Recently one of my personal coaching students injured their knee and came to me looking for some tips and tricks for getting a good leg workout without causing excess pain and strain to their injured knee. Working around aches and pains is a common problem that we all face from time to time, and if you haven't had any injuries or joint pain yet, you probably will later on down the road.

Video Transcription


Hey, its Lee Hayward here, and I just got an email from one of my personal coaching students, and basically she was complaining that she has injured her knee while training and she wants to know how she can work around her knee injury. And this is quite common, I mean, I have dealt with this myself on occasion. Generally, when people have problems, it's usually in the knees or it's the elbows, or the shoulders. Those are the joints that really cause most problems. But anyway, she wanted to know some tips and suggestions that she could use for working around her knee injury. So what I did, is I put together a little video clip here, and it's going to cover some simple exercises that you can do, and allow you to get a good solid leg workout, but without placing excess strain on the knee joint. The first exercise that I would like to do are leg extensions. I will do these with light weights and high reps. For example, I will use about 50 pounds of the weight stack, and shoot for 50 reps per se. High rep leg extensions are very therapeutic on the knee joints, because they circulate blood throughout the knees, and they help to release your body's natural joint lubricant, which is called synovial fluid. This is secreted from the inner membrane of your joints to help lubricate your joints during activity. It's just another reason that you should always perform a light high rep warm up, prior to moving on to heavy weight lifting. As you keep going throughout the state, you will find that your quad muscles are burnt like crazy due to the lactic acid build up. Well, keep going, and work through the burn, because the lactic acid is actually good for helping to speed up recovery and recuperate from a knee injury. The next exercise that I would like to move on to is body weights squats. These are great for working the legs in a natural plane of movement, you are not restricted or held in place like when doing machine exercises. Squats work all the major muscles of the legs from the quads, hamstrings, hips and glutes, and because we are using just body weight here, there will not be a lot of stress and strain on the knee joint. When you perform these, do high reps, and strive to do about a hundred total body weights squats over the course of your workout. You can break this up into like four sets of 25 reps, or five sets of 20, or however you like, but just strive to do about 100 total reps over the course of your workout. The last exercise is leg presses, for working around a knee injury, you should do your leg presses with your feet placed high and wide on the foot plate. This will take the stress off the knees, and place more of the emphasis on the hamstrings, hips and glutes. Only bring your legs down until your knees are about 90 degree angles. Then press the weight back up, doing your leg presses in this way will allow you to handle fairly heavy weight, and you will be able to do it comfortably and work around your knee injuries without a lot of pain or discomfort. For more training and nutrition tips, make sure to visit my website, at www.leehayward.com, and while you are there make sure to sign up for my free body building and fitness tips newsletter.