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This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness, and we're going to talk about VMO, or vastus medialis
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obliquus activation, and knee dysfunction. I'm going to have Vinnie come in and help me
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demonstrate a few movements.
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First things first, we need to discuss on why we need VMO activation, and when we
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should use it. Now generally knee pain comes from an inability to eccentrically
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decelerate femoral
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internal rotation and adduction, as our tibia externally rotates.This most easily
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seen in people who do a squat and their knees cave in. Can you demonstrate that for us?
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I know many of you guys have seen a squat done like this, where the knees start
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caving in. You can see that the femur has internally rotated. This increases
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the stress placed on many of the structures in the knee either medial or
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lateral, and it starts wearing us down,
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more or less. What a lot of individuals will do is they'll start trying to
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activate the VMO, thinking that it's just a patellar tracking problem.
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And while there is a patellar tracking problem, we also have huge problems in
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the hip, and huge problems in the ankle, if this is occurring, or one or the
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First things first, before we even start VMO activation,
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we need to correct whatever dysfunction we have going
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at the hip and the ankle because these structures, with the large muscles that are
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placed around these structures, have far more impact on what's happening to the
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alignment. Now, once we've gone ahead and done our release, stretching, and activation,
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our corrective exercise routine for the hip, ankle, or both, whatever the
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dysfunction is, we can use VMO activation as kind of the icing on the cake
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for those individuals with knee pain.
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In other words, you'd write a lower leg dysfunction strategy, and then add the
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VMO because the person had knee dysfunction. Now, Vinnie's going to do my
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favorite VMO exercise,
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the only one that really seems to be effective in my book.
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First things first, before we did this exercise, we would release this muscle
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here, which is not a common muscle to be released, but your biceps femoris needs
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to be released and stretched, and there's actually research to show just releasing
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this muscle alone, will increase activity to his VMO, or that inner muscle of your
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quads, that teardrop muscle that's just on the inside of your knee. Once he does
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that, we can then increase VMO activation by focusing on strengthening
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the last 10 degrees of knee extension. In a closed chain, this seems to work really, really
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well. So Vinnie is going to descend down just a little bit so we got
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a little bit of knee flexion here, and then what he's going to do is just lock
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out his knee against this resistance. So Vinnie, go ahead and show that one
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more time.
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So he's just locking his knee, working on strengthening that last 10 degrees of
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knee extension. Now, we can even take this one step further by having him lock his knee
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and then squeeze his glute, which will
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externally rotate his femur. External rotation of the femur is the same thing
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as tibial internal rotation, the same joint action that the vastus medialis
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obliquus will do on its own. So we got femoral external rotation by
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squeezing the glutes, increasing activation of the VMO because it is
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relative tibial internal rotation. Why don't you go ahead and show that one more
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So we're going to lock out the knee, squeeze the glute,
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hold for two seconds, and back down. You can have somebody do 10 to 20 reps, real
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easy to progress just by strengthening the band. Real easy thing to add into
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our activation, progression or activation circuit. Thank you.
