Quiz! - How to prevent knee injury and heal your knees!
Strong muscles & healthy movement patterns will help your knees be healthy!...
How do strength and health in other body parts go toward protecting your knees?
Instructions
This quiz will stimulate your thinking and encourage you to do your own internet research, whereby you’ll intuitively know which exercises to use. For each question, a model audio answer is provided - write down your answer first before listening to the audio.
(Note: Google’s AI-generated answers provide me with surprisingly relevant research summaries and links that let me research more deeply - try it for yourself!)
1. How do strong and stable toes, feet and ankles help the knees?
2. How does knee alignment (by sending the knee forward over the 3rd to 5th toe) help the knees?
3. How does the instruction: “Be tall, with a horizontal belt line” help the knees?
4. How do flexible and coordinated hip joints help the knees?
5. How do long, strong hamstrings help the knees?
Note on the link between weak hamstrings and knee damage:-
It’s been adequately proven that vigorous sporting movements and weak hamstrings increase knee damage risk. It’s also likely that those who are not athletic risk knee damage due to weak hamstrings when they trip, stumble, or occasionally “overdo things”.
Ref 1: What is the relationship between anterior cruciate ligament injury and hamstring strengthening?
Comment on reference papers:-
The first paper showed that weak hamstrings contribute to higher cruciate ligament loading in jumps and side cuts. The second paper showed a strong and significant post rehab association between weak hamstrings, and subsequent re-injury. However it could only show a trend association once other variables had been accounted for (p = 0.16 - see Table 2). Alltogether the papers show that strong hamstrings are likely to prevent ACL ligament and knee cartilage damage.
*Research paper (ref 2) is problematic:-
(1) Failure to adequately deal with a vast amount of random and non-random interference between hamstring/quadriceps ratio and six other not always independent variables, e.g. the method of surgical repair (which is a non-independent variable because hamstring autograft reduces hamstring strength and also an independent variable because this style of surgery might not provide the strongest and most reliable ligament repair); the sex of the participant (because females are less prone to ACL re-injury, and also because female athletes prior to injury are less likely than males to “do weights”, but equally likely to “do weights” during rehab; the age at the time of injury, and the heterogeneity in the rehab program (perhaps some physio programs enhance ACL robustness by concentrating on hamstring strength, while others others concentrate more on core strength and/or graded plyometrics, but both are equally effective at preventing re-injury). Rather than relying upon computerised statistical analysis, a safer way to deal with the interference betwen might have been to split the single study group into appropriate smaller groups, e.g. “high-level male athletes of middle age who had hamstring autograft repairs and underwent a similar exercise and rehab program”. This would reliably remove the statistical noise due to male or female, choice of surgery, level of sporting challenge, and age. Such groups might then be re-combined in the same way that systematic reviews combine separate research papers.
6. How do strong buttocks and back do for knees?
7. How do strong mid to upper back and shoulder blades help the knees?
(when your upper upper back is strong and your manubrium lifts, it’s easy to be tall, and light on your feet - see picture below… )
