Anterior Knee Pain Rehab (Runner's Knee) for BJJ | Part 4 (16 min)

If you're very sore, I'd recommend starting with the tennis ball first. We're working all the way through the gluteal muscles here, and then there's muscle right on the front of the hip bone here, little tensor fasciae latae, TFL to its friends. And I find that a lot of the time, there are some trigger points around there that can often radiate right down the leg, and sometimes cause pain, either in the groin or in the knee as well. So I'm going to work into some of those tender points, and just hang out there a little bit.

So you don't want it to be screaming agony, but you want to get it so it's a little bit uncomfortable. What a lot of my clients describe as good pain. The more you play around with it, the more you'll become familiar with where those sensitive spots are, and how to find them. Again, if you want to make this a little bit easier to start off with, you can put the ball on top of a soft surface, like a pillow or a towel, and it just takes some of the, just makes it a little bit softer, a little bit more give-in-it.

Again, if you want to make this a little bit easier to start off with, you can put the ball on top of a soft surface like a pillow or a towel, and it just takes some of the... Just makes it a little bit softer, a little bit more give in it. You might find that on some of the spots, you actually start feeling sensation down the leg or pins and needles tingling down into the leg. That's quite a common reaction to some of these trigger points.

So, again, don't go too crazy with it the first time, but it's also not something to get too worried about. Just going to come around at the front of the hip there. And... If it's too sore to work into, if it's too sore to work into, just find a way to take that pressure off.

Either put more weight through the opposite leg, or just give yourself a little bit more support. OK, there. When we've done that... So, we're going to go into a quadriceps stretch.

So, same thing as before, one knee bent up. I grab the other ankle or I can hook a belt around it. Thigh parallel to the ground. I'm going to push my hip forwards.

Now, you should be feeling this in the front of the thigh, in the quadriceps. If you're feeling it mostly in the knee joint, just give yourself a little bit more space. You don't want to be jamming the knee into flexion if it doesn't want to go. OK.

That's where the belt comes in handy. I'm just going to push back. I'm pushing my ankle into my hand as I'm straightening my leg. And then I relax.

I put the stretch on a bit more. I'm going to do the same thing again. Push back. And again, it might be a little bit uncomfortable when I push back.

It shouldn't be really painful. OK, so I want to keep it on the edge of that discomfort. And relax. And from there, I can switch sides.

And switch sides. Do the same thing on the other side. And push the leg against the hand. And then relax.

And do the same thing again. And relax and stretch. And relax and stretch. So today, I want to work on a static lunge.

OK. There are loads of variations on lunges. It's not right or wrong. But this is the one that I like to teach.

It's called the static lunge. But this is the one that I like to teach for knee pain in particular. OK. So again, we're going to go into that half kneeling position.

The one we use for the hip flexor stretch. 90 degree angle at the front knee, 90 degree angle at the back knee. I'm going to tuck my toes underneath me. If you've got toe flexibility issues, which some people do, this may be a little bit more tricky.

You might find it easier with shoes on. So that's fine. What I'm going to do is from here, I don't want to lean forward and I don't want to bring that front foot in. I'm going to try and go straight up.

I'm going to lift myself up. I'm going to touch the back knee down and back up again. A lot of time, a lot of people find the balance difficult with this to start with. And often more so on one side than the other.

So again, it's OK to put one hand on something, but try not to use it any more than you have to. And then we're going to switch legs. So once again, this is a really easy exercise to add load to. So if I want to make it harder, I can add a dumbbell in each hand.

I can add a dumbbell overhead in the back hand. I can add a bar across my shoulders. So loads of ways to make this exercise harder. And I find this is a really good one for everything from knee problems, to hip problems, to lower back problems.

So I use this exercise a lot. And we're going to switch over, get back the first leg again. Again, if this feels easy, start thinking about maybe adding some loading to it. If it feels painful at the moment, then you can even make the exercise shorter.

So we can just make it a short lunge. And then we're going to go all the way to the ground. Switch over. Do the same thing on the other side.

And I want to make sure that I've got an even balance of weight front and back with these. So I'm loading the front foot as well as the back foot. Last but not least, we're going to do some more work on the hip. So we're going to go onto all fours.

And we're going to do our dog against the line. So we're going to do a little bit of a back and forth movement. We're going to go onto all fours. And we're going to do our dog against the line post impression.

Switch legs. Switch legs. We're going to switch back to the first side. And this time, instead of just taking the leg out the side, we're going to do circles.

We're going to do five one way. And then we're going to do five back the other way. And we switch back to the other leg. And you'll notice that with all of this, I'm trying to keep my back as still as I can.

I'm not lifting it up like this. I'm trying to keep my hips in one plane. Okay. Okay.

And to finish off, very last thing today, we're just going to do a couple of quick sets of squats that we did earlier in the week. So getting your band back. And hopefully you'll find that you can get a little bit more range than we were doing the other day. Remembering to keep pressure out against the band.

And then we're going to take a breather and we're going to do one more set of those. So again, working within your comfort zone, just up to the edges of it. And as I mentioned last time, taking light breaths, that's going to reduce air pressure in the air as well as trend control. So again, don't you feel that the air flow isn't going to be too slow if you start aligning with your injury.

It will do fine over time, As I mentioned last time we did the squats, don't be afraid to use a little bit of support if you need to, I say, or to cut the range a bit short. So if you find that you're having problems when you get right down to the bottom here, then maybe put a box or a bench and just do the squats on the bench. So you're taking out the bottom part of the range because that's the bit that's most likely to be problematic with this kind of knee pain. So if we can leave that out, but we can still work the knee through the range that you've got, then over time we'll be able to get that back.

So that's everything for day four. We've got one more day to go in this series, so I'll see you back here tomorrow and we'll put it all together.