaging in more glute-dominant exercises will take this pressure off your knees, leading to better running performance and long-term injury prevention.
For those quad-dominant runners, engaging more in glute and hip strengthening exercises will release some of the stress away from your quadriceps. When doing so it alleviates the imbalance between your quadriceps and hamstrings as described above.
What can you do about all this?
1. Strengthen your weak muscles
Proper muscle strengthening of the muscles that cross over a joining will hold this joint in its most functional position. This is incredibly beneficial for your hips in order to prevent the pelvis from dropping into misalignment.
In addition, muscle strengthening is a preventative measure towards overuse injuries. By increasing your muscle strength it helps to decrease the joint load and improve shock absorption capabilities of your muscles (4).
Exercises You Can Implement Today
- Clam Shells: A great exercise to start with! This should be done without the activation of your hamstrings. Advancing from here, you can add a hip lift. This exercise can be added in before your run and/or at the beginning of your strength training session.
- Glute bridges + Lateral band walks (a.k.a. monster walks: Great glute activation exercise before your runs/ heavy glue exercises
- Nordic leans : Depending on your level of strength in your hamstrings, this exercise could be used as an activation for an advanced lifter, or as one of your main hamstring strength exercises if you are new to strength training
- Romanian deadLifts (RDL) + Split squats + Step ups : Exercise positions that you can easily add weight to, in order to challenge and strengthen your glutes + hamstrings