Weak Knees? Four Exercises To Strengthen Every Knee Muscle

Over-50s specialist physio Will Harlow shows us how:

The most bang-for-buck:

We’ll keep it simple; the four exercises are:

1. Knee extensions while sitting: sit back in a chair, straighten your leg, pull your toes towards you, and strongly contract your thigh while pushing your knee down into the chair, before lowering and repeating.
2. Hamstring bridge: lie on your back on the floor with your legs resting on a chair or similar elevated surface, press your lower back into the floor, then push through your heels to lift your pelvis by squeezing your hamstrings, before lowering slowly.
3. Forward lean calf raise: stand about a meter from a wall, lean forwards with your hands on it, then rise onto your toes through a full range before lowering under control, progressing to one leg if reasonable.
4. sit to stand progression: move from a standard sit-to-stand to a staggered stance, and eventually a single-leg version, leaning your body forwards, and controlling both the lift and the descent.

For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

• Do This Before Walking To Suffer Less (It Takes 30 Seconds) ← when what feels like a problem in your knees is actually a lack of glute activation
• How To Make Downhill Walking Easier On The Knees ← famously more of a challenge than going uphill, in the case of dubious knees
• The Best Exercise to Stop Your Legs From Giving Out ← this one’s good if, like this writer, you have strong legs and/but also EDS or a similar connective tissue disorder that causes your joints to sometimes just fold like laundry for no obvious reason (it’s about the body’s misguided attempt to save you from something that’s not actually a problem but a tendon got confused so the muscle just dropped it)

Take care!