A recommendation to improve knee pain
I was working with a client today that had difficulty standing up from a chair. He is an elderly male with many mobility restrictions throughout his body. His goal is to improve knee pain and strength. He doesn’t have severe pain but just has difficulty moving around at times.
He walks slow but typically without pain. He has a weakness when trying to climb stairs and also has some balance issues that we work on. He’s making progress with exercise, however, he has left knee pain when standing up from a chair.
I routinely use a chair sit-to-stand movement pattern, bilaterally, for strength training and balance in my older clients. With younger clients, I use 1 leg sit-to-stand. I also teach a more hip dominant movement to engage the glutes & hams vs. the quads.
Anyway, he was having left knee pain when standing up so I used a modified TMR movement (see video). What I had him do was lean over to the right leg when standing up. I asked him to try and put the majority of his weight on his right side and push the foot into the floor. He was pain-free on the right so this was appropriate for him.
He completed 3 sets of 10 reps, and I then asked him to go back to standing up from the chair on both legs equally. This is essentially a pre & post testing after the corrective movement was performed. He reported a big improvement in the left knee pain after those first 3 sets but not total elimination.
I asked him to perform 3 more sets with him really pushing through the good side (right) before we re-test using both. So when we went back to using both legs his left knee pain was gone!
This another example of how Total Motion Release can be applied in a functional manner to help move people toward pain-free function.