Most knee pain injuries’ primary reasons this pain happens: are hip weakness and adductor weakness. Where the knee bends and occurs is controlled by the ankles and hips.
The Importance of the Adductors
Adductors play an important role in knee pain. Run down inside of your thigh down to the knee inside of the hip and work to bring leg back towards inside. These muscles help bend your knee and advance your knee drive when they’re stronger. The adductors play a massive role during running. Not only do the adductors bring your leg back in towards your body, but these muscles will also help move and stabilize your knee and hip simply because of their location on your leg.
The adductors will help bend the knee and flex or lift the hip. Think about how often your knee bends while you run or your thigh bone lifts. The adductors will play a huge role in running faster, on uneven terrain, or when running uphill. This is because they will help advance your thigh forward, which becomes more forceful as you run faster.
This is also because the knee will have more demand when running uphill. As demand increases on a joint during running, the muscles and other structures will have to work harder.
Here are 14 exercises to perform that will strengthen your adductors and prevent knee injuries while running!
1. Foam rolling
2. Lateral lunge with band
3. Quadruped rocking stretch
4. Butterfly stretch
5. Lying leg adductor stretch
6. Low side-to-side lunge
7. Prisoner low squat
8. Warrior 2
9. Sliding kneeling adductor exercise
10. Sliding lateral lunge with
11. Sliding skater lunge
12. Plank jack with slider
13. Glute bridge with adductor hold
14. Copenhagen plank with knee tap addition
Perform each exercise for 12-15 reps, 2-3x/week around your runs!
Strengthening this muscle group will improve your running.
Join our webinar on 9/20 at 8 pm EST to perform these LIVE with @jaci.wilson.runs & I! ??
?Link to register: https://forms.gle/HGCYsVLdibqxuZw16.
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