Hi everyone in this video I am going to show you an exercise for strengthening the knee and hip muscles. This exercise is very effective for recovery after various knee problems and injuries. It is a higher level exercise which requires a lot of quadriceps, hip and calf strength to perform properly.

This knee pain exercise technique specially helps strengthen the quadriceps, glutes and other hip muscles and ankle and foot muscles. It’s also very effective for improving balance and coordination.

Tweetables:

How to Do the Single Leg Squat  [Click To Tweet]
One-legged Squat: Quads, Glutes, Hips [Click To Tweet]
Complete Guide of Single Leg Squat to Strengthen Quadricep  [Click To Tweet]

Transcript: 

Hey guys, this is Manu Kalia, physical therapist and Ayurveda herbalist. So I’m going to show you guys a strengthening exercise today for your quadriceps muscle, your glutes and a lot of your hip musculature too, and this is a great exercise especially if you’re trying to strengthen your quads and definitely your patellar tendon also. A bit challenging and you really got to get the mechanics right. You want to do it properly. So were going to use a step, and this is a six-inch step and we’re going to working at stepping down and controlling…doing some eccentric work and doing some concentric work, pushing back up too on that.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to raise this up so you can see. Now, in terms of positioning, I want to make sure that my pelvis is nice and level. So most of the time you’ll see people doing this exercise where they’re doing this kind of thing. The knee is drifting in, the pelvis is dropping, so you’re not really engaging a lot of these muscles that need to be on to do that properly. So the knee is drifting in too much and really loading up that inside of the joint, too. What we want to do is we want to target and we want to make sure you really control that movement as you descend down and you come back up.

So I want you to really think about really kicking in these glutes through here, your quads are on, and you’re working at controlling the descent down as you do the exercise. You want to bring my leg forward, I bring it out to the side, I bring it backwards. Everything else is leveled, so my pelvis isn’t dropping down. So I really have to engage my glutes to keep everything level through here, and then my quads and patellar tendon, all of these guys have to control that movement. So when done properly, definitely a lot more challenging exercise.

So I’m going to show you from the other view, too, so you get an idea from the side view. So, same thing. I’m going to be up in this position and I’m going to control the descent down, I bring me back up, and I can move forward and I bring it back up, and I go backwards, I bring it back up. So it really fires up a lot of these muscles when done properly, but as I said, make sure it’s not dropping down and your knee is in line, in better alignment, with your foot and the rest of your pelvis in order for you to do the exercise properly. So it really helps strengthen a lot of these muscles and it works on balance too.

So I hope you enjoyed that video. If you have any questions, make sure you leave a comment.  Thanks.