5 exercises that help keep knees healthy and strong
- Stay in Motion. It's the number one rule of joint health: The more you move, the less stiffness you'll have.
Ways to achieve this:
- Whether you're reading, working, or watching TV, change positions often. Take breaks from your desk or your chair and get active.
- You can set yourself alarm reminders to remind you to do so, because sometimes we get carried away and lose track of time.
- Going to the gym regularly can increase functional strength and flexibility in the legs and doing more outdoor activities regularly on a weekly basis. Starting your day off with a workout can be excellent for waking your body up and will provide you with more energy for the day.
- Stay at a healthy weight for your height.
Ways to achieve this:
- Well balanced eating lifestyle. Controlling the timings of your meals in relation to your schedules and eating enough and not too much.
- Limit portion sizes to control your calorie intake. Don’t eat to the point that you are full, eat to the point where you have still space left.
- Be as physically active as you can daily. Getting involved in sport can be a good idea if gym is not your thing. This way you can socialise more too, and it gives you a motivational purpose to keep going back.
- Try and go low impact.
- Don’t over-do it at the gym. Doing endless amounts of cardio is not going to make you maintain weight and lose weight consistently. It will wear and tear your joints. Try working with shorter bursts of exercise but more intense and not as continuous. Of-course involve maybe three periods of continuous cardio into your routine. It is more beneficial to add 20 to 30 minutes of cardio at the end of a workout as you will burn a lot more calories than you would at the start of a workout. So, leave your continuous cardio for after the weights.
- There is no benefit really in doing high impact movements if you don’t need to be doing them. Unless course you do sport and there is a purpose behind it. Try and do low impact cardio sessions and doing volume training would benefit you more to maintain a good figure than lifting too heavy and doing too much intensity.
- Power Up Your Trunk strength.
- Glute Isolation Exercises
- Isometric core exercises.
- Postural Exercises.
- Functional Core Strength Exercises
- Functional Full Body exercises
Cable machines and specific weighted workouts can be a great source of training to strengthen your core. Doing side crunches, leg raises and crunches ect.. aren’t the most effective way in doing do.
- Work on your Flexibility (Range of motion)
Muscles to Stretch in Isolation in your legs:
Hip Flexors Gastrocnemius (Calf)
Quadricep muscles Glutes
Hamstring muscles Peroneal Muscles (Shin area of the foot)
Abductor muscles Adductor Muscles
Soloes
Doing ankle mobilisation work in your ankles will also help mobilise the knees specially into the hips and glutes. The three major muscles to focus most on to stretch would be the Front Thighs (Quadriceps), the Hamstrings (back upper section of your legs) and Your Hips/Glutes.
To maintain your current flexibility:
Hold for 15 to 20 seconds
To improve flexibility:
30 seconds to 90 seconds and repetitively.
Try to repeat exercises more than once and use a variety of stretches for each muscle and not just one all the time.
There are different types of stretching which you can use:
ballistic stretching.
dynamic stretching.
active stretching.
passive (or relaxed) stretching.
static stretching.
isometric stretching.
PNF stretching
Dynamic Stretches are used more in warming up for workouts or just in general as a warm-up to do static stretches in depth. PNF is the type of stretching I most recommend for improving flexibility. But everyone is different so try all the methods and see what works best for you.
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