The 10 Best Exercises to Help You Fix Knee Arthritis for the Long-Term

Dr. David here. Hope you guys can see me and hear me. Give me some feedback. I'm kind of trying a different angle here. Let's get Instagram going here. There we go. Instagram should be going. Yeah, it is.

Um, I'm trying. I got some exercises we're going to cover today for knee arthritis. And so I want to free up. I don't have my normal, um, my flip chart. I'm, I'm using this board here. Um, and then we have a table set up. We got some good stuff for you. We're going to be covering the 10 best exercises to help you fix knee arthritis for the long term. And what I want to highlight for you here is it's not about getting short-term pain relief. I mean, that's important obviously if you're in pain, but, um, I'm not saying that that's not, uh, important. What I want to focus on though is fixing this for the long term because I think what everybody wants is to not have to be dealing with knee arthritis coming back over and over again. So, um, that's that's the goal of today.

So, those of you guys that are with me on live right now, drop me a comment. I should be able to see comments from YouTube and from Facebook and just let me know you can hear me. If you can say where you're from, that would be fantastic as well. Um, and then, uh, if just just give me some feedback here. I don't see any comments coming in yet. I want to know if my setup is working properly. How's everybody doing? Where you guys at? Okay, I got a thumbs up from Facebook. That's a good sign. Can y'all make sure that my mic's working? My video's coming through. Okay, now we got some coming in. I see Claudia Reynolds. Let me just tip this back here. Claudia's here from Oakland. Fantastic. Let me switch my camera angle even better. There we go. I got Claudia from Oakland. Lori Wilson says, "Hey, hi." Probably this spelling, Lori, happens to the best of us. Sheila's from Dallas. Awesome. We have Ferdinand from Canada. Kimberly says, "Can't wait for this live." Hey, Kimberly. Kimberly's like our diehard fan. Uh, we have Karen is in Florida. Hey, Karen. Jersey girl is in Virginia. Fantastic. Lori Wilson is in Ohio. I remember you, Lori. Lori's Loriy's one of our greatest fans, too. Always on these lives. Karen Nodine, you're coming in loud and clear. Awesome. Looks like there's just a little bit of a delay from the the comments coming in on my end to the, uh, to to what I can see here. Edie Phillips from Austin, Texas. Awesome. I I I lived in Austin for 10 years. I'm a Longhorn. Fun times. We got Tommy in Chicago. Let me do a few more here. Dewan in St. Louis. I've visited St. Louis. Beautiful place. We have, um, Kathy says, "Hello from Minnesota." Awesome. It looks like you you might be a subscriber, Kathy. Thank you for subscribing. I think that's what that little symbol is on there. Um, and then we have Nicole. "Been working hard on my glutes, hoping for a miracle." It's going to work, Nicole. It's going to work. It We see it happen all the time. We just got to make sure that it happens properly.

All right, with that, let's get into it. Yeah, we're coming through on Instagram. Let me switch my camera angle. One second here while I mess with the tech. All right, that should work. Cool. I see you here now. Fantastic.

All right, what is number one here? The 10 best exercises. So, let me let me give you a little preface before I start writing everything here because to let me write a few. When you think about knee exercises, the first thing that most healthcare providers go to and and I think the public in general just thinks about because of what they're told by healthcare providers is to do exercises where you're bending your knee, especially like knee extensions where you're working on your quads and and knee knee bending exercises where you're working on your hamstrings on the thigh muscles. But we're not going to do that. In fact, um, this first one is going to be a little bit of an ebending, but you're going to see it's not like aggressive at all. And there's you should not be getting tired in your quads. And the whole point of this exercise is to just get things to calm down because that's what the first few exercises are going to be about is just what I would call phase one exercises, if you will. Like things that you need to do just to to calm things down. Can we get this view over here? I'll let you see it right there. So, if you look at my legs here, I'm just swinging my legs. That's it. This is what I call a tailgate swing. What I wrote on the on the whiteboard there, the tailgate swing is you're you're just nice and easy rocking your legs back and forth, your feet back and forth. You can do both legs at the same time. You can do one leg at a time. It doesn't matter. The whole point of this is to get the fluid inside the knee joints to circulate because if you're hurting, if it's swollen, especially, then there's there's irritation happening inside the joint from knee arthritis, and we want that to to begin to calm down. And so, this is not weightbearing, obviously. I'm not standing on my leg. It's not aggressive. I'm not trying to forcefully make my quads contract or my hamstrings contract. It's just nice and easy, and I could do this for a long time. for probably nine out of ten people that have severe arthritis, like they're in pain a lot right now, it's it's really bad. This exercise done at the right frequency, which is usually more than you think. I tell people to do it hourly for a few minutes at a time. Um, it can really begin to calm things down in the knee so that you can get to the point where you can do more exercises, but this is a really good starting point exercise to make sure that you get that fluid to circulate and begin helping the inflammation process.

All right. So, our camera flips and we don't have a good way to it's it's like set to do that. We can't turn that that setting off once it flips down too much. All right.

So, exercise number two. This is a very important one, uh, to get the muscle imbalance fixed. Glute sets. Now, the way this works is you're just tightening your glutes. Um, you could do this in different positions. So, I'm going to show you in standing. All I'm doing is is making my my butt muscles tighten up. So, when you tighten up your butt muscles, it should make your hips want to go forward. But the trick is you have to hold it for 10 seconds. And you have to be able to do it in different positions here. So, if you're I did it in standing, for instance, but I can do it in sitting. Right now, I'm tightening my glutes. And the the a key thing you want to figure out is to not tighten these muscles in your thighs either. So, I'm going to tighten my glutes here. Then I'm going to count to 10. And I have to be thinking, make my glutes tighten up, make my glutes contract, make my glutes tire out over those 10 seconds without the thigh muscles also engaging a lot, tightening up a lot, and getting tired as well. And this is a a big struggle for a lot of people going through our treatment approach, whether it's through our YouTube videos or through our knee arthritis recovery program. um, which if you want to learn more about that, check out the description in this video and you'll be able to get to a link and learn learn about our knee arthritis recovery program which is a roadmap and it's a very structured organized program that you can choose to be a member of and we walk you through the whole process. This is just like a taster if you will an overview of a portion of the program. It's it's pretty robust program but glute sets need to be done on a consistent basis to get your glutes to be active. And something I want to say before I show you the the lying down version is a lot of people we find we found out people that are entering our program, they can't even turn on their glutes. There's people that they there's even been people on our program that don't even think it's possible to and we have to kind of push them to keep practicing it and and get them to realize that it is possible to tighten these glute muscles back here without this tightening up. At the very lowest level, nothing tightens up in the glutes when you try and all this tightens up instead. Then the next level is it all kind of fires together. You do have some glute activation, but a lot of thigh activation. And the next level after that is to get the glutes to activate without the thighs activating. And then you have to be able to activate only one side, just the right and just the left glute. And in sitting and standing, and in lying down, which I'll show you next. pretty easy to do, especially if you're, you know, in bed in the morning or you're just relaxing or if you're in a recliner, you know, you might be between sitting and lying down. You're just tightening the glutes from here. So, you should see my hips rise a little bit. And you got to be able to hold it and not activate the thighs, too. You have to keep that relaxed. So, glute sets, super important exercise, foundational in making sure that you're setting yourself up to go into the later levels of of rehabilitating your knee arthritis so that you can avoid surgery and be good for the long term.

All right, let me just get my notes right side up here. So, next one we have is bridge holds. This one is the next level after the the glute sets. So, you're going to do it lying down. I have this treatment table, but you could do it on on the floor on your bed. It's not too soft. And here's how we do the bridge hold. Most people know a bridge. You're in this position and you're picking up your hips. That's a general idea of a bridge exercise. But the way that I teach it is you have to make your glutes work the most. So, the steps are here. You flatten your back. You have to suck in your abs. Already you should be feeling your your glutes wanting to work, but your abs should be working. That's key. Then you consciously have to tighten your glutes. So you see why the glute sets are important so that you can do this. They're all going to build on each other. By the way, then you get the glutes to tighten up while holding your back flattening your abs in. You haven't even lifted yet. For a lot of people when they're starting out this exercise, this is it. They they just got to hang out here and hold it for 10 seconds. It's a bridge hold. So you're going to hold for 10 seconds. There's a scientific reason for the 10 seconds. I'll tell you in a minute. So after you're holding here, if you can do this just fine without thigh muscles taking over and your glutes not doing anything, then the next level would be to then actually lift. So just lift like an inch, just a little bit right here. Just be able to clear your hands under your bottom and the surface that you're on. That would be the next level. And then if you can go beyond that and go higher, but you're still using your glutes primarily and not starting to activate your thighs a lot or feeling like a big stretch is happening here or your hamstrings back here in the back of your thighs or even your back muscles. Some people compensate with their back muscles and they skip using the butt muscles, the glutes, you have to focus on using those glutes on this bridge hold and then you can do repeated reps to get the glutes tired. So, just to review it a little quicker here, back flat, butt tight, then lift up a little, then if you can go up higher, still using your glutes, then you can hold it any of those positions where your glutes are active and you're challenging them. And just a little quick tip, if you are having trouble getting your glutes to fire, it might help you to open your feet and open your knees. I tell people just get in like the birthing position and they're like, "Oh, I get it." Because when you do this, when you open your knees, it puts a little a little uh it takes up the some of the slack in your glute muscles. It makes it want to fire better. So, same routine after that. Back flat butt tight. Start to lift up. And you might be able to better isolate the glutes. This tends to work for people. For some people, they say, "Oh, no, no, no. I like it better this way." And that's fine. Just the the focus here is to get the glutes to burn and to be active. That's number one. It doesn't matter if you do little variations of this of this bridge exercise.

All right, let's go to number four. Here we have toe curl holds. Let me show you what I mean on this one here. Let's Let's take out the little piggies here so you guys can see. What are you guys commenting on here? Who else is here? We have Lady Tindo is in Zimbabwe. Oh, that's awesome. Africa's in the house. So cool. Hey, Lady Lady Tindo. We have Calm Ocean Sunset. Arlene from Baypoint, California. Fantastic. Jacqueline says, "Hi, I can see you from Uganda." Another person from Africa. This is so cool. Lena Music says, "Thank you so much." You're welcome, Lena. Uh, Ivonne Jackson is in Detroit, Michigan. Fantastic. Lady Tindo, we saw you in Zimbabwe. Oh, I'm I'm getting repeats here. Uh, Edie Phillips says, "Your cervical stenosis exercises help me tremendously." Oh, that's awesome. Thank you for letting me know. I appreciate that, Edie. And then, uh, hi, doctor. I learned from your videos. I learn I learned from your videos, Alice Amanita. Fantastic.

All right, let's get into this number four exercise, the toe curls with you guys, by the way. All right, so you see the the tozies here. Here's the exercise. Let me back up just a bit. You're curling your toes as much as you can without cramping. You just don't want to get a cramp. You're trying to curl those toes and not and avoid getting a cramp in the arch of the foot here because it's uncomfortable. But what you're trying to do is work out the muscles that are in the in the arch of your foot because these muscles are going to help to support your arch. and then position your knee better as you begin to do standing activities. But in the beginning, you have to first be able to curl the toes. And ideally, I want you to get your toe knuckles to pop out. So, what the toe knuckles are, they're right here in the meat of the foot. So, not quite your toes, but where the toes connect to the meat of your foot, if you can curl your toes enough to get that right there, to get that to to pop out, and you have five of them. So, you have to really think hard to make them all bend down. Sometimes people have a toe that doesn't want to go down while the one will stay up. Might be your second, third, fourth, fifth, sometimes a big toe. You might have a bunion issue going on. Just be careful with the bunion not to hurt it. But the idea is to curl the toes like this. Make the knuckles pop out as best as you can and hold it for 10 seconds. You may not have the strength right now to curl that far. So, here's a little a little hack. Sit with your legs crossed this way. One of your legs crossed this way. Grab your toes with your hand and then pull them to their end range comfortably because this is this is a stretch for a lot of people. Then that that's as far as my toes want to go. Then I'm using my muscles in my foot to make them go and I'm trying to keep my toes in position as I let off my hands. But you can see how my my toes don't want to do it. So, you're trying to work the end range to make these knuckles pop out because if you can strengthen a muscle through the full range of motion, especially the end range, that's going to help the muscle get strong through the entire range of motion. Muscles get stronger stronger in the range of motion that you train them in. So, if you can't get there with your own muscle muscles in your foot, giving them that over pressure will help them get to the to the end range, but then you have to activate the muscles. Just I I strongly want to cautious caution you if this is the first time you're doing this exercise, you're gonna cramp. So, what I want you to do is only go as much as you can like if you think of the intensity of toe curl 0 to 100%. Figure out how much you can take before your foot wants to cramp and just hang out there. So, in other words, if you start to curl and you're like, it's about 50%. Just do the hold right there. Count to 10 real slow. And then on the next rep, you might be able to go 55%, maybe 60%. And that might be all you hang out at the first day or the first time you try this. But here in another day or two, maybe definitely in a week, you should feel like you can go to 70, 80, maybe even 90%, maybe even 100% and get the full range of motion. So this one I would be working on for sure because it's going to set up future exercises, ones I'm going to talk about here in a second. I'm telling you, this is all cumulative here.

So, let me come back to the board here for a second and let me just draw this right here because just I want to group these for you because this is very much what I what I would call phase one exercises or exercises that you would do if your knees just really irritated, if you're in a lot of pain. This is like the starting point exercises. So, the next ones we're going to go into are going to be kind of the next level, if you will. number five. Mini squat holds. And then we'll just do six here. Let me just get ready for the next ones. And we'll do eight as well. All right.

So, let's do the mini squat holds. Let me move this table out of the way a little bit so we have a little more space and show you guys what I'm talking about. And just to just to speak to the complexity yet the simplicity of what we're doing, you know, fixing knee arthritis seems like a very complicated thing and and I would say that it is like there's a lot to consider. Um, and the the mechanics of it, the muscle imbalances, you know, all the treatments that are out there. My hope is that I've simplified it enough for you and and what might happen is a lot of what I get from a lot of people the feedback is that it seems almost too simple what I'm telling you. But I promise you the simplest things done correctly are usually so effective. It's like beautifully simply beautifully simple yet so effective. So, I'm telling you, all we're doing is firing the glutes, circulating the fluid first with the tailgate swings, and we're firing the glutes and and just glute sets, getting them to turn on, then the bridges, because how many of you how many of you guys have done bridges, but didn't actually target your glutes. You're feeding into the muscle imbalance. And then a lot of people don't pay attention to the feet. Big deal. All right, so let's pull it all together in the mini squat here next. And then there's still more levels to to show you. So, I'm going to get in a squat stance. If you can see, let me back up a bit so you can see my whole body here. Um, and thank you to the cameraman, by the way. This is We're trying something new here. So, you have to be able to grab with your toes so that your arches come up. That's a big deal here. That's why the toe strength because if you don't have toe strength, your arches are going to come down. And look what happens to my knees. When my arches collapse, knees fall in. And when my knees fall in, it makes me want to use these thigh muscles. You can try it out for yourself. If you just do a little bit of a squat and hold it and your knees are more in, you're going to feel your thigh muscles work. Versus if you push your knees out, get your feet involved, all of a sudden you start to use your glutes more. And then even better, which is what we're going to do in the mini squat here, is shove your hips forward. You see how I was leaning forward? My my hips are behind my head. But if you bring your hips forward under your spine, so your spine, your head is above your spine and your but your butts below your spine, it's a lot of glutes here. It's a mini squat. So this is it's this low. Literally, it's just shove your hips forward. Grab with your feet, knees out a little bit, drop your hips down subtly. I'm I'm bending my knees a bit. You can even go less. You can even just barely unlock your knees. And that's that's it right there. Hold it for 10 seconds. Make your butt burn. That's the most important part of this exercise. It's don't let your knees hurt and make your butt burn. And I want to give you the disclaimer now. If your knees are painful and swollen and it's hurting you to do this, you're not ready. Go back to doing those other exercises that I said that the ones that I outlined in green for you, the first ones that I did before this. This is a next level exercise when you're not that bad. When you can tolerate this and it feels okay. I already felt my glutes working there. So, let me show you the side view just so you can see. This is how most people squat. Their their butt goes backwards and they're not really squatting. You can see my hips and my knees. It's mainly my hips bending. My knees not bending a whole lot. But what I want you to do instead, angle your feet out, grab with the toes, shove your hips forward, and then drop down vertically just a bit. Hold it there. Keep your hips forward and keep pushing your knees out because that makes the butt muscles work without putting too much pressure through the knees. As long as your knees are not too irritated, your knees will be okay with this. If your knees are very irritated, they're going to say, "I don't like it, and it's not time for you to be doing this." You need to be doing some bridges or glute sets instead. Right? So, that's the the bridge, I'm sorry, the mini squat exercise.

Let's cover the next one. We got squat reps. When you get better at the mini squat holds and you can consistently use your glutes on the mini squat holds, that's why the holds so that you can practice consistently using your glutes. Once you're confident you can do that, then I want you to do reps and stop doing the holds. Oh, I mentioned to you earlier there's a reason for the hold, the scientific hold. There's something called a motor unit. This is a scientific thing and you don't you don't need to remember this or It's just simp for your simple understanding. A motor unit is the nerves that start in your head, go down your spinal cord, and connect to any muscle in your body. I want the motor units that connect from your brain to your butt to work better. But if you don't have good glute activation on your own, you need to practice. And so if you do a hold, like a 10-second hold, then you send the nerve signal more frequently, more often. And if you're consciously focused on it, you're you're improving the the connection from the the nerves in your head all the way to the muscle activation in the butt. So the holds are critically important at the beginning, especially if you don't have good glute activation. But once you've been doing it for a little while, once you've been doing it for a few weeks, definitely a month or more consistently, then you should feel confident that, yeah, I can I can activate my glute every single time, which then sets you up for the reps. So, that's what I'm going to do here next. Once you get good at the holds, then you can start doing reps, squat reps. So, I'm pushing my knees out every single time. Feet are grabbing, arches are supported, and when I come down right here, I'm trying to push my hips forward because I'm using my glutes at the bottom of the squat. And then when I stand up at the top, butts tight, abs are in a bit so that my hips are going forward and it's it's a butt workout. And if this is all you got, because that's all your knees want to give you, it hurts to go lower. You don't feel like you use your glutes very well if you go lower. It's it turns into more thigh muscles working. Then just work in the range that you can. I have 70, 80 plus year old people that are doing squats like this and they work themselves into feeling fantastic in their knees and don't feel like they have to have knee surgery, you know, joint replacement surgery. And we never need to go to a full depth squat. At the same rate, I have 70, 80 year olds that end up being able to squat like this because they have the ability to and they fix the muscle imbalances and they're squatting correctly. Their spine's more upright. Their bottom's coming straight down like towards their heels. And it's not back like this and real quad dominant. Their legs aren't forward like this. I've taught them to open up on the squat reps. And it's so practical because how many times you need to get down to pick up that thing from the floor, sit down on a chair somewhere. You need to be able to squat. You need to be able to use the right muscles while you're squatting. So squats, squat holds, and then squat reps are critically important.

All right. Number seven, we have calf raises. You need to have good strength in those calf muscles. Let me hold on to something sturdy here. Oh, do I have a walker? I think we took it out. Would you hand me that step stool behind you just so we can be in the middle of the camera shot here? Thank you. That'll be more sturdy. So, you want to hold on to something sturdy. You need to um make sure that you can be on a flat surface like I am right here or you can be off the ledge of something like a like the ledge of a step for instance. But I would start flat on the floor the first time you do this. You need to have already practiced the toe curls so that you can activate your toe curls here and get that arch to come up. You see that? So that's relaxed right there. Arch wants to come down. But if I flatten my toes, I get a little support in my arch that comes up. That's what should happen because then it posts my ankle up and it posts my shin up, which gives me support in the knees and just puts the right pressure through my knee joints. Then what you're going to do, holding on here, toes grabbed, come up, hold it for 10 seconds, and go as high as you can. And I am still thinking about gripping with those toes. Get those calf muscles to work with the toes. The trick here is getting the toes involved because you have five muscles that can push your heel up like this. The two big ones that everybody always talks about are the gastro solius and the the gastrochemus and the solius. They they're the ones that make the shape of your calf. But you have to curl muscles that help support the arch that also can influence this posterior tibialis flexor dutum longus and flexor halocus longus. Those are the names of the muscles. You don't need to know that. Main thing you need to know is that there's five muscle groups and you'll involve all of them if you just grab with your toes. And that gives your arch the most support which supports your knee. So hold it for 10 seconds. Grab with the toes. Make the calf muscle burn. And you should even feel the muscle in the arch of the foot start to work. Sometimes you'll feel it you'll feel it up here, but maybe even down here. That's good because the muscle belly for the toe curl muscles are right here. And then in the arch of the foot too, there's some brevis muscles, some muscles within the foot that wouldn't be a bad idea to exercise as well. All right, so that's calf raises. Super important to make sure you get better. We have people that comment online, you know, maybe it's some of you guys that are watching right now that say things like, "Uh, I'm better overall. I've been working on my glutes. I figured out my glutes, but it still hurts sometimes." If you're that person, you're probably not working the foot muscles and you need to be doing these calf raises to get that last 30, 20, maybe even 10% boost and get completely better. We go into detail about this, by the way, in the knee arthritis recovery program. So, you might consider checking it out so that you get everything because it's not it's more than I can explain here in a in a video on YouTube or a live here on YouTube.

All right, next up we have situps. Let's get set up for this one. The abs. I haven't talked about them yet. So important because you know the the glutes without without your abs working properly, your glutes won't work properly. And this is another reason why some people work on their glutes and they're like, I'm not 100%. Like my glutes are active, but there's a part missing here. And it's usually because your your abs aren't as strong as they need to be. And you need the abs strong because they if can you see this here? The skeleton. Yeah. The the glutes connect to the back of the pelvis bones right here. And the pelvis bones are stabilized most by the abs that attach on the front side of them. So if you have weak abs, then you're going to have a a not stable pelvis and your glutes are going to not be able to work at their full potential. So to get to the 100% better, if you have the potential, which many people with knee arthritis do, and they're signing up for surgeries unnecessarily, they just need to work on the right strengthening exercises, you can't forget the abs. So I have a lot of progressions, but what I love to get people to is this full-on situp where your back is flat, your legs are down. Turn your feet out, toes out, push your heels down. that want that makes my knees want to bend and it actually makes my glutes active, which is good. Then I have to think about pushing my abs in and my back flat. Now I'm set. I've I've set up my lower half. I'm ready to do the situp. And I'm going to use my arms to get some momentum to throw my arms up and bring my arms towards my my legs. So it looks like this. Notice my feet are down. They're not they're not flying up like this. If they do that to you, you need to work on some more basic ab exercises that lead up to this eventually so that you can be able to do sit-ups without your feet flying up every single time and you're working on your lower abs. If you're doing this correctly, you should feel like your lower abs are getting a workout as you keep going through the reps. What you want to avoid is having something pinning your feet down, you know, like somebody holding your feet down or pinning them under a piece of furniture or some exercise equipment and coming up because then you're using your hip flexors, the muscles that are right here in the front of your hips, and you're skipping using your abdominals. It's cheating. And yeah, you could do the sit-up motion. That's how a lot of people in fitness do sit-ups. But biomechanically, for the sake of your knee health and hip and back health, because it affects all of that, you need to make sure that you're not doing sit-ups without wi with something holding down your legs. You need to do it without anything. Just like that, sit-ups.

All right, next one. Uh, let me group these together for you guys because these are kind of like the mid level. So entry level, if your knees really flared up, these are the four you want to work on. Then this is this is like the next level after you flared down a bit doing this stuff. Then you would work on this stuff here. Let's see. Where am I going to fit this in? I'll do think you'll just have to be down here. Nine and 10. Let's do nine first. We have deadlifts. There's a lot of other weightlifting exercises you could do, but deadlifts, I would have to say, if I had to pick one exercise, it would absolutely be deadlifts. So, and I'm going to do them barefoot for you here because I need you to see what the feet are doing. A lot of people don't think about feet when it comes to weightlifting. And at this point, when you're going to go do deadlifts, if you've had knee arthritis is, let me get the barbell. It's right behind the camera over here. Couldn't really fit anywhere else in the room. But if you're at this point where you're able to lift weights because you feel comfortable enough to do it, your knee should not hurt at this point. Now you're looking to maintain your strength and even boost your strength up with the proper balance so that you're not falling into knee arthritis problems again. So what you want to do when you're doing, uh, deadlifts is make sure that the exercise is focused on using your back muscle. I'm sorry, not your back muscles, your glute muscles, your toes, and your abdominals. So, same muscle groups that we've been already working on. We we're just it's progressively building on itself. So, by the time you get to a deadlift, you're you should have already been able to do a a squat hold, a squat rep. It's the same motion. It's just now you're going to hold a barbell down here. You might do it with a small smaller weight, you know, with a a dumbbell, smaller weights, whatever you can find. You want to grip with the toes so your arches are supported. Shove the knees out against your arms here because that makes your glutes turn on. Suck the abs in. And then when you stand up, tighten the glutes. So it's a big glute workout. Abs are in as well. Just like this. I'm going to pretend I had plates on there. And this is about as low as I would go. So knees out every single time. Abs in. Abs in. Knees out. Abs in, butt forward. Knees out, abs in, butt forward. Let me show you the side view. See if we fit. Okay, here. Yeah, that works. Knees out, abs in, butt forward. What you don't want to do is stick your chest out because then your back muscles take over, right? In order for me to to do this, all these back muscles have to engage, which then shuts off my abs. And then back muscles can compensate for glutes. And if you have abs that are shut off, you're not getting good efficiency out of your glutes. So avoid sticking out your chest and feeling your back muscles work here. Keep your abs in and your glutes tight. That's the number one thing you want to fix on your deadlift routine. And that's, you know, assuming you're comfortable getting to the weights.

All right, finally grand finale here is walking. We're going have to set up the treadmill. It's in the It's just outside the room here in the hallway. So, give us a moment while we get literally just like less than a minute and um, we're going to get this set up. But I'm going to keep chatting with you guys, giving you some tips here. Even though we're off camera, I saved walking for last because it's the first thing that people usually want to do, but you shouldn't be because notice all the stuff that we covered leading up to this. We got the glutes to work. We got the feet to work. We got the abs to work. We were setting everything up for walking because you need to be able to use all those muscles while you're walking. Otherwise, you're going to be walking with muscle imbalances. What are we going to unplug here? Probably that one. There's a little black remote on the desk over there. That's what operates this. Let's If you can bring it over, please. And you know, health care professionals will tell you, "Let's, oh, you got diagnosed with knee arthritis. Look at your X-ray. Look at your MRI. You need to start a walking program." And they say that because they're trying to follow best advice, which is there's research evidence out there that shows that knee arthritis improves with walking, but up to a certain point because if you walk too much, knee arthritis actually worsens. So what it is is you're talking to health care professionals that are specialists in medicines and surgery, not specialists in biomechanics and movement. And a lot of physical therapists you would think are specialists in exercise, and they are, but in exercise after surgery. They're helping people who have had surgery recently recover from the surgery. But what if you're not trying to have surgery? What if you don't want any replacement? What if you want to make sure you don't ever have to have any replacement? Well, don't start with walking. Start with all the other stuff that I listed. Then after you've gotten your glutes working, your feet working, your abs working. Now, we're ready to walk. Now, you got to walk obviously for, you know, everyday purposes to take care of your life. That's fine. But don't go on on a dedicated walk for exercise. Not until you figure out things first like I showed you with the abs, glutes, and feet.

All right, let's make sure this is working here. And let me show you what I mean with walking. So, when I'm when I'm I'm walking, here we go. What you want to do as you're going is make sure that every single step you take, as you land on the leg and bear weight, you grab with the toes. So, right now, my right foot's grabbing. Now, my left toes are grabbing. Right toes, left toes, right toes. And at the same time when my right foot hits the ground, right toes grabbing, left right glute is working. So right toes and glute, right toes and glute here. Then as I bear weight on my left leg, left toes and glutes here, left toes and glutes. Then you have to figure out how to alternate in a way that makes sense to you. So you have to alternate this side. Now, this side, I'm tightening my left glute, tightening my right glute, tightening my left foot, my right foot. And you have to play this game with yourself of being able to do the muscle contractions the way you need to the entire time. Let me show you from the front here. I don't know if the cord will reach. We'll do our best. And then I'll talk to you about the abs from this position, too, because that matters. That'll work. When you're walking the entire time, you need to have your lower abs especially a little sucked in. Meaning when when they're active because you sucked them in, you're holding your spine stable and you're holding your pelvis bone stable so that your glutes can work as best as possible. All right. So, let me get to a more comfortable walking pace and show you what I mean. Remember, don't walk if you're flared up. So, right here is a more comfortable walking pace. Glutes, glutes, glutes, glutes, foot, foot, foot, abs the whole time. This takes concentration. I can't tell you how many people mess this up. I have to tell people if you if you're at the level where you're able to walk because you've been practicing your glutes, your feet, all that stuff, go on a 10-minute dedicated walk, maybe in the hallway of your house, just, you know, go back and forth or maybe go down the street, but don't talk to anybody and just think about the muscles working. That's what you need to do and start to make it a habit. If you can do that, then it'll become a little more subconscious where you don't have to think about it as much. And then you might be able to talk on the phone or do something on your phone or have a friend with you, a a family member that you can actually talk to and still do this on a consistent basis. But I can tell you, I'm the guy teaching this stuff and I still need to focus in every so often. So this takes some concentration so that you're using the right muscle balance and not making walking harm your knees. It's actually helping your knee arthritis.

All right, guys. So, that does it for my 10. Let's answer some comments here and see who's with us and make sure we get get to y'all here. I'm going to let me switch the camera angle. All right, perfect. I can see you guys here. Sorry, I got to look at my vent up there. I'm so glad we have it, by the way, because I'm sweating. All right, let's see. What questions we have here? Why, this is Ivon Jackson. Why you never show anything for like a person that has a Baker's cyst exercise. Great question, Ivon. Let me answer that head on. Um, a Baker cyst is a result of knee arthritis. So, if you have a Baker cyst, you pretty much have to assume that you have knee arthritis or you're about to develop knee arthritis. What you absolutely have for sure is a muscle imbalance. It's the same one that I'm talking about that we need to fix that these exercises that I showed you fix. And and you have an overdevelopment of knee fluid inside your knee joint and that fluid's just going back into the backside of the joint causing the Baker cyst. So there's no special exercises besides these that we already talked about. I would if I see somebody with with a Baker cyst come into my clinic, I I'm thinking your knee's swollen. you have swelling in your knee due to arthritis, which is with the root problem of that is really that you have the muscle imbalance. And so, we're going to start with that. There's no special dedicated exercises for a baker cyst that are going to make the Baker cyst go away. You need to fix a root muscle imbalance. So, you stop overproducing the fluid and you're not making the Baker cyst worse. It could pop and the fluid drains into your into your calf and it it's just painful. It's a mess. You have to fix the muscle imbalance. Hope that helps, Ivon. Good question. We have Karen Elliott who says, "What about knee stiffness?" Good. The first exercise that I showed, the tailgate swings, that one tends to help knee stiffness quite a bit. There might be some specific stretches that you need to do. I talk about that in the knee arthritis program, the knee arthritis recovery program. Um, there's there's a bunch of other things that we have in the program that I just I can't go into here. There's it's a lot. There's over 10 videos just in phase one, and there's there's a bunch of phases. There's four phases. It's it's a lot. But the knee the tailgate swing is probably the most popular part of the program that helps with knee stiffness. Hope that helps you there. Star Seed says, "I stopped eating carbohydrates and my arthritis went away. Meat is medicine." You know, I I agree with you partially in that um like cuz I love meat myself and I love to um you

know, reduce my carbs when I need to. I should do it more often. But um, it works for me to eat, you know, more of a, of a meat diet. Sorry, I'm switching my camera angle here. Um, but it doesn't work for everybody. I think this has to do with your genetics. You have to test out at the end of the day what works best for you. Uh, uh, you know, more uh, uh, meat sources in your diet or less meat sources in your diet. You have to play around with what works best for you.

I think what is consistent though is foods that are less processed are generally healthier, healthier for everyone. Um, but I'm not a nutritionist and I'm not, you know, here to give that kind of advice directly. You need to talk to your nutritionist and your, your, your medical expert. I'm here for the mechanics side of it, the muscle side of it, the way you move, the, the strength part of it. That's what I specialize in. But just telling you what I see from my clients as in, in general. I hope that helps.

Star Seed. Thanks for sharing, by the way, what's worked for you. Rep 216 says they're in Ohio. Fantastic. A lot of people from Ohio here today. Rileina Music says, "Swing helped me automatically." So, she's talking about the leg swinging, the tailgate swinging. Just raise my computer chair and easy pain and stiffness gone in 2 minutes. Isn't that crazy? Now, it's going to come back because that doesn't fix the muscle imbalance. That just gets the fluid moving. That helps the cartilage surfaces to start moving. You still have to fix the muscle imbalance. But that's why I grouped those exercises the way that I did because those first four are the ones that are really important at just calming things down, get setting up the beginnings of fixing the muscle imbalance. Then, then comes the the next section. Uh, five through eight where you really have to boost up the strength and then you have to figure out how to weightlift and walk. It's cardio and strengthening so that you can be able to maintain strength for the long term. But if you're hurting right now, stick to the tailgate swings. You're on the right track, Lena. Fantastic.

Then we have uh Candace Richardson says, "Greetings from Aruba." Fantastic. So jealous you're in Aruba. Melanie Enriquez is waving her hand. Hey Melanie. Um, Rep. 216 says, "What if you're bone on bone?" Oh, fantastic question. I love this question. Um, what if you're bone on bone? I think that the whole bone on bone concept is putting the wrong idea in our heads because I don't have a knee model with me, but I do have the skeleton. If you think about the idea of bone on bone, the way that you're told that you're bone on bone is if you get an X-ray and the the space within the knee joint is less than what it should be according to norms and according to your other side, like there's there's ways that they detect this stuff. And when they say bone on bone, what they are assuming assuming they don't know because they've just done an X-ray, they're assuming that the cartilage is gone. But it's not always the case because I have clients all the time, people in our knee arthritis recovery program that have been told they're bone on bone. We go through all the stuff we we go through here, the treatment approach, they fix the muscle imbalance, and they work their way through the program and they get back to being pain-free. They get back to doing high-level stuff, squats, full depth squats, hiking, being on their feet as long as they want, as if they didn't have anything wrong with them. And here's why I think it is. Cuz when you're bone on bone, they're looking at these bones right here, and they're saying that they're touching. It can't quite do it in the skeleton. Maybe like that, like right there, how they're touching. But if you have the muscle imbalance where your quads are overdominant and they're they're tighter as a result of that because you get an increased resting tension, it pulls a kneecap up, which the kneecap then has a tendon that attaches down to the shin bone here and it pulls that up. It's compressing the joint. So at that moment that you got the X-ray, you're probably having a really bad flare-up in your knee. That's why it hurt. That's what led you to go to the doctor. But you've been building this muscle imbalance for months, if not years or even decades. And this muscle is just holding everything up and smashing the joint together. And that's what I would think is a better description of what's going on. Instead of saying bone on bone, I think medical professionals should say should say your knee joint is being smashed. Because if we say that instead, then it leaves the door open for how do we unsmash the knee joint? How do we take the pressure off the knee joint? Because it's what happens. We fix we fix the glutes from from we get the glutes working and we fix the imbalance, you know, over time. We get the quads to calm down and not be so so stiff and tight. So, they let go, which then lets go down here on the knee and it takes the pressure off. I have yet to have anybody that was told they were bone on bone go back for an X-ray because they're usually feeling better. There's no reason to, but I I would imagine there's probably a little more space in the joint. Sure, if you crush the cartilage for long enough, it will probably start to die and you do get true wasting away of of the cells there, the cartilage cells and and dying of the cartilage cells. But I think that there's a window of time where if you catch it, you can un undepressurize it, unsquish it, and restore your cartilage back to normal health. Even in people though that have had cartilage death in the area, which this is all stuff that isn't research, which doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's just we don't know. We're just speculating here. But I can tell you that from my experience and working with the clients that I have who have been told they're bone on bone, they improve 100%. Some most of them it even if you have dead cartilage cells there and it's truly gone and the bone surface is is exposed. If you normalize the the surface. If you normalize the muscle imbalance, you'll get better function of the knee joint and you could probably be be pain-free. So, that's my answer to the bone on bone situation. This stuff still works. This treatment approach is still effective. These exercises that I presented today are still going to help if you're bone on bone. The only exception, this is the only exception, rep 216, is if you have a significant permanent loss of motion in your knee joint. Because think about it, the knee is designed to bend and straighten, right? It should bend and straighten about that much. If you can't get to straight and you're about this much, that shortens your leg. Your leg should be like this when you stand on it. But if your knee can't straighten out because of of the surfaces of the of the joint being so affected, then the in my eyes, the joint is too far gone to go through our treatment approach, and you probably do need a knee replacement. Same is true for if you can't bend it much. If you've lost so much motion that you can't bend more than about this much and you should be able to bend to here, then that there's a chance here that you could improve it. And we have people going through our program to in an effort to do it, but we're we're telling them like you might not improve. Your knee might be too far gone, but it's worth a shot. What have you got to lose? You you escape the surgery. Best case scenario. Worst case scenario, you just keep going into surgery like you probably planned on doing anyway before you discovered us. So, you can't lose. You just at least explore the options and cross it off the list if this isn't going to work for you. But I can tell you confidently that there's so many people so many people in our program that are that have been told they're bone on bone and they get better. There you go. Rep 216. I got time for one more here. Then I have to go.

Ba Limbic says, "Living with chronic pain and beyond a birthing position. Laughing." Yeah, it's true thing. Uh, we have Dolina from Switzerland. Fantastic. Kathleen Adams from Michigan. France Long from Kentucky. What do you think of Ben Patrick's knees over toes? Um, good question. Uh, I I think he's he's awesome in that he's presenting what's worked for him. Um, you know, that's that's his his approach to to presenting his information. I think some of the exercises are questionable and are like they they worked for him obviously and they might work for some other people. Um, but for somebody with knee osteoarthritis like I'm trying to help here. Um, probably not a good idea. And that being said, the whole idea of like knees over toes, I you saw me squatting, my knees were going over my toes, you saw me deadlifting, knees passing your toes is okay with the right muscle imbalance. I I don't I don't have like a solid history on where this all started. But my suspicion with why people were told to not let their knees pass their toes is because if you have a painful knee, if you if it's irritated for whatever reason, knee arthritis or not, some other reason, generally speaking, if you don't if you bend in such a way where you don't let your knees pass your toes, it hurts less in general. So, it's a short-term adaptation to your movement in order to be able to just keep going, but in the long term, you're not fixing the muscle imbalance, and it's not a productive thing to pro to forever not let your knees pass your toes. So, I feel like people got told early on, like when they're in physical therapy or seeing a doctor, like bend in a way that doesn't let your knees pass your toes. And it got taken as the doctor told me 17 years ago to not let my knees pass my toes. And I'm still doing that even though my knee arthritis is getting worse. So, I think it's fine to let your knees pass your toes, but that's not the full picture. You need to make sure you fix the muscle imbalance because then you can confidently move and not worry about how your knees are passing your toes. Humans are doing it all the time. You see babies knees passing their toes. I see grown people, elderly people who have been told they have bone on bone knee arthritis, squat with their knees passing their toes, deadlift with weights with their knees passing their toes, and they feel the best they've ever felt in years and decades. So, I think it's very possible. I agree with Ben Patrick on that. Um, but some of the things that he's doing are very extreme. You know, the lunge thing that he does, I think it's it's cool what he does and it's it's very, you know, visually appealing. It's like, I want to be able to do that. But for some of you guys here that are suffering with pretty bad knee arthritis and you're just trying to avoid surgery, I would be okay with you not ever lunging like he's lunging. You probably don't ever need to do that the rest of your life. You don't need to, you know, dip your knees down to the ground the way he bends like that. Um, it's it's probably not practical for you. Maybe for him because he's he's a basketball guy and he's working with, you know, people that are in that realm, the sports realm. So, it might be appropriate for them. But you saw the the mini squats that I was doing here. I have people work their way through this program feeling fantastic, being on their feet as long as they want, and never do a full-on squat. They just do mini squats, but they're targeting their glutes. That's what works. Excellent questions today, guys. I love y'all. I love this. This is so cool. I got to get going, though. I will be here next week doing some more exercises for you guys. See you guys next time.