by Susi Hately, B.Sc. Kinesiology, C-IAYT Yoga Therapist

The knees brings a sense of levity to a yoga practice, and into day-to-day activities. When they are functioning well, and without pain, they enable buoyancy, easily transferring movement and action from the hips to the feet. In yoga poses, this buoyancy is translated into the feeling of grounded lightness. Movement feels easy.

However, when the knees aren’t functioning well, it is like there is a tether holding you back, that can be annoying and frustrating as you become more and more limited in yoga poses or other activities that involve knee flexion or extension.

Which is why the “flexing the ankle” cue came to be. There is an assumption that engaging the muscles along the front of the shin, which bring the ankle into a Tadasana position, would somehow protect the knee. I understand from where this thinking arose, however, it isn’t helping improve the function of the knee, and is actually leading to greater tension in the shin and through the foot, and all in all, less knee “protection”.

Let’s Look Further:

The knee is the mid way point between the hip and foot. Skeletally, it consists of the tibia, patella and femur. The tibia creates part of the ankle joint, and the femur forms part of the hip joint. What happens at those 2 joints (ankle and hip) will impact the knee.

If we look muscularly at the knee, there are a total of 13 muscles that cross the knee. Of these 13 muscles, 7 also cross the hip. Just one also crosses the ankle.

The hip crossing muscles include:

1. Rectus Femoris
2. Sartorius
3. Gracilis
4. 3 hamstrings
5. Tensor Fasciae Latae/Gluteus Maximus via Iliotibial Band

The ankle crossing muscle is:

1. Gastrocnemius

When looking at dorsiflexion of the ankle (aka flexing the ankle) and its impact on the knee, we can analyze whether the muscles that are involved in dorsiflexion also cross the knee.

These muscles that contract to create dorsiflexion include:

1. Tibialis Anterior
2. Extensor Digitorum Longus
3. Extensor Hallucis Longus
4. Peroneus Tertius

None of these muscles cross the knee, so there is not a direct impact of these muscles on the knee.

Even so, people may suggest that:

• these muscles support the arch of the foot and as a result they support the knee. The only muscle that has been considered for that role is the Tibialis Anterior, so there is some truth there. However, most of the muscles that directly support the arches attach to the plantar or bottom side of the foot (and interestingly, some of the muscles of the hip also help support the arches of the foot).
• the gastrocnemius is an antagonist to dorsiflexion, and it does cross the knee, so it doing so will impact the knee, since releasing the back line of the leg can, in part, help to support the knee. However . . .

If I am going to state it like it is – there are other areas that have a much greater impact on the knee. If we pay attention to them, not only will knee function improve, pain will reduce and injury will be prevented. In this case, “better function” and “prevention” is the ultimate form of “protection”.

Building True Support For the Knee

Most of the muscles that cross the knee also cross the hip. Interestingly, when we improve the movement of the hip, we improve the function of the knee. If you really want to prevent yoga injuries that are related to the knee, if you want to create better stability of the knee, and if you want to protect the knee, be sure to work with creating better stability and mobility of the hips.

An easy way to do this is to only move into your yoga poses as far as your hips can take you. If you push or force yourself into depth too soon, if you compensate and hold yourself with a grippy, tense, bracing feeling, it is quite possible that your legs will fall toward the midline of the body or internally rotate, you may torque through your knee, invert or evert your ankle, hold your pelvic floor or respiratory diaphragm too tightly, or collapse through your spine.

How Does this Relate to Dead Pigeon aka Threading the Needle?

A common place to dorsiflex the ankle “to protect the knee” happens while supine (on your back) and placing the right ankle to the left knee. If you look closely you will see many people lifting their pelvis to do the movement, overusing their back, and hardly using their hip rotators at all. This compensation can and often has massive repercussions at the knee. If you want to help your knee, be sure to that you aren’t lifting your bum to get the ankle to the knee and that you are only move the femur in the acetabulum as far as your pelvis doesn’t shift. Also be sure that you aren’t compensating by torquing at your knee, or inverting your foot so that you get little wrinkles of skin on the inside of your ankle. You don’t need to hold your foot in Tadasana to prevent this last point. Be gentle, easy with yourself.

Other resources:

You can see the hip-ankle connection in the following youtube clip on lotus pose. You will see that my ankle is comfortable, the toes aren’t being pulled to the nose, the movement is at the hip:

Remember, in order to cue well, it is vital to understand the movement of your body, how your joints function and the impact of the surrounding neuromuscular and fascia structures. You don’t have to steeped in anatomy, but you do need to have a solid foundation for seeing movement and then knowing what to do or say to help your students improve. Their progress is proportionally tied to your ability to see and communicate.

If you would like help with your cueing and your ability to see movement, consider joining me this fall at one of the Intensives where you will be steeped in Kinesiology and Biomechanics of Yoga. You will leave with an incredible knowledge of which cues work and why, and which cues don’t work and why. You will gain 20-20 vision for picking up on the way the body is actually meant to move. For more details click here