I’m usually not a fan of tests, but this one will be fun and useful.
Yesterday, we talked about leg alignment mistakes that cause knee pain and how you can avoid them. Now, we’ll take it a step further.
With today’s simple test, you will:
- Discover how exposed your knees are to further injury
- Train your muscles to prevent knee pain
- Teach your nervous system to avoid dangerous alignments automatically
Best of all: the test only takes 60-seconds. Are you ready?
Let’s go through the test together.
Video Transcript
If you had superman’s x-ray vision, here’s what you would see inside the knee with bad leg alignment:
- Greater pressure and shearing forces on parts of the meniscus
- More tension on the ACL
- A diagonal force on the kneecap that’s damaging the patellar tendon
- And more wear and tear on other structures of the knee
The tissue that becomes painful first will determine what type of knee injury you ultimately get.
Walking, running, jumping, and taking stairs are all opportunities to cause more damage and if you examine these actions, you’ll notice they’re all combinations of single-leg movements.
How well you can control movement during the single-leg stance will tell you how exposed you are to further injury. That’s what we’re going to test right now.
The Test
Let’s go through the test together.
Stand with your feet hip-width apart and pointed forward.
Next, lift one foot up and keep the knee of the other leg aligned over the toes.
You pass the test if you can hold this position with your eyes closed for 30 seconds.
I will explain why we’re doing this with closed eyes after we’re done.
If you lose your balance, you fail the test.
Evaluation
How did you do? This should be easy. The more you struggled with this simple test, the harder it will be for you to maintain safe leg alignment when you’re actually moving and not just standing around. Here’s why we did this with closed eyes.
The body maintains balance by combining three systems:
- Your vestibular system in the inner ear.
- Your proprioception (body awareness), which is guided by forces you feel on the soles of your feet and in your body.
- Your eyesight, which uses visual input.
By taking the visual input away, we’re forcing the body to make better use of the remaining two systems. It’s great for training your proprioception, which will help correct dangerous alignments automatically and thereby prevent injuries.
In other words, by practicing this skill, you’re teaching your body to keep your legs well aligned and your knees safe.
Just to repeat, this exercise should be easy. If you struggled, practice it every day until you’re better. With enough practice, this part of keeping your knees healthy will happen on autopilot.
– Martin
Used Music
“Decisions” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0