One question I am regularly asked about knee pain is, how good is walking backwards for strengthening your knees? In recent years this type of exercise has grown in popularity on the internet and also among many therapists as an exercise to prescribe their patients with for strengthening of the knees. I can see how it appeals to so many people with knee pain as it requires no equipment, minimal skill, and can be done almost anywhere. The big question is how effective is it really when it comes to strengthening the knees to get rid of pain? While there are some positive benefits to using this, there are several problems I believe are overlooked that would be better resolved with other exercises. In this article, I explore this exercise in more detail and challenge my bias to see if it is something that I may be underestimating.
How The Decline Board Squat Strengthens The Quadriceps After A Knee Injury
When planning to start the long process and break up the progressive stages of a knee rehabilitation program, an understanding of what can influence movements from a mobility and stability perspective is critical. Many of the best exercises to develop strength into weak areas are not necessarily the best option in the early stages as the body compensates and adapts to the pain and injury. Using various tools and drills to “retrain” the brain and nervous system is very important in being able to restore efficient functional movements of the body. The quadriceps can be a real problem in the beginning as they may have contributed greatly to creating the injury in the first place, and are often left with excessive tightness and weakness. This makes it very difficult to strengthen without creating more pain, and also more dysfunction. In this article, I am going to explain the role of using the Decline Board Squat to overcome this problem. I will show you how to gradually progress to heel plate squats, to eventually floor based squats and pain free movement. The purpose of the decline squat is to improve the overall strength of quadriceps while maintaining muscle balance and optimal movement pattern of squatting.
Why Tight Quadriceps Exacerbate Knee Pain & The Solution Is Not With Stretching
One of the most confusing things I have come across over the past 20 years as a rehabilitation trainer working with many complex injuries and movement dysfunctions is how confusing the role of the quadriceps can be with relation to knee pain. In most cases of knee pain there is significant stiffness at the knee joint leading to conclusions of tight quadriceps and hip flexors. For years I believed the answer for people who had limited knee flexion needed to spend more time stretching and foam rolling their quads and hip muscles to restore full range to the joint. It makes perfect sense, the muscle is noticeably tight and not even close to its full range of motion so it must need stretching to improve it. While some people showed some great results, there were many who showed little improvement with some even becoming worse! This failure led me to find that the solution was not to be found with stretching but from changing the underlying cause of the stiffness. In this article, I will show you how to find this and what things you can do to correct the problem for good.