Keeping Your Knees Safe
Whether you have knobby knees, bowed legs, or hyperextend knees, chances are you've strained or injured a knee joint at some time or another.That's why Mary Dunn's class today on "Saving and Protecting Knees" was an essential for anyone hoping to prevent injuries.
Lesson number one: knees come in different shapes and sizes, and you have to understand the structure of the knee before you can determine how to care for it. "It's like painting with gree paint on green paper," says Mary. "It's not going to look the same as it would on white or grey paper."
Not everyone has the same skeletal structure at one of the body's most delicate joints. For example, I'm pretty sure my legs fall under a category Mary would call knobby kneed. That means my thigh comes in at an angle,then my shin bones extend out slightly. It's kind of an undesirable hour-glass effect, which, of course, is more dynamic in one leg than the other. I also have a bit of an overextension in my joint. So I lock my knees when I'm standing.
Another lady in the class was the perfect example of "bowlegged." Her knees were further away from her midline, making her legs curve outwardly.
As it turns out, the key to protecting the knees may not lie in the knee itself. (I'm assuming most people know about the whole lining-the-knee-over-the-ankle concept in poses like Warrior I and II.) According to Mary, we can train ourselves to take care of our knees through how we work our feet and hips.
"The feet are only the foundation of everything we do!" Marys says as she instructs the class to evenly distribute the weight on the feet.
It's a lot easier on the knee if we let our hips and ankle joints do some of the work, too, in poses like Utkatasana. To demonstrate this, we practiced Utkatasana with our heels up on a folded blanket so we'd have to use our ankles. She had each of us keep our feet three inches apart so bow-legged folks "can't complain that they can't get their feet together." Then we were instructed to press through the balls of our feet and pull our toes up so we weren't collapsing in at the arches of our feet. So that's how you lift your arches--I never knew!
Even though I haven't had a lot of knee issues yet (knock on wood) it really made me think about what I need to do to ensure that I don't develop knee issues in the future, and also gave me some things to look for as I continue on in my yoga teacher training.
photo by Susan Slattery