How To Fix And Prevent Knee Pain For Good | Mind Pump 2117

Knee pain is one of the most common types of pain that people report. Today's episode, we're going to talk about how to fix knee pain. Better yet, how to prevent it from ever happening in the first place. So you're going to love this episode. Let's talk about the knee pain. Who's got the worst knees here? Worst knees? That's a good question. All of us are pretty good with knees. You've had knee surgery. Yeah, I've had knee surgery. Have you had knee surgery? I mean, I didn't have surgery, but I did strain and then slightly tear my MCL. Okay. Yeah. No, no cool story. I had dislocated kneecap. That's about it. Oh, you did? How did you do that? My, uh, 13 years old playing at a park, playing volleyball with the family. And I landed weird and my kneecap went out to the side and then that's what, after that I had to rehab it. Ruined the barbecue. Yeah, I know. I know. No more sport ball for you. I retired after that. I was, I was saving, I was saving a baby. So that's how I do it. Dove in front of a car. And, uh, of course you were. No, a guy landed on my knee. It wasn't even like a good play or anything. We were both going out for a rebound and like I like planted and when my leg was straight and he landed on it and just. Well, so what's interesting is, um, I looked up the statistics for how many people, um, report knee pain. 25% of Americans report knee pain. So it's, it's definitely one of the most common ones. I think back pain might be a little more back pain is higher. Yeah. But knee pain is, is right there. Second. Um, it's super common. And a lot of the, a majority of that is not the kind that we're explaining where you hurt yourself and then it hurts until it heals. Right. It's the chronic type. It's like, yeah, it's like I hurt my knee, but that was 10 years ago. Or, you know, it just bothers me. I can't do certain things. I'm just getting old. Um, and there's this myth out there that it's a overuse that people will hear that. It's an over you. Oh, it's because you're using your knees too much. Here's something that kind of flies in the face of that reported knee pain has gone up 65% in the last two decades. Wow. So, and I don't think people are moving more. Yeah. They're moving less. And yet you're getting more, uh, reported knee pain. So that right there shows you that it's not because, well, I mean, I would make the case that that's exactly why it's going. Yeah. Right. Yep. Yep. A hundred percent. You know, this, obviously this conversation is, it's spurred from the, you know, this, we just had a caller not that long ago who brought up prime pro. And this is not the first time this has happened. We've actually had this had multiple times where someone has purchased our maps prime pro program, which goes over all the major joints in the body and the mobility movements to it. And people go, why is there nothing for the knee? And so we've had to explain this and we normally address it in a short version, uh, when it gets asked, but you know, it's like, you know what, maybe we should do an episode explaining since this has happened so many times where people don't quite understand why we, there's not these mobility drills for the knee and isolating just the knee. Like we're looking elsewhere. Right. Yet everybody, but everybody correlates knee pain is like an issue, a major issue. So where, okay, what do I do about it? And very few people understand where it stems from or the root cause. And so I think it's important to address that. Now this, although it's true that oftentimes joint pain is the result of things, other things happening in the body so that that joint ends up operating over time in a way that's not optimal. So that's true. A lot of the times with the knee, it's almost always true because, uh, the knee is pretty basic in compare in comparison to the joints that are closest to it, the hip and the ankle. And so this is why we're going to talk about this in today's episode. Um, and hip and ankle issues, uh, are what tend to cause most of the knee pain. Cause if you look at the knee, first off, yes, you need to have strong muscles that support the knee. So your hamstrings, your quads, or should I say strong, stable muscles, right? Quads, the abductors, adductors, those all should be pretty strong cause that helps support the knee. But the knee is pretty basic, um, in the sense that it really only flexes and extends. Okay. So what does that mean? That means you can bend your knee or you can extend your name. Okay. There are ligaments attached to the knee that prevent it from really doing anything else or that keep it stable. So like you have like the ACL, PCL that keep it from sliding apart. Um, you have lateral ligaments like the MCL, LCL that keep it from bending sideways the meniscus, which is a shock absorber that prevents it really from twisting too much. All those things, all those ligaments and cartilage is there to keep the knee kind of stable so that it can try to keep it in place and it's optimal track. And then to add a little bit more complexity, you have the kneecap, which kind of floats on top of the femur, the, the, the big bone of the, of the leg. And it kind of glides if you take a kneecap off and look at it underneath it, there's cartilage and it kind of slides over a groove every time you bend and extend your knee. So that's how the knee is operating. And if it's not operating optimally, if some ligaments are having to do more work than they're supposed to in terms of supporting, or if the meniscus is constantly being strained because there's stuff going on with the ankle or the hip, or if the kneecap is tracking too hard to the left or the right, then you start to develop chronic problems. And you can see the issue in the knee oftentimes. So a doctor can go in and be like, Oh, inflammation here in the meniscus or there's a slight tear, or you have patella chondromalacia, which is underneath the patella where it's all kind of chewed up. That is, yes, that's one of the reasons why the pain is there. But the root issue is that the knee is not operating optimally. And again, it has a lot more, most of the time to do with the hip and the ankle. I'm glad you went that direction because I also think that there's a bunch of people that get lost in this conversation that don't understand that they fall in the category of this chronic pain because they got diagnosed from a doctor. They go in and they're told they have tendinitis, bursitis, they have arthritis. And so they think, Oh, this is, this isn't something that I could have solved. This is not something I could have fixed. It's like, I just got a bad, bad draw on the cards. Yeah, I'm getting older. And so it's like that, but that falls in the category of chronic pain. In fact, like before we had done the episode, I just wanted to see what, um, you know, Google and chat GBT said for like the 10 most common reasons for pain. And like every single one of them were all these, you know, bursitis, the arthritis, the tendinitis, and all the patellar stuff, everything is all things that are related to poor movement or weakness in those other joints that then end up causing that drawn out amount of time. And so I remember talking to, I would tell clients like when they come in and they, Oh, I have really bad knees. And then I'd say, Oh, well, you know, we need to address hip mobility and ankle mobility and strengthen those areas. And they'd be like, Oh no, no, no. My doctor says that I have tendinitis or I have bursitis or I have arthritis and I shouldn't do squatting and I shouldn't do these things. And like I was always trying to overcome that diagnosis from the doctor because it made people believe that they have this thing that they're forever going to be plagued with. And there wasn't something that we can do to address it and potentially eliminate it completely. Because a lot of people don't understand that just because you get diagnosed with those things doesn't mean that you you're stuck with it for the rest of your life. All right. Today's program giveaway is the RGB bundle, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance and MAPS Aesthetic. Here's how you can enter to win. Leave a comment below this video, the first 24 hours that we drop it, subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comments section. We're also running a sale right now on some programs. Our beginner workout program, MAPS Starter is 50% off. And then we have a bundle that includes MAPS Anabolic and MAPS Prime. That's the starter bundle. We made that also 50% off. If you're interested, click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, back to the show. We have to differentiate something because common does not mean normal. Okay. So knee pain is common, but that doesn't mean it's normal. You're not supposed to have chronic pain in your joints. Your body is very well equipped at regenerating, at lubricating, and at moving, at tamping down inflammation when it needs to, producing inflammation when it needs to. So it's really good at these things. But if things are moving in suboptimal ways over time and you're overcoming your body's ability to heal and recover and lubricate, then you start to develop these chronic issues. And then yes, the pain is coming from the fact that you have swelling underneath your kneecap, but that's not what caused the swelling to begin with. So it'd be like wearing one shoe with a five inch rise and then you walking around and then your back hurts. And so the doctor's like, Oh, the back pain, I can see where it's coming from when your discs is over here. But they never addressed the fact that you're wearing one shoe that's so much higher than the other. Right. So it's the same thing. So yes, you can look at a knee joint and you can see, you know, tendonitis and inflammation and cartilage that doesn't look right and all that stuff. And yeah, pain's coming from that. But there's a root reason as to why that's there in the first place. And it's because that knee is not operating the way, the way it should. It's doing more than it should or it's compensating for the joint surrounding it. And again, that's the ankle and hip. Which is also why what ends up happening a lot of times is people end up taking cortisone shots and it's one of the worst things that you can do because it ends up masking what's really going on and you get this temporary fix and I get it because it feels like magical right after you do that, right? You get that shot and all of a sudden it brings, it nails down all that inflammation. So the pain goes away and you feel like, Oh my God, I feel so amazing. And then what, a month, two, three months go by and then you have to go do that again. I think, Oh, this is just going to be part of my routine as I go and get these cortisone shots all the time. And it's like, dude, what's going on is that you're not addressing the root cause. It's causing the inflammation and we can get to that and fix that. Yeah. In fact, if you look at the data on cortisone shots, oftentimes, majority of the time, what they do is actually accelerate the degeneration of the joint and they cause worse problems later on. There's two reasons for this. One is it's really hammering inflammation down. You need some inflammation for your body to heal. That's, that's a signal, right? Your inflammation is, is literally your body trying to heal itself. That's why if you cut yourself, you get some reds and some swelling cause it's sending things to heal. So if you tamp it down completely, it really stopped the healing process. Pain's gone, but now there's no healing process going on. But then two, now that the pain's gone, you don't have a signal telling you that you're moving wrong. So you just move wrong more. So walk more, squat more in bad ways. And so you see the acceleration of, of joint issues as a result. So it's a temporary fix. It improves your quality of life in the short term and the long term. Um, it's, it's not great. You got to figure out what the hell, uh, the root issue is. So to give an example of kind of what we're talking about. So, you know, cause people are like, well, how's the ankle and the hips relate to the knees? So we'll look at the ankle for a second, for a second. When you do a full squat, if you're standing or doing full squat, your hip has to bend, your knee has to bend and your ankles have to bend. So let's look at the ankles for a second. As I squat, my ankle has to bend. Now, if my ankle is tight or my foot is weak or I lack mobility in it and I'm trying to squat more and I'm pushing myself down to squat more, what'll happen is my feet as I'm squatting, we'll start to turn out to compensate that twisting that's happening in the body. My hip can handle that. No problem. My hip can twist. Okay. My knee can't. So I'm squatting while my knees are twisting out and what's preventing my knees from twisting apart my meniscus. Well, if I squat enough times that way, I'm going to strain my meniscus. I'm going to have inflammation there. Maybe a tear. Of course the doctor go in there and say, Oh, we can trim your meniscus, make you feel better. But then you keep squatting, never figure out what's going on. Where in that case, if I had just worked on my ankle mobility, now when I squat, my knee wouldn't have to rotate out, but because the knee doesn't rotate and that rotating is happening under load, well now we're causing problems. That's just one example. But again, if you look at the ankle itself, it's, it can bend laterally. It can flex and extend. It can rotate to a degree. And then the foot itself has has some movement. Then the hip is also a very mobile joint in comparison to the knee. So if the hip and the ankle aren't able to stabilize and do what they're supposed to do, then what happens is the ligaments and the cartilage in the knee all of a sudden start to support things. You don't want ligaments and cartilage to do the support. You want muscle to do this. So imagine if you're holding a weight here with your elbow bent in your bicep tense. Now imagine if you extend your elbow all the way. So you put your elbow at the end of a table and then put a weight on it and your elbow, it's like an arm lock, right? And your elbows now supporting the weight, how bad that would be for the joint. So that's kind of what happens to the knee over time when those things aren't functioning the way they should. Well, I mean, that's in terms of like my actual injury, when I was playing football, it was because of the surface. So it was normally, you know, you have a little bit more give and your foot can kind of move and slide you know, on a type of like a grass surface versus like this, this was like a very thin astroturf. Like I was basically on like a really sticky kind of like a astroturf. That's almost like, uh, there's no give, no give. It's like cement just in a sense, but I was wearing like regular shoes, astroturf shoes. And so like, I wasn't used to cutting with those. I go to cut this way and my whole body keeps going that way, which then I was going to rotate, but my foot just got caught. And so now put all the pressure and buckling right there on my knee. And so it just stretched out my MCL to like a crazy degree. But that's the thing is it's, I mean, your ankle and your hips, they have to be able to have that kind of travel and movement in order to keep it in good tracking. Isn't that one of the challenges that they've had with, uh, like figuring out how to make fields, the astroturf fields is to make it as close to like grass is because one of the things about grass is grass ends up being a lot safer because it kind of gives out, right? So if your cleats get in there, it tears through the dirt and grass where you don't get stuck in something. Isn't that what they have? That other kind of turf that's got like the shavings, rubber pellets and stuff. It actually has a little bit of, uh, you know, something you could kind of dig into versus it being that like abrupt stop. Yeah. So just another example is if you look at female athletes, um, female athletes suffer from ACL tears at something like, I mean, it's, it's, it's a multiple, I believe it like seven versus male. I like female athletes are much higher risk for ACL tears. And you think, well, how, why, when they play the same sports, like what's going on? Well, it's, it's, as a, as a girl goes through puberty, uh, her hips start to widen first. And the pelvis of women tend to be wider anyway. So there's a stronger angle from the hip to the knee requiring more support from the ligaments. You add in that you add in the fact too, that women wear high heels a lot more than men do. So you throw that in there on top of that. And now how you, how do you prevent this in female athletes? You really work on hip strength and stability and the, you cut when, when female athletes do this, it reduces their injury of their knees significantly because their hips now have the ability to stabilize. But if that's not there, now you're relying on all the ligaments and stuff of the, of the need to support you. And that basically is, you're basically playing with fire. How much can my ligaments handle and how much of my body weight can it support when I move the wrong way or twist? And it's not as much as muscle. It's not as much. No. Well, and then there's this idea of, Oh, which some doctors will recommend to these patients is stop squatting, you know? And of course I would not barbell backload, you know, squat heavy with one of these clients that are in this condition. But this idea of let's just eliminate a movement pattern like that, that is so fundamental. You're going to, you're forever going to have to get up off the toilet. You're forever going to have to get up out of your bed, out of your vehicle. Like, so this idea of, Oh, well you shouldn't squat anymore. It's one of the dumbest things that someone could tell a patient because that is such a functional movement. Sure. Loading a barbell for 200 pounds and doing a barbell back squat is not the most ideal situation that client, but to tell them to stop doing a pattern that they're going to need to do for the rest of their life is only going to make this condition worse in the long run. It is. And by the way, the data, they're starting to figure out a little bit. Like for example, when they tell people in older populations, it's time to use a cane or a walker. They're much more careful. Because when you tell somebody who's having trouble walking to start using a walker, the decline in their ability to walk accelerates because he stopped practicing walking. And the reason why doctors will say this about exercise is because it's like, well, Oh, exercise is a big deal. Stop doing them. But really it would be no different than you saying going to the doctor and be like, Hey, my foot hurts when I walk. I will stop walking. Right. Nobody would settle for that. Well, no, I got to walk, you know? So if you don't do these exercises, your ability to do them declines even faster. Now, we're not saying do these exercises if you can't do them, but the answer should be, let's figure out why you can't do them. Let's get you to a point where you can do them and then let's do them. So we never lose that skill. And let me tell you, that is the, uh, the best way to bulletproof your joints is to be able to keep them strong, uh, through all these different exercises and movements. Yeah, really. It's a lack of strength at the end of the day, for the most part, anytime a joint isn't like stable and functioning properly, there's some kind of a, an instability. Uh, there's, there's a lack of strength somewhere there that we can address to help kind of embolden that response of it being protected and, and, uh, being functional. Now, here's the interesting thing about knee pain. I'd love your guys' um, uh, feedback cause this is all my anecdotes. So I haven't trained millions of people, right? I've trained probably a hundred or so and then thousands maybe by proxy, but of all the common injuries or chronic pain issues, my success rate was very, very high with knee over time. Very, very high. And I, I want to guess it's because the knee flexes and extends and it was much more simple and I could really work on mobility and strength on the ankle and hip and just strength on the knee. And it, it, it was like, I was like nine out of 10 times, I would have significant improvements versus like more complicated joints like the hip or the shoulder, which would take me a little work. I don't know if you guys had any similar experience. Yeah. For the most part, it was like that. I mean, I did remember one real difficult situation with dancing like clients because of the, the, so they've hardwired this type of movement where they're just constantly kind of outwardly pushing out and all that kind of stuff. So that would be something that you have to sort of, uh, repattern that. And that takes a few years to really like repattern it and get everything to track the way it should. I had tremendous success with it once I became educated on it. Once I became a corrective exercise specialist and understood what was going on, first part of my career, I was terrible. I was the trainer who was like, Oh, we'll just avoid these things. Oh, you can't squat. Okay. Let's get over here. Let's do this because you can't do these things or, Oh, your doctor told you that. Okay. Don't worry. We won't do that. We'll do this instead. Later on, when I become more confident in what I was able to do and then I realized the root cause and like how common this was in my, in a lot of my clients, it was, it was actually an easier fix than you would think. And what I mean by easy is not like it didn't take consistency and discipline of doing these movements, but it wasn't like this really hard thing we had to do. I would do like get down and do a hip mobility test with somebody or an ankle mobility. And it was glaring. It was like this person could not get their knee to travel even close to the end of their toes, much less over their toes. It was like, Oh my God, we lack all kinds of ankle mobility. And if we lack ankle mobility there, we probably were probably weak in the ankle and the foot. So that was an obvious thing. And then the same thing for the hips. I remember the first time that mine got tested with Brink and realizing like my inability and I actually had okay hip mobility. It wasn't even horrific, but I saw how, how much more range of motion I could have if I had better connection there. And so it was very glaring to me like, Oh wow, there's so much room for improvement in these joints as we get. And I used to give this analogy to clients that man, when we're young, when we're kids, we do so much play right where we're rolling around and you're cutting left and you're cutting right and you're spinning around and we're doing all these things where we put demand on the hips and ankles to have to, to rotate and move and flex in all these different directions. And so we stay good and connected to it. Even if you're familiar with it. Yeah. Even if you're not really super strong in those areas, we're at least good and connected. What ends up happening as we get older and especially when we stop playing sports and playing like this is the body just prunes it off. If you don't take your hip like this and rotate it all the way around or move that ankle all the way, your, yeah, your brain goes, Oh, we don't need this anymore. So let's stop sending neurons over in that area and prioritizing that movement. Let's send it in other places where we do still have demand and it prunes it off. And it doesn't mean you don't have the inability. You just have to retrain that neurological connection. And then once I can get you to do that, then all of a sudden it frees up all this movement. Yeah. I mean, that's really where I've found the most success. You started dressing it with mobility, hip, hip and ankle, and then really like incorporating and programming intentionally in lateral movement and rotational type strengthening movements. So you just learn how to respond in real life situations a lot better where that's, you know, that's where all that potential for injury is going to occur anyways. And so we're strengthening those types of movements. So that way you're equipped better for, if you move quickly or you twist all of a sudden or you're, a weekend warrior and you're doing a basketball game or whatever it is, like your body is, is better equipped to be able to be strong and supported around your joints. Yeah. So just to, just to put it plainly, our bodies and brains have this amazing ability to learn. They also have this amazing ability to unlearn. The unlearning process is very important. It's what keeps us efficient machines. Okay. It's what keeps us alive. So if you're not using something, you lose it. The old adage, if you don't use it, you lose it. You really do. Like if you were to lay down right now in bed and not get up for 30 days, I promise you when you got up, walking would not come as easily, nor would running or no withstanding. So if you don't do certain things, you'll lose that, that ability. And in other words, your body's only ever as strong or as fit or as mobile as it thinks it needs to be. Right. So if you want to move through life pain free, if you want to move through life feeling like, man, I feel really good. You want a fitness mobility and strength capability that's far higher than your daily demands. Then if you step off the curb, you jump to do something, you got to grab the kid from the backseat or whatever. Not a problem. By the way, those are all ways that people hurt themselves often because it's just above their capability because they had to do it in a way that was a little faster or whatever than they were, they were used to. So that's the, the kind of the, the crux of it. Now back to the knee, we got to get the ankle strong and stable and mobile and we got to get the hip strong and stable and mobile. Then the knee can move the way it's supposed to and then you don't develop any problems. I just talked about one issue, right? That the ankle not being able to really flex properly when I'm doing a squat making my knee need to come out. If my hips are weak, similar things start to happen when I'm squatting or lunging or standing or sitting down. If you ever see somebody try to stand up in their knees, buckle in then you're looking at maybe some hip issues that are going on. So we're going to talk about all those, but I think we should start with basic lower body strengthening exercises because if you look at the average person, I could really, this is general, but generally speaking, if the average person's knee hurts, generally speaking, they just lack strength. Generally, we can get more specifics, but the average person's pain today is a result of lack of strength and getting them stronger overall in movements that really mimic good movement patterns. Getting them stronger overall tends to take away a lot of this type of pain so long as the movements are properly executed. What you just said is where we align really well with the strength community that's anti-mobility people, right? So there's a divide in the strength community and the like super mobility people and we come from a camp of like both, but there's a camp in the strength community that's like, Oh, you don't need to do all this Gumby mobility, you know, just squat. Yeah. Just squat more. And there's some truth to that. And it's exactly what you just said right now because in most cases it is just purely weakness. You're just weak in that area. You haven't even attempted to build strength in that range of motion. And once you start to do that, you will increase this range of motion. You will get stronger. You will become more stable and that many times will solve a lot of issues. But the reason why I don't like to stop there, because in my experience of all the clients I've trained, it's not always that way. There's also other cases where we have to address mobility, but I just wanted to highlight that because the time we've been doing this podcast, well, range of motion even, yeah, well there's people that like try and pit us against even some of our friends that are, that come from the strength background, that that tout that all the time of like, you just need to squat more and practice practice bad patterns. That's right. That'd be my response. That's right. But what Sal was saying right now, that's where we align. There's truth in both. Look, that's right. If you, if you are, if you've never swung a baseball bat and you go to a coach, here's what the coach is going to do. They're going to break everything down. You got your feet, got to go here, bend your hips here, your knees here, hold the bat in this way. This is how you rotate. Here's what happens to the back leg. You got to watch this. And that's how you practice at first. But then when you get good at swinging a bat, all you got to do is practice swinging a bat. You never have, you don't have to practice all the pieces anymore. If you're an advanced strength athlete, yeah, you probably all you ever need to do is squat. But that mobility stuff comes in handy when you're, when you're not an expert, when you don't have great movement pattern, you take the average person off the street, tell them to do a barbell squat. It's probably not going to look good. There's a lot of mobility, mobility movements we need to work on. And then to take it back, if you're that strength athlete and you're pushing the weight, well, the stronger you get, the more little tiny discrepancies in your mobility start to become glaring. Well then mobility becomes more important again for that advanced athlete. So there's definitely truth in both, but you need both. They're both very, very important. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's movement education for the individuals. So it's like, you have to know your body's abilities and it's limitations as well. And I think that, you know, going through mobility, it's, it's an important part of that process of connecting and figuring out, you know, my entire joints ability and like where, where those lines are and where that's established and in, in a pretty safe way. And in terms of like just loading it, and then just trying to like master a complex movement, which yes, you can, you can sharpen a complex movement and get good mechanics and like, you know, reinforce that and end up getting strong. So yes, you're going to be in a good place if, but again, they're, they're more educated. So they've been doing the process a lot longer. So they know what a good squat feels like. They know what it feels like. Most people don't get into that pocket. So let's talk about some of the best knee protecting movements. We mentioned already the barbell squat or squats in general. Squatting is one of the best if done properly, right? One of the best knee protecting movements you could do. If you're squatting well, you're strengthening everything that you need to have a stable knee. Now it's not perfect in the sense that you never should do anything else, but generally speaking, if the average person did good barbell squats and that's all they did, they'd probably be okay. They'd probably be okay. They wouldn't be as good as if they did other stuff as well. But a barbell squat is, is up there in terms of protecting the knee when done properly. Cause it strengthens all those, all those muscles. Yeah. Yeah. No, and it's one of the fundamental places that you go to. The next one would have to be, and I, you could, I think you could categorize this similar to as a single leg stuff. Like so single leg squat or single leg deadlift, I think is another great place. Yes. Now why single leg? Because your body does a really good job of compensating when one side is weaker or not as stable than the other. And you, it does such a good job that you don't even, you can't even tell, like you can't even tell half the time until you try doing things on one side versus the other. Here's an easy way to test it. You don't even have to do anything complex. See how long you can stand on one leg and balance and then see how long you can stand and balance on the other leg. And I guarantee you, unless you practice this, you're probably way better on one side, right there. That shows you there's a difference between one side of the other. So single leg exercises are great. A single leg deadlifts are one of my favorite exercises for the average person. And I do them with no weight. I would have clients just balance on one foot and they would go down toe touch. That's it. Just go down and see if you could touch your foot and stand back up without your other foot touching the ground. Or if they're beginners, I'd have them just touch their knee to start with. Great exercise at strengthening. We're stressing them with a more unstable type of a situation where it's like now you're just highlighting the feel of like how everything's sort of compensating in order to try and get you to stay within that optimal position with your hips. So I have a movement that I would teach. And this was later on, like years of training, I started to piece this together and I would tell my clients like, here's a movement I want you to learn. And it seems so probably gimmicky for some trainers that we might have, I might have teased about in my early career that I now go, I want you to be able to do this for as long as all the exercise I show you, if you can do this one exercise, it encompasses so much that's going to protect your knees, hips, and low back. And that I would have them stand on a box, stand next to a box at this tall facing like, like, so you're parallel to the box. So it's next to the up, open the hip, step up, single leg toe touch, come back down. Oh, that's everything. So it literally gives you the stability component in there. You have to have good hip mobility in order to open the hips up and to step all the way up like that. You have to be able to stabilize with the ankle on the foot and then to hamstring over and touch the toe is such a good basic movement that if you can just keep the ability to do that for a long time, you're going to, you're as far as knee pain and hip pain goes, you're going to, you're going to cover a lot of the bases just being able to do that. I love that. It was all the split stance exercises, which are good too. They're not necessarily single leg cause you have the back leg supporting you, but like a lunge, all the versions of lunges, Bulgarian split stance squats. And then this one was at one time only athletes use this tool. But the funny thing about this tool is I think it's actually not that it's not valuable for us. Very valuable for athletes. I think that this tool is more valuable for the average person, which is a sled. Yeah. A sled is so valuable because it's such a low skill. You don't need a lot of skill to, to push a sled. I've had old people push a very light sled. I've had really strong people push a heavy sled. It involves the foot and the ankle and the hip. There's no like having to lower a weight under control so they don't get sore. And I can drag a sled. I could push a sled. I could do it laterally. It's like, it's one of the best things you could use. Well, and you see like, I know I think his name's Ben Johnson. I was just going to bring him up and make the comment about how we, I wish I would have, I've been doing that with my clients forever. Yeah. And I wish I would have. Intentionally done it for this reason. Yes. Shared the sled drag for bulletproofing your knees. Cause I swear to God he went viral. I know he was on, I know he got on a Rogan show and like Huberman. I know a lot of people have shared him and he's got great content. This is not a knock on him whatsoever. I love his stuff. It's good stuff. But I mean, it's like there was nothing revolutionary about what he was teaching. It's like if you, if you understand corrective exercise, how to bulletproof your knees, those are the ways. Especially ankle mobility, right? Yes. So if you're, if you're directionally kind of digging your heel down and pushing back and your knees just naturally will be in that like forward position where it's going, directing it over the toe, but it's all the stress isn't hitting it there because you're directing all the force backwards. So it's like helps you to, to kind of get into that position if you have a hard time with mobilizing your ankles like that. Yeah. All right. Now let's talk about some of the best mobility movements for the ankle and the hip. By the way, these you would do before doing your squats and deadlifts and split stance exercises. The truth is you should do these. If you have bad knees, you should do these as much as you possibly can. Not just before. Good point. All the time. I mean, I take, this was one of the, the biggest things that broke through for myself, which is typically right. We always talk about like, we're good at training our clients or, and we're terrible at ourselves until I had to go apply this for myself and to working, working on my ankle and my hip mobility. And I saw what made the greatest difference was these, you know, when I was teaching at orange theory, I remember this is getting down and doing the combat stretch, you know, every hour for a couple minutes, not long, not hard, just frequently doing it all day throughout the day. And these little bouts, I made huge improvement on my ankles and my hips. And I didn't realize how much better that was for me until I took myself through that versus like programming it, how I used to as a coach, like, Oh, before you see me, make sure you go over and do your couple mobility drills. And then we're going to get into our workout, not realizing that my clients are probably only doing that when they see me those three times in the week. And they'll be at far more benefit if they, if they practice this frequently throughout the day. Yeah. Now mobility, the reason why we're not saying, I know it says combat stretch, but they're not called stretch movements. Cause you're not stretching. Although you do feel a stretch. The idea with a real good mobility is to connect to better ranges of motion. Okay. So we talked about combat stretch. That's for ankle mobility. When you're in the position where you're moving forward with your knee and you feel the stretch, what you need to do when you're there is to pull your toes up, activate the tibialis. You need to spread your toes. You need to push into the floor, activate your calf. You need to fire all the muscles that are in that position. Otherwise, all you're going to get is more flexibility and more flexibility. Isn't going to make you more stable. You're just going to be able to move more, but now you can't control it. So all the stuff we're going to go over when you're in these positions, you have, you want to try to lift your leg and twist your leg and activate all the muscles that are holding you there and make it hard so you can connect to those new ranges of motion. That's what gives you the mobility that we're talking about. So combat stretch is one for the ankle. I love 90, 90 for the hips. 90, 90 is phenomenal because it's internal to go to external rotation. When you're in that position, try to lift your foot and your knee. Try to press them into the floor. Try to pull your foot up behind you. Try to activate all those different positions on that. And this is something again that you're doing. Uh, you know, one of the things I want to do is we go through all these movements and we can, we can wrap the episode up with like giving kind of a, um, a protocol of what this would look like. And when I'm programming, we're trying to bulletproof our knees or work on somebody who's got chronic pain. Mobility is every day, all day, meaning as much as you can, right? At the bare minimum, every day, I want to do at least two or three of these drills for my ankles and my hips that, that make the greatest difference and doing it as frankly, frequently as possible. And then I'm strength training two or three times on the strength training exercises that you're, you were talking about earlier. Yeah. So what it will for, for most people tends to look like, you know, more realistic is in the morning you wake up, do five to 10 minutes. When you're watching TV at night, get on the floor, do a little bit. You do that twice a day. You'll see some pretty fast progress. If you do it just twice a week, you'll still get better. It's going to take a lot longer. And that's the point we're trying to make is that unlike other forms of exercise with this, the more, the better tends to be just practice. He's king. Yeah. Short foot is another one. Short foot. You're literally trying to activate the muscles that are in the bottom of your foot or the arch of your foot. Most of us are totally dead. They're very difficult. Yeah. It's very difficult. We're very flat footed. The majority of people. Yeah. And it's weird because when I first tried doing this, it's like the muscle didn't exist. I couldn't do it. I'm like, right, I can't, I can't do that with my foot. Then when I was finally able to do it, as I practice more and more, I was able to get those muscles to fire. Why do you want to strengthen your foot? Because if your foot is weak, it's like you're standing on stilts. And your foot is just there. And all kinds of weird stuff can happen with your foot and ankle if it's not strong. Short foot is one way to strengthen it. Yep. And then lastly, and we're giving you just kind of the most common basic ones because there's a lot. Uh, lateral tube walking. That's really, really good for activating those muscles that abduct, right? That bring the knees apart and the hips. You see now a lot of fitness influencers doing this to build their butt. Right? It's, this is not a huge muscle builder, but it can definitely help build your butt. If you have trouble connecting to that area. So then you do the other exercises that build the butt and you can, you got better technique. Now, as far as resources for this, obviously we created prime pro, which was specific to addressing things like this. So you have that. Uh, if you're not buying a program from us, then we've created all kinds of YouTube videos. You can look these up on our YouTube channel. We've gone in great detail, uh, addressing, uh, knee pain. So all these movements that we've talked about, they're all on my webinars. The great one to go. We've got the prime pro webinar, which is absolutely free to you. And then lastly, if you're not already utilizing ask mind pump.com, you can ask the AI tool and it'll point you in the right direction on how to solve this problem. So if you have family or friends or you suffer from chronic pain, there's no reason why we can't fix this now. Now honorable mention, let's talk about foam rolling just for a second. Uh, foam rolling does have an initial pain relieving, um, you know, benefit. So like you'll hear people say, Oh, I foam roll my it band and my pain and my knee is gone. Yes, that can definitely happen, but it's not solving the root issue. What you're doing with the foam roller is you're loosening up, uh, the muscle and the, in the fascia here on the side of the leg. But they were tight. The reason why they were tight in the first place is because your body protect you, your body trying to protect you. And it sees that there's a mobility issue. So now it feels better. Now I go do my exercise, but it never solved the mobility issue. This is why if you foam roll for knee pain, you have to foam roll every damn time. You work out. Otherwise your knee starts to hurt you. Does that mean foam rolling is a waste of time? No, I think foam rolling is phenomenal before mobility. If I could foam roll now, I can get into positions I couldn't before then do the mobility. The mobility is where the, where the magic is. It's also a great place. Like where you talked about earlier, where sometimes the pain in someone's knee is just purely out of a weakness thing. And they just need to practice more. A great way before I go into squatting with somebody is to kind of foam, roll the hips, foam, roll the calves, foam the IT, foam, roll the piriformis, get that all foam roll and then go into the movement so that they'll have better, better range of motion and better connection to movement. Exactly. But by the way, it was prime pro webinar.com. That will show you a lot of great free mobility stuff. And I like that because like, like our program maps prime pro, you actually have Adam on there coaching you how to do that. Because if you just look at a picture, tent is everything. Yeah. If you just look at a picture, you're not going to be able to do it right. Perform them right. There's a way that you have to connect the muscles when you do those movements. Look, if you like mind pump, head over to mind, pump free.com and download some of our free guides. You can also find all of us on Instagram. So Justin is at mind pump, Justin. I'm at mind pump, the Stefano and Adam is at mind pump Adam.