Life Is Lived Through Movement

Glute strength will be your best friend!

The muscles that surround your hips and pelvis are collectively known as the gluteals or “glutes”. These muscles are essential for everyday movements including walking, running, jumping, and stair climbing.

The pelvis is an inherently stable joint and everything in the body moves relative to it via muscle attachments. If there is weakness in the gluteals around the pelvis and hips, then compensation will occur at other parts of the body to help maintain stability during movements. This can result in the overuse of compensating body parts and lead to knee injuries and knee pain.

Having strong gluteals will reduce the risk of instability and knee pain and improve your movement and function during everyday activities.

EXERCISES TO HELP GET YOU STARTED WITH GLUTE STRENGTHENING

• Glute Bridge (double and single leg)
• Crab Walk
• Clam 
• Standing Hip Extension (banded)
• Hip Thrust

 

What About The Muscles Of My Knee?

Because there is such a large focus on the glutes in our programs, it often begs the question for a lot of people: “What about the muscles of my knee”?

This is a great question, which helps to shed a light on one of the most commonly misunderstood factors when it comes to knee pain. The fact that our knee joint is an inherently stable joint with a relatively small range of movement possible (when compared with other joints such as the hip & shoulder). This range of movement is really only categorised in one plane of motion (i.e. flexion & extension; bringing the knee towards the backside, or straightening it out). What this means is that the health & function of our knee is predominantly governed by the function of muscles above & below the knee itself.

While there certainly is an impact of the muscles that cross the knee joint (quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, etc.), working on only these muscles is a common culprit of poorly conducted rehab programs.

What’s more, how we move globally and how we are able to control the stability & mobility of our body will have big impacts on our overall knee health (to see more about this concept in detail, check out our comprehensive article HERE). That’s why we focus on movement first & take a global approach to treating knee pain. This approach really helps to highlight the importance of the quote “he who treats the site of pain is lost” touted in our last article.

Our knee is an incredibly strong structure that can tolerate an incredible amount of force. In a large majority of people, knee pain is simply a symptom of dysfunction of somewhere else in their body. Usually, this dysfunction has occurred for long enough to cause the body to de-adapt over time, which eventually leads an inability of the structures of the body to tolerate loading (so much so that their body struggles to cope with the forces it experiences in it’s day to day existence & develops pain/conditions such as arthritis). To see more about this concept of adaptation, related to knee health, check out our comprehensive article HERE.

And so to leave you today, we want to finish with a note of positivity. A note of what is possible for human beings. We should preface the video below by saying that we certainly don’t expect everyone will be able to do the crazy things that we see. Nor are we suggesting that these people are perfect humans. What we do want to highlight is the fact that these people are able to tolerate what would be considered by many ‘experts’ (researchers, health professionals etc.) to be impossible. If we think about the concept of adaptation highlighted in the article linked above, we could effectively think of these people at being at level 100 in terms of their overall ability to tolerate force through their joints (where most ordinary people would be at say level 5). These people have adapted to doing this kind of high force movement over years & now their body is able to tolerate these forces. If the average person at level 5 tried to jump in and do these movements, they would probably seriously injure themselves, with the force experienced by their body being too great for it to handle. But that’s not to say with years of specialised training & exercise that they couldn’t slowly work their way towards being able to do this kind of stuff!

And this exact example is the same thing for people who are struggling with knee pain (albeit more extreme). If most people who have knee pain are at level 1, then all it takes is a certain amount of specialised training to be able to get themselves to a level where they aren’t in pain (let’s say level 5+). The difficulty in training at these lower levels is that a comprehensive understanding of the human body & human adaptation is required to make sure things are applied at the right level to effectively progress. This is where our concept of Specialised Exercise was born. What’s more, when it comes to human adaptation, we’re talking in terms of weeks & months. Typically it takes about 48-72 hours for the body to fully recover from an intense bout of exercise. That’s why it’s critical to think long term with our exercise programs & why we focus on far more than just the 12-week program that we offer.

But that’s all for now!

We encourage you to watch the video below with the lens of human adaptation in mind. Don’t think ‘that’s impossible’, because what you see in front of your eyes is already being done. Instead, think through the lens of the power of yet. Realise that even if you have no intention of ever doing anything that these people can do, that you can learn from them. If they’re able to reach level 100+, then surely you can reach level 5 with relative ease 🙂