Get on Track to Eliminate Knee Pain

Do your knees hurt? Do they aggaravate you when you're just standing around or doing bilaterally symmetric poses like mountain pose (tadasana) or wide-stance forward bend (prasarita padottanasana)?

Sometimes it's because the knees just don't track right.

Knee pain often goes away with a simple seated maneuver you can try right now.

Sit on the edge of a chair or on the floor. If your right knee hurts, pick your right leg up off the floor, knee comfortably bent. Place your right hand on the outside (lateral) of your right calf muscle. Put your left hand on your inner thigh. Push your shin towards the mid-line with your right hand. Push your thigh in the opposite direction, away from the mid-line of your body. While pressing with both hands, open and close your knee joint a dozen times.


Here's an assistant pressing the shin toward the mid-line and thigh away. Opening and closing the knee will often put the knee back on track.

If it's your left leg, you've got to switch the instructions all around. (Good luck!)

The mnemonic is SITA. SITA stands for shins in, thighs apart. To make this work on either knee, you've got to press your shin in, toward the mid-line and press your thighs apart, away from the mid-line.

Look at your shoes. Are your heels worn on the outside? If they are your shins are probably moving away from the mid-line whenever you walk. That may be all you need to get the knees slightly off track and well into the pain zone.

This little SITA adjustment can get you up and going again.

By the way, SITA, shins in, thighs apart, is a principle you can apply with great success in every pose. How to do it is not easily summed up in message like this. But it's quite simple to experience and master in tadasana, mountain pose. Then you can apply this action in the other poses.

Do me a favor. If this makes your knee pain go away today, send me an email! Thanks.

Don't just read about it. Get up. Experience it. Experience yoga!

Kevin Perry
www.ExperienceYoga.org

p.s., A fun yoga fact to know is that Sita is the devoted spouse of Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu. Their story is told in the great epic tale, the Ramayana. If you don't know the story of the Ramayana you should particpate in the Experience Sanskrit workshop coming up on June 25 at St. Louis YogaSource. The Ramayana is one of the "stories behind the pose" that we discuss. You'll learn about the great monkey warrior Hanuman who led a vast army of monkeys and bears across the Straits on a bridge they made by casting stones into the water. They found Sita and brought her back, after a long battle, to Ram. Because of his amazing leaps across the Straits, the pose hanumanasana, was named in dedication to Hanuman, whose devotion to his master is a model for us all.

Copyright 2005. All rights reserved, Mo Yoga LLC.