Knee flexibility is one of those things most of us take for granted until it’s taken away from us, whether by injury, age, or adaptive shortening over time due to lack of use. In this guide, we’ll explain some gentle ways to improve knee flexibility:
The general steps for improving knee flexibility are:
- Perform regular stretching exercises for the hamstring, quadriceps, and calves.
- Engage in low-impact activities such as walking, swimming, or cycling to maintain mobility without strain.
- Use foam rolling or massage techniques to release muscle tightness around the knee.
- Strengthen supporting muscles, particularly in the hips and thighs, through resistance training.
In this article, we’ll provide some practical suggestions for how to accomplish each of these tasks.
But first, let’s define what a flexible knee actually should be capable of:
What exactly do we mean by “knee flexibility?”
While this may seem obvious at first glance, we’d like to first cover what we would call a “flexible” or “mobile” knee joint. Of course, this exists on a spectrum.
The range of motion in the knee varies from person to person, and is influenced by a few factors aside from their general flexibility efforts. As a rough guideline, we define a “flexible” or “normal” knee as:
- A knee that can bend between 110-120 degrees as good range of motion, and anything above that as excellent range of motion. This flexion could continue all the way through to “hamstring on the calves” mobility, which can be beneficial as long as it isn’t painful.
- The knee should be able to extend all the way to 0 degrees (perfectly straight).
Anything below these ranges, we would describe as “needs work.”
Why we consider knee flexibility and mobility to be important
In general, folks with more mobile knees will be less injury prone and more capable of performing daily activities. In addition, improving the flexibility of the knee joint will make us feel younger! Those “odd” positions that we see folks assuming with impunity (deep squats, kneeling on one leg, sitting on the floor) will be unlocked for us as we’re able to assume deeper positions and growing stronger through the knee joint.
In other words, by becoming more flexible, we improve our functional mobility for daily tasks.
How we became inflexible in the first place
Though we don’t need to spend a ton of time discussing this aspect of it (most of us probably intuitively know how we became inflexible!), we’ll point out here that the reason most of us become inflexible is simple lack of use.
Many folks have the mistaken idea that if we don’t stress our bodies, we can’t (or won’t) get injured. We treat our bodies like a car: if we don’t use it, it can’t wear out. In the case of our bodies, the opposite is more true:
At some point in our adult lives, we stop using our joints to their full potential, and the body adapts over time. This phenomenon is known as adaptive shortening. As we covered in our article on “sitting is the new smoking,” many of us have assumed a seated position for most of our lives, and our knees rarely flex beyond the 90 degrees required to sit on a chair, couch, or car seat.
As an aside, we don’t recommend stressing too much about this effect – we just need to recognize it for what it is. By implementing a simple routine of stretching and strengthening, we can actually restore the mobility in our knees with fairly little effort.
Without further ado:
Steps to improve knee strength and flexibility
1. Stretch your hamstrings, quadriceps, and calves daily
As we discussed in our article on how long it takes to improve flexibility, our stretching and mobility routines don’t need to take forever, but we do need to be consistent.
There are numerous stretches that exist for the muscle groups mentioned above – we advise that you pick your favorites, emphasizing that they aren’t painful for you.
Spend around 30 seconds on each side performing your hamstring stretch of choice, your quadriceps stretch of choice, and your calf stretch of choice. In all, this should take about three minutes to accomplish.
In the beginning, perform these stretches twice per day. Upon awakening and directly before bed are great times to stretch, although you can select whatever times of day you want.
Don’t get too worried about choosing the “optimal” stretch. There are many ways to stretch each of these muscle groups. While we could label one as better than the other, it will be context dependent based on the person, and at the end of the day, the “best” stretch and the “worst” stretch generally accomplish the same thing.
2. Engage in regular low-impact activities
One thing that’s incredibly useful for many folks is frequent, short duration low-impact exercise like walking, swimming, or cycling. Again, we advise that you don’t spend too much time trying to figure out which is best – simply spend 10-12 minutes engaging in one of these activities, once or twice per day.
This activity will get your joints moving regularly, provide very little resistance, and have the side benefit of being helpful in controlling body weight, if that’s an issue that’s concerning to you.
3. Use foam rolling or massage techniques
First, let’s be clear that we don’t think you should foam roll or use massage guns on the actual knee bones. Rather, use a foam roller, massage gun, lacrosse ball, or other self-massage implement to roll out the musculature of the quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and calves to loosen up the muscles and allow for maximum mobility.
In addition to relaxing and temporarily lengthening the muscles, this feels very good and will alleviate the stiffness and tightness that you feel around the joint. Like stretching, we recommend doing this twice per day for the first few weeks, then backing off to once per day (if desired) as you begin to become more flexible.
We have full articles on both topics, if you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of massage guns or the benefits of foam rolling.
4. Strengthen the surrounding musculature through resistance training
As we discussed in our post on resistance training and flexibility, becoming stronger tends to improve the mobility and flexibility of the muscles surrounding the joints, rather than the other way around.
We recommend engaging in resistance training targeting the lower body at least twice per week. If you’re looking for a simple, no-frills solution for lower body resistance training, check out our lower body micro workout for more particulars of how to accomplish this task in just a few minutes per day.
How long will it take to improve knee flexibility?
As we discussed in our article on how long it takes to improve flexibility, you should see significant improvements after 2-3 weeks of stretching your knees. However, progress after that first few weeks depending on your goals.
If your goal is to have highly flexible knees, such as to be able to place your hamstrings on your calves, then you may be looking at a few months of work. If you simply want relatively strong and flexible knees, it won’t take nearly as long.
Good luck!
