 Hey everybody, it's Dr. Nathan Sermeno here. I'm coming at you from the Southern California University of Health Sciences. Today we're gonna talk about knee health, how to keep our knees healthy, how to keep our knees strong, and hopefully prevent any future injury. Three variations of stretches for the hamstrings, the quadriceps, and the calf muscles. We can help maintain a nice range of motion, flexibility, limberness in our knees to help prevent injury. And if we're already dealing with an injury, to help maintain normal length and tension between those muscle groups to help protect our knees. We're gonna start out today with a very, very simple hamstring stretch. The hamstring group is the big group of muscles behind the knee that helps support the back of the knee. So if those get too tight, sometimes we'll get a lot of tension, tightness, stiffness, soreness in the knee. We wanna make sure we keep those nice and limber. From this position, Ricky's gonna sort of trace down his leg and stretch forward, reaching for that foot, good right through there. Now, I don't want him to tug on this foot here and pull that foot, because we've got a big, long sciatic nerve that runs all the way back behind the leg. And we don't wanna pull on that ankle because that's gonna tension that nerve too much. We just wanna focus on getting some stretch into the back of that hamstring group. If this is too difficult for you to do, sitting upright and trying to reach for the leg, we can modify this position to make the stretch a little bit easier. And he can keep the opposite knee bent for a little bit of stability here. And then now, we can slowly try to raise our leg off the table and bring it up, keeping the knee nice and straight, keeping those toes pointed up towards the sky as he brings the leg up. Now, with both arms, we can slowly try to reach behind the thigh here, okay? And so now, we can use those arms to pull that leg and get that same kind of stretch. Sometimes it's a little bit easier on our back in this position. And we can still get that good stretch into the hamstring group from this position. We're gonna bring our foot off the ground and try to catch our ankle in our hand here to stretch the quadricep muscles in the front of the thigh. Those muscles kind of join together and cross the knee. So if they're really tight, sometimes we'll get a lot of pulling on that front of the knee when we're doing certain activities. So this is a nice way to make sure we get a good stretch into that quadricep group. And now, we're gonna stretch the muscles in our calf because the big muscle back here, the gastrocnemius muscle, crosses the knee. And then we have another smaller muscle in our calf, the soleus muscle that can also put a little bit of tension in the overall calf group. We're gonna have the patient bring the leg back in a nice straight line, keeping the knee straight, make sure his heel is nice and flat on the floor. And from this position, he's going to sort of lean towards the chair a little bit here. And now we're gonna stretch not only the hamstring group here, but also those gastrocnemius muscles that cross on either side of the knee here. So knees can be achy, they can be stiff, they can be sore. Anything from sore, like you just did a long bike ride or you're doing on a long walk, and now it's really kind of sore and stiff to sharp, stabbing pains that are deep inside the joint. And all these things can have different meanings as to what's going on inside the knee. So it's important that we get our knees evaluated if we're experiencing pain by a qualified healthcare professional that's going to do a good examination to determine what is the cause of that pain.