Lindsay Baumgren shares five exercises she uses 10 weeks after meniscus repair surgery. Walking backwards activates the VMO, toe raises strengthen the shock absorber muscle, and knee-over-toe calf raises train ankle-knee coordination. She does 40 seconds work, 20 seconds rest, for 3-4 sets.
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Hi, I'm Lindsay Baumgren of Nurse Move Love and these are five knee strengthening exercises you should be doing daily. For more content like this, hit subscribe to our YouTube channel. Alright, you guys, I have five knee strengthening exercises. Like I said, you should be doing these daily. And the reason I took an interest in this and have added these to my routine is because I'm about 10 weeks post surgery, I completely tore my meniscus and had repair surgery. So I'm about 10 weeks post surgery and got that brace off, got some bend and some flexion coming back. And I've been incorporating these exercises into my strength training routine as a way to improve my knee health and rehab my surgery knee. So I'm gonna walk you through it. It's five moves and you're gonna do them for about 40 seconds of work, 20 seconds of rest. I'm just using that as a format to walk you through these and I'll talk about how I incorporate these exercises into my daily workout routine. Now, if you have a chair, you can make sure you have that in play. Or you can just simply use a wall too for some calf raises that we're going to do if you need some balance support. All right, so we're going to jump right in and your first move is going to be walking backwards, which is going to look kind of funny because I'm literally just going to sit on this mat and go side to side and walk backwards. But I'll talk about ways you can integrate this into your workout routine and why you should be doing each exercise. So this is really an educational video, but I suggest you join me and add it to your workout today. So let's go ahead and start. 40 seconds on the timer. We're going to walk backwards. I'm going to start on this side of my mat and I'm just going to walk backwards. And so I'm walking backwards and I just want you to look at, as I walk backwards, where my toe strikes. So toe strikes and then where my knee is in relation to that. So typically this is a position in which I'm getting knee over toe. So a lot of these exercises I did get from the knees over toes guy. Ben Patrick, I've been following him and his program and the ATG program, the Athletic Truth Group. After my knee surgery, a lot of people have had success doing his exercises. So I was like, I'm going to do them too. The reason I'm walking backwards is I want to get my knee over toe, but I really want to strengthen my vmo. Okay, so my VMO is the tear dropped muscle. I'm just going to show you right here, the teardrop muscle right here on my quad. And this is one of the fastest twitch muscles in my quad, one of the four fastest twitch. And it's going to be the first to absorb that shock of the knee. So next we're going to go to tib raises. I'm going to come back here to a wall and I'm literally placing my back against the wall and I'm just going to pull my toes towards my face right here to braces. So you can join me. We'll do this for 40 seconds. Typically, if I was adding this to my workout routine, okay, I would do four, three to four sets of 25 reps. So I would just add 25 reps in right here. I'm pulling my toes back towards my shin. This is going to strengthen the tibialis, this muscle right here, which is the number one shock absorber of the knee. So having strong tibs plays a really big role in our knee health as well as our ankle health, too. 2. All right, so I'm just pulling these up. The last five reps should feel pretty challenging. You feel burn in the front of the shin. Nice. Got five, four, three, two and one. Nice. And now I'm going to bring the chair into play and I'm going to show you a knee over toe calf raise. So you could do standard calf raise, but coming into this knee over toe position, I'm just bending my knees over my toes and I'm going to do calf raises from this position. All right, if that's not comfortable, go ahead and do a standard calf raise. We'll talk about the benefits. Here we go. So calf raises. So in this position, you'll see I'm in this position because think about anytime you sprint, you jump, which I can't do because my knee jump and land. You're in this position. Right. And so coming and doing calf raises in this position is a great way to train your body by functionally how to absorb that shock or when you're taking off, accelerating, decelerating. Right. It's a really great exercise for knee health as well as ankle health and your Achilles. So knee injuries, Achilles injuries are great. Again, I do this typically rep style, 25 reps for three to four sets. Okay, nice. All right, we're moving on. And next you could do a step down. You can add a small book or a small step. I'm going to do this just from the ground more of like a Patrick step versus a step step down. Because like I said, I'm still recovering. This knee right here, I'll start on my good knee. So you can see foot planted on the ground. I am simply right here going to tap my heel out in front of me again, striving to get that knee over toe while keeping my back heel on the ground. So nice bend. I'm bending that knee as far as I can bend while keeping my back heel planted. If the heel starts to pop, that's when I know I've hit my ankle knee range of motion right here, tapping that heel in front of me. Okay, I'll show you what it looks like on my bad knee. So this is my surgery knee. I'm really still trying to get that range of motion. So I'm just barely getting that knee to meet my toe. My heels tapping out in front of me a lot shallower than that range of motion when I was way out in front. So you do that on each knee. Again, you could go rep based or time based up to you. Again, that's really strengthening the VMO right here, that teardrop shape muscle and our quad, which really helps absorb the knee shock. And then your final move is going to be a glute bridge. So we're going to come down to the back of the mat or to the mat and you're going to lay your back on the mat, legs bent at 90 degrees, and you're going to bridge. So the first four exercises focus really on strengthening the quad and the front of the knee. All right, we've got calf raises in there, but just as much as you strengthen the front, you need to strengthen the back. So right here, these muscles are also very important. We're going to add a glute bridge in here. You could do this on an exercise ball. You could add a hamstring curl. Just also strengthening the back side of the body, equally as important to strengthening the front side of the body. So these are exercises I've been incorporating into my routine post surgery to help with knee health. I hope you found them valuable and I hope you add them to your routine to keep your body and your knees healthy. Thanks so much for joining me and have a great day. If you've struggled from a knee injury or are currently recovering from a knee injury like me hit. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. We filmed a bunch of content that is knee friendly. You can find a workout that's seated right here or you can find my full list of workouts I filmed while I was post surgery in this playlist right here. Have a great day.
