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Hi. My name is Eric Sampson, and I want to talk a little bit about how to do a quadriceps
stretch. Quadriceps is probably your most important muscle for your knee. It is the
large muscle in the front of your knee. It is made up of four parts. That's why it's
called a quadriceps. You have your vastus medialis on the inner, your lateralis on the
lateral side. In the middle, you have two. You have your intermedius as well as your
*** femoris. The *** femoris is the one deepest and that, along with another muscle
of your thigh, called your sartorius, are muscles that actually cross your hip joint.
They all are going to attach to your knee, but two of them are going to attach up here
by your hip. So, it's important, when you're stretching out your quadriceps, to make sure
you're addressing your hip. Too often I see in the clinic people trying to stretch out
their knee by tugging their heel up towards their buttocks, but they're not addressing
their hip angle enough, and they might be causing too much joint compression on their
knee.
It's an important muscle to stretch because it's very active with our running, with our
exercise population, and it ends up being fatigued and tightened with too much exercise.
So the classic quadriceps stretch is going to be in standing, and the key thing is to
grab your foot and to make sure you place your hip in the right position. The first
thing is to get your knees together, then bring the leg you're stretching behind the
other leg, and that puts this on the right angle, and from there you pull up.
When you start to pull up, you should feel an intense stretch or a moderate stretch in
the front of the thigh, and you can try to hold it for about 15 to 20 seconds per repetition.
It's a stretch, so you might want to do stretching on a daily basis in the presence of an injury
or a tight tissue, maybe two repetitions each time you do it, and continue that for a few
weeks and see if you can loosen up the quadriceps.
So, it's an important exercise to continue doing on a daily basis, the quadriceps, and
if you do it once or twice a day on a regular basis, you should get by.