Do you have bad knees because you’re old or are you old because you have bad knees?

Do you have bad knees because you’re old or are you old because you have bad knees?

If you follow my SocMed channels you may see me doing jump squats in my back yard with a kettlebell on my back.

Deep, full range squats.

At the age of 49½ years young.

I’m well past the age many are complaining their knees are shot, they’re “too old” and so on and so forth.

To be fair, I’m not a fair comparison for most, I have trained in one way or another all my life.

Keeping my strength, mobility and endurance topped up is a key part of who I am.

But what about the everyman

Do knees just have an expiry date? A “best before”

I genuinely don’t believe so, but shit happens.

But here’s a thing, the worst knees I’ve worked with, outside of acute injury such as a road traffic accident, the worst knees belong to people who don’t train or exercise.

The people never really bend their knees or hips all the way, never use the full range of the joints, and don’t deliberately work on the musculature.

When the time comes to start exercise, maybe because of knee pain, they often find almost immediate relief, I should say partial relief there.

When a person tells me they have knee pain, and there’s no evidence of structural damage, meniscus tears, cartilage damage etc.

I look at their whole body movement and see what they are or are not doing.

Then, we try putting that missing movement back.

And so often we find the missing movements are those that ask the adductors to join the party.

Second to that would be the hamstrings

Sometimes the hip flexor, and almost always the quads.

And when we say “join the party” we mean an eccentric load, ie a stretch.

Muscles love to be stretched, because that’s when they shout out and ask to contract (shorten)

A contracted muscle is finished, it can only lengthen again, it's the lengthened muscles that are primed and ready to fire.

And when all the leg and hip muscles are pulling their weight, the knee joint often breathes a sigh of relief.

This was a big part of what was going through my mind when I created the “Resting Squat” online course.

The ability to sit in a resting squat suggests that all muscles and joints in the lower body are probably playing ball.

So in working towards a resting squat, even if you never achieve it, you are dealing with any existing issues.

And the course as I present it is a journey of self discovery as you work the exercises to find the ones that your body responds to.

That help you work through your problems, not the problems me or any SocMed Guru says you have.

Existing clients have all the online courses built into their membership packages, everyone else will have to pay a small fee to access them.

Simple

Not Easy

Dave www.DaveHedges.net