Save Your Knees With Exercise Modifications

Save Your Knees With Exercise Modifications

If your knees ache when you do squats or lunges, don’t despair — there are ways to modify those exercises to take some pressure off while letting you still get that workout in.

Photo by www.localfitness.com.au.

While you can always just try a different exercise, we like DailyBurn’s tips for modifying some classic moves. For lunges, you can still get most of the muscle-building benefit by staying in place rather than stepping forward or backward with each rep.

Known as static lunges, these have you standing with one foot in front of you and one behind; each rep takes you down and up. (Do a full set before switching sides.)

Another helpful tip is to do squats with your back on an exercise ball on the wall. You’ll be leaning into the wall a bit, which changes the exercise slightly, but it may be well worth doing since it takes pressure off your knees. Obviously, holding weight in this position will be tricky, so enlist a friend’s help to place the ball or just save this one for unweighted squats.

Check out the link below for more modifications. And by the way — it should go without saying, but if you have knee pain and don’t know why, have a doctor check you out.

5 Workout Modifications to Go Easy on Your Knees [DailyBurn]


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