Knees, Knees Knees – Part 1

Your foot bones connected to your … shin bone, your shin bones connected to your … knee bone, your knee bones connected to your … you know the story……

….We all do, we all spent a childhood singing this exact song. What when wrong? How did we forget that everything is connected in the body? We all grew up and started making things complicated and separate. Well not on my watch. You my darlings are getting back in touch with your bodies!

So knees. These little babies get such a bad wrap for causing pain but really these structures are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Remember pain is the bodies way of telling us to make a change it is vary rarely where the actual root cause is! Now that change could be physical, psychological or social but that, my lovelies is another blog. Just think, the foot is the only thing that connects us to the world, communicating what’s going on above us and below us and the hips and pelvis are trying to keep our middles both stable and mobile whilst giving a home to our internal organs. If we have two notorious areas for getting stiff (hips and ankles) the knees have no other option to adjust and move more to accommodate this stiffness. If something has to move more it has to work harder.

Pain after all, can come from an area that is stuck or an area that is moving too much.

Everyone is different, clocking up a life time of compensations but where are YOU? First off roll them trousers up and get those knees out. Yes you, don’t just read this, lets get interactive! Get someone to take a picture of you or look in the mirror. Stand with your feet hip width apart, have a shake and just relax. Checkout those knees, let’s start assessing. Do they both roll in? Both roll out? Both face forward? Or one rolls in and one rolls out? Where do you feel the weight in your feet? Front, back middle or sides? One foot different to the other? One heavier than the other? A knee or knees that turn in are called valgus, a knee or knees that turn out are called varus.

Now you have an idea of where you are let’s see how the body connects. Make your stance a little wider, imagine you are sandwiched between two panes of glass. All I want you to do is shift your hips slowly to the right keeping your legs straight. As you do this can you feel how your left foot flattens opening the joints in your foot stretching the muscles, your left inner thigh stretches and the inside of the knee opens. Feel the outside of the left hip closing. Now what happens in the right leg at the same time. As the pelvis moves to the right the arch in the right foot raises closing the joints in the foot contracting the muscles. The muscles on the inside of the right thigh are contracting as the joints on the inside of knee are closing. The outside of the right hip the joints are opening lengthening the muscle. Go back the other way and the opposite happens.

Are you starting to see how the position of the knee is dictated to by above and below? How everything impacts on everything? We could go on up the body but lets keep it simple.

Let’s leave it here for part 1. Have a play and a FEEL of how your body adapts when you move side to side and we shall continue the adventure next time.

Remember knowledge is power when action is taken!

Elle x