knee pain

Here are 3 dynamic exercises to get you prepared for your next run

1. The first exercise, 90/90 Hip Translations, work on warming up your hip capsule and the muscles that innervate your low back, pelvis, and knees. This is an important yet gentle step to increase the range of motion and control from your hips. The majority of your stride with come from this control and full range of motion. It will also help to decrease the likelihood of injuries from compensation patterns.
2. The next exercise, Dynamic Runner Prep, helps to activate your posterior chain. This gets the muscles of the glutes, hamstrings, calves and more to fire. This will help to control and use the proper muscles needed during running. If they don’t fire we can compensate with improper muscles like your low back (erectors and quadratus lumborum), quads, and hip flexors. If we use these instead you can expect to experience low back pain, side cramps, hip flexor cramping, knee pain, IT-Band tightness, shin splints and more. So get that posterior chain firing!
3. Lastly, the Dynamic Runner will warm up your balance and proprioception. During running you’re rarely standing still. The tiny muscles and nerves that help us stay up-right and propel forward need to work in conjunction with the big muscles that help us power into the next stride. By imprinting the proper motion of loading and exploding replicates your running pattern. By doing this before your run it’s easy to see and CORRECT what imperfections are there. Plus, it gets your brain and body ready to know how it should feel to be running with correct form.

Try these before you next run and let us know how you feel. Keep running!

If you ever have any questions or something doesn’t feel right, please reach out to your rehab specialist or provider. And don’t forget, you can always schedule an in-depth appointment to look at the foundations of your stride and how your running gait patterns could be causing you pain. We’re here to help!

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