Hi, I’m Dr. Molly with your Goals Physical Therapy. Lateral lunges are amazing. If you’re a runner, they are perfect to help you learn how to balance on one foot and counteract all of those side to side movements.
Heaven forbid you hit the edge of a sidewalk, a rock or a pebble. You need to be able to combat that motion if you play basketball, being able to quickly change positions, lateral lunges are perfect for that. Same thing with tennis.
Needless to say I’m a big fan of the lateral lunge, but what happens if you’re doing those lateral lunges and your knees keep grinding?
Are they still as good as what I just talked about? It’s probably very hard to assume they are if your knees are constantly grinding. Certainly if they’re swelling afterwards. The reason I’m doing this video is because I don’t want you to give up on those lateral lunges just yet.
Let’s see if we can’t get rid of that pain so that you can get all the benefits of still doing those lateral lunges. Again, they are an amazing exercise, truly anything that allows you to challenge one side of your body and then the other to help you stay balanced is a beautiful thing.
especially if it’s grinding enough that there’s swelling associated with it. I’m doing this video to help you not to worry about it and not develop arthritis or to be worried about needing a knee replacement in a few years.
If you continue this, working out should not be damaging your body. It should only be making things better. Let’s get started with these four suggestions that I have for you. First we’ll begin with a bit of the anatomy of your knee, because that’ll help the rest of this.
Your knee is pretty simple because it’s just a hinge joint. It’s your tibia, which is your shin bone and your femur, which is your thigh bone where they meet. That’s your knee. Over your knee, you have a kneecap. Your kneecap is actually pretty cool. It’s just a fulcrum, a floating bone that has its own little ridge on its back
That ridge fits perfectly inside of its own channel on your femur. When your quad muscles work together and they’re synchronized they have the same amount of strength, not one side’s too tight, the other side’s weak, everything’s balanced.
Your kneecap gets pulled up and down its canal and everything works beautifully. There’s no grinding, there’s no random noises, there’s no knee swelling. It’s a beautiful thing and it allows you to have more power in your thigh than you would if you didn’t have a kneecap. Pretty cool.
Knees grind when the kneecap pops in and out, when there’s too much compression at that joint. If your kneecap is being pushed into its canal and literally grinded up that canal and back down, that’s where you can get that grinding noise.
That’s what these suggestions are, right? Because what we really want is we wanna be able to do that lateral lunge in such a way that that kneecap is able to track up and down its canal without being pulled out to the side without it being pushed into the joint more. We want nice balanced lateral lunges with no noises please.
The way that we’re going to get that is by making sure that our thighs and our hips are flexible. Since I’ve talked about it, a lot of people use lunges lateral forward back as a way to stretch out their hips, certainly before an activity.
As it implies, it takes a lot of range of motion for you to be able to do a lunge properly. If you are dealing with grinding in your knee, then I would suggest spending a little extra time doing different types of stretches to get more length out of your thigh muscle, your quads, your hamstrings and your glutes, and your piriformis.
To make sure that when you get down into that deep part of that lunge that you really have enough flexibility in those muscles to not be compressing your kneecap against the femur.
Suggestion number one, flexibility. Take the time to stretch before you do those lateral lunges. Then there really is a certain amount of strength to get into that position. As I mentioned before, to get that kneecap to track correctly inside of its canal, you need to have equal pull coming from the outside as coming from the inside on that thigh.
You have four thigh muscles, hence quads. If the one on the outside is pulling dramatically harder than the one on the inside, then what happens is your kneecap gets popped out of the joint, it comes out of its canal for a brief moment and then it comes back in. To prevent that, you just need to make sure that your thigh muscle is strong enough to tolerate going down into that deep part of the lunge.
Sometimes when I’m working with people, it’s purely the depth that they can’t tolerate. I would tell them not to go as low. In some instances, depending on where you are in training. If you’re new to lunges or you’ve been over training, maybe you need to back off or lower the amount of weight that you’re using while you’re doing the lunges so that the outside quad is not just dominating over a weaker inside quad muscle. That’s number two. Make sure that your quad strength is strong enough to tolerate what you’re trying to do.
I don’t think many people think about this, but your ankle stability, because if your ankle just rolls in, thinking pronation, right? So if the whole inside of your foot collapses, your knee comes in with it, which again makes it harder for that inside quad to grab and to be strong, to get a good contraction compared to the tightness on that outside thigh muscle.
So your kneecap will be pulled out of the joint a bit and then pushed back in. If you see your knee wobble, you know, everybody looks for those knee wiggles, right? You wanna keep your knee over your foot to make sure that it’s gonna be in the best alignment, allowing it the best opportunity to track your kneecap inside of that canal.
The same is true because sometimes what happens is people over supinate, so they push their knee outside of their foot. So you have the inside of your foot and then the outside, right? If your knee is past the outside of your foot, that will also cause a problem, causing extra grinding.
That can be where that noise is coming from because of that, the extra compression is what I meant, but it causes extra compression on that joint, which then causes that grinding. So truly, if you’re doing those lateral lunges, you need to make sure that your form is good and that your knee is staying in line with your foot and your knee is not going past your toe. That is very, very important.
My first three were to make sure that your flexibility is good. You need to have enough flexibility to be into that deep depth. You need to make sure that you have enough quad strength to tolerate the weight or the depth that you’re going and you need to make sure that your form is good and that your ankle stability is good.
If you are having trouble with ankle stability, wearing supportive shoes is a good way to help overcome that. Because sometimes we tend to wear shoes that let our foot do whatever it wants. In this case, we don’t necessarily want our feet to do whatever we want.
We want it to help our knees stay in alignment.
Last, it is not shocking, but sometimes these things are very hard to do on your own. Sometimes you can get a little bit of a gain, you have less grinding, less pain, and being less uncomfortable. Because you’re able to maybe fix your form, watch your depth, but then you get stuck or it doesn’t fully resolve.
Have somebody else with a set of eyes that can actually assess what’s happening at your hips, your knee and your ankle so that you can get a clear picture of exactly where that grinding is coming from, for you and help you come up with a very clear, concise, specialized program for you to get you back to lateral lunges.
Truly lateral lunges help you with many, many things. If you’re having a problem with the lateral lunges, there’s probably something else that’s happening in another exercise that is more pronounced here. There’s no reason to let this exercise go and there’s certainly no reason to suffer from knee grinding for a long time. Let’s get in there, let’s figure it out. Let’s get you back on track for your fitness goals.
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If you have a very specific question or if you don’t have a very specific question, you just have a question and you would like to talk to a therapist first before committing to a full evaluation. I completely understand and I love fielding questions. I will have a button below for you that says, “Talk to a PT”.
You’ll fill out a quick form, um, with that after that button and my office will help set up a time for us to chat. I typically set out 20 minutes for those conversations so that we make sure that we have enough time to actually answer your question instead of feeling like you’re getting rushed off the phone.
So until we have the opportunity to meet and talk, I hope that you’re having a lovely day. Bye.
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