Your Knees Will Thank You!
Knee pain when bending and moving is incredibly common in individuals of varying walks of life. Some individuals who have knee pain are older adults who haven’t worked out in years, while others are high level athletes who simply train at their highest potential. Despite your current background, having strong knees makes every aspect of movement and life much more enjoyable. Today, I am going to be sharing with you some of my favorite slant board exercises for knee pain, which can strengthen your knee joint quickly, and get you back to a life worth living.
Need a Slant Board?
If you want to do the exercises outlined below, and shown above in the video linked, I would highly recommend grabbing a slant board for yourself to do these movements. I am going to go ahead and link my favorite slant board below that you can check out for yourself, to the exercises to the fullest. Feel free to consult the video above if you have any questions on how any of the movements look.
Slant Board Exercises for Knee Pain
The first thing I want to address is the origin of the knee pain itself. Often, individuals who are experiencing knee pain have strength and stability issues in their hips and ankles as well. Since these areas translate force through the knees, your knees often get quite a bit of the brunt. Because of this, the following exercises are going to target your hips, knees, and ankles. For the best results, I would recommend every single one of these!
Slant Board Step Downs
Slant board step downs, are one of my favorite knee strengthening exercises to start with. This exercise will strengthen your knees in a very small range of motion. When doing this exercise, we are trying to do 30 or more total repetitions. This is simply because we are trying to get as much blood flow to the knee joint as possible when doing this movement.
Calf Stretch Hold
For this one, you’ll flip the calf stretch slantboard around from what we previously did. Next, you will slowly lean your knee forward until you get a nice gentle stretch on your calf. When doing this, the name of the game is to make sure your heel is slightly elevated off of the slant board. This will make sure that you get a little bit of a stretch, as well as some isometric strengthening in your calf muscle as well.
Raised Toe Deadlifts
Raised toe deadlifts are a potent way for you to open up your calf muscles, as well as strengthen your hips and lower back. By doing this exercise, you’ll be able to improve the stability of your hips, which will allow you to ease pain in your knees. For this exercise make sure to keep your back nice and straight when doing it. As noted in the video above, I like doing this with a kettlebell, as it forces you to reach in front of the calf stretch board.
Single Leg Squat Hold (Sideways)
This is a very small and simple movement, but extremely effective at decreasing knee pain. For this one, you’ll start with your foot on the slant of the slant board, sideways. next, you will bend your knee slightly so that it is in a single leg squat hold position. Make sure you repeat this exercise on both legs and both directions of the slantboard.
ATG Split Squat
The ATG split squat is one of the best knee pain exercises that will not only strengthen your knees, but also stretch out your hips. For this one, you will likely need to find an elevated surface to place your foot up onto. Then you will gently push your knee forward, keeping your back leg nice and straight. This will really strengthen the tendons in your knees, and keep your hips nice and mobile.
Slant Board Squats
Tying all of these exercises together, we will end with some slant board squats. Slant-board squats are incredibly effective at reducing knee pain, as they allow most individuals to do a full squat, even if they have limited mobility. Go as low as you can, when doing this exercise, and slowly work your way up to a full deep slantboard squats over time.
One More Thing..
If you want to continue to improve your overall health and knowledge of the gym, regardless of your current abilities in life, you need to subscribe to our blog. Once you’ve finished doing that, feel free to check out another article I created below, showing you a few lower back stretches that can help ease your pain, when you get a flair up there as well!
QUICK Back Pain Relief: Simple Stretches You Can Do In a Chair
Back Pain: Make it Stop! Back pain is something that many of us deal with on a day to day basis. Just because you are dealing with back pain, doesn’t mean that there is nothing for you to do. In fact, by the end of this article, you will know a few simple stretches that…
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