Video

Transcript

so i want to talk about knee pain and tight calfs  now especially when you get knee pain in the front  

part just underneath the patella or the kneecap  sometimes they call this patellar tendonitis  

now the patella is a kneecap and there’s a  tendon attached to the top part of that bone  

which is then connected to your quadricep muscles  on your front part of your thigh so this is  

usually caused by tight calf muscles now sometimes  it could be tight hamstrings but most of the time  

it’s going to be a tight calf muscle and you’re  going to have a difficulty of bringing your foot  

upwards okay so when you bring your foot upward  that’s called dorsiflexion so you won’t be able  

to do that as well why because your calf is tight  so there’s an interesting 2011 study that shows  

that when you have reduced dorsiflexion which is  tight calves that is going to increase your risk  

of getting patellar tendonitis by a factor of 16x  so you want to avoid that condition because that’s  

going to affect your ability to run jump and do  other types of motion so what is the solution  

stretch the calf muscle so to stretch the calf  muscle you can just go on your stairs either  

going downstairs or going upstairs and put the  front part of your foot on one of the steps and  

then start stretching the calves or better yet you  can start stretching your calves on a slant board  

and after you do that for a few days i would add  another exercise and i would start to do this  

statically in other words not on a step or on the  slant board you take a small pillow put it between  

the knees and then you take both of your knees  and actually draw a circle clockwise okay about  

10 times and then draw a circle counterclockwise  now doing this exercise you are going to  

help the dorsiflexion but you’re going to do it in  a coordinated way then you can actually do this on  

the slant board to increase even more coordinated  activity while you’re stretching it at the same  

time now if you want more information about the  stretch check out the video i put down below so  

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