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Video Transcription:
Welcome back to Foundation’s YouTube channel, my name is Christian Compean. I’m a physical therapist fellowship trained in manual orthopedic physical therapy. Today I’m going to go over a very simple exercise called a TKE. Thats terminal knee extension. All that means is its an exercise geared towards making sure you’re using your quads to completely straighten the knee. Especially if you’re recovering from any kind of rehab injury and you’re under the treatment of a physical therapist you may be asked to do this exercise and I’m going to point out a few of the very important key points in it that can make the difference between this being very fruitful versus you just kind of spinning your wheels and not getting too much out of it. So we’re going to use the keiser you can definitely do this with a band you can also do this is with a pulley system. Anything that provides some resistance straight across. I want the pulley to end up right at about knee level. Then what I’m going to do is step my foot right in this strap right so that this ends up kind of right behind my knee. Make sure its not obstructing any movement of the knee cap or patella. Now one key point here is that I want you to imagine that as you stand there are 3 dots underneath your foot. One underneath the ball of your foot or the base of your big toe, one underneath the base of your little toe and one underneath the heal. I’m going to balance over those three points then what you’re going to do is you’re going to bend your knee and kind of shift your weight onto the front two points that would be the ball of your foot or the base of your big toe and the base of your little toe and then thats where I let the knee bend. Then I engage the quad and I think of pulling my kneecap up towards my hip and I get that third point down on the floor. Then I come up and back. Now at first it may be challenging to do this against any kind of weight so just start light. You can even do this with no weight and even kind of learning how to shift your weight from those front two points to that back point and really working on tightening that quad. Now as I get better at this and as your quad gets more resilient then you can just set a timer and do this for time to build some endurance in that quad. Variations for this you can do this staggered stance where your foot is on a little bolster or a step thats going to put more weight on this side or you can do it like I’m doing it now single leg and really work on getting your entire weight on that quad. So its a great exercise where you can really progress from early on in rehab after an injury all the way up to being very high level and just doing it on a single leg. If you really wanted to sup this thing up you could put an unstable surface under there like a balance pad. Make sure you’re safe with that. But now you’re really doing some upper level rehab or upper level training on unstable surfaces which will protect your knee. If this is something you like please give it a thumbs up. If you know somebody else that this might help please share it with them. If you like this type of content please subscribe we invite any questions or comments below. Most importantly we remind you that movement is a gift and we hope you enjoy it.