Knee Mobility: Secret Rotator Cuff Exercise for BJJ

It actually looks painful because it should be. Essentially what happens there, on a planted foot, if my knee comes in with a valgus force, I'm essentially externally rotating my tibia on my femur. Again, that's where we're going to start to see injuries to the MCL, the medial collateral ligament, the medial meniscus or lateral meniscus for that matter, and as well as the popliteus. When we're playing a lot of guards like Dila Hava, K-guard, all these kind of weird ones where we're wrapping our limbs around someone else and there's potential for the foot to get caught and torqued in an external rotation manner, it's really important that we can fight that motion with an internal rotation of our tibia.

So knowing that, essentially what we want to try and do is we're going to take some tubing and again, you want to go fairly light with this if you've never done it before. And you can either hang onto it or you can anchor it to something. I like to hang onto it. That way if it gets tired, I can sort of tend to follow my foot rather than it getting too easy or too hard depending on whatever resistance or length you have of the band.

So I'm going to focus on keeping my knee still and I'm pivoting on my heel. My foot's going to be up in the air and I give it some tension like this and I rotate outwards with the foot and then pull in. Okay. Now, when you're looking to see it doesn't seem like a big movement, so it kind of feels like a really weird, like why am I doing this kind of thing?

But if you pay real close attention with my knee cap being perfectly still, I should see my tibia rotate inwards when I pull in and when I let it open up, the little head of my fibula here should almost hide right back in the pocket where my hamstring is. And so again, what we're trying to do is externally rotate under control and then pull back into neutral externally, rotate back with control, slow and controlled, and then pull back into neutral and you can obviously play with the position of how flex the knee. I typically get people to start at about 90 degrees when they do this and as they, so again, I'll be here and I externally rotate and pull back in and I don't know if you can see it on the camera here. It's a very subtle movement, but I'm looking for the head of my fibula to kind of pop forward as I internally rotate and kind of hide as I open back that way.

Okay. And again, like I was saying is that if you have an injury where say you, it gets painful, the more I get into this bent position or I play a lot of butterfly guard or these kinds of things where I need to have this rotational control of my tibia, start at 90 degrees and over the week or two weeks, we're going to try and work our leg into a more flexed position. There's no point doing it in a fully straight position because the tibia has very little rotation on the femur when it's straight, which is why when we're doing any kind of heel hook, you always want to have a bend in the knee. And again, I don't necessarily think that you are ever going to stop a heel hook from just having really strong popliteus or tibial internal rotation.

There's a lot of break mechanics that happen in that. But I always think, you know what? It's really good to at least make sure while we're doing things like dry land training or rolling that you at least have strength and you have control and any kind of feedback from your knee. Again, am I getting into this poor control position?

Before I get into the end range, break mechanic of a heel hook or I get caught in some weird position again, just make sure that you understand this is just to build upon another layer of strength in our arsenal of our legs in jiu jitsu and kickboxing. I hope that helps. If you have any questions, please fire me an email and I'll see you on the mat soon. Thanks again.