When a patient comes to visit our Clinic complaining of knee pain, it is very important to make a good anamnesis and exhaustive assessment; this will help us a lot to find the cause of the damage and create a more appropriate rehabilitation program focused on the recovery.

Most of cases, we will find an imbalance between the flexor and the extensor muscle chain of the hip or of the knee. However, we should not focus our treatment in just one muscle chain. Usually there is a knee extensor muscular chain weakness versus flexor muscular chain hypertonicity.  As I noticed before, we should not avoid any of both muscular chains and we have to try to work strengthening on the weaker one, and give flexibility to the hypertonic one.

We should focus as well on the compensations in the knee joint during the exercise performance. It is very important to avoid them and in case of appearing, we must know how to correct them.

The best way to increase strength in a rehabilitation program either after surgical intervention or to prevent injuries, is to apply eccentric contraction exercises. In this type of contraction, the muscle stretches during activation which provoke both ends of the muscle to move away. The eccentric contraction uses a maximal muscle intensity, so that, we receive the benefit of this condition to increase the strengthening in training programs.

The benefits we can find in this kind of training workouts are:

• Increase strengthening muscle and joint speed
• Increase tissue elasticity, muscular and connective
• Builds sarcomere in series (facilitates muscle stretching)
• Improve muscle contraction capacity
• Increase collagen synthesis in the connective tissue
• Improve proprioception capacity (stability)
• Better neuromuscular control
• Decrease muscle and tendon injury risk
• Improved response to concentric contraction

We perform this kind of programs in recoveries after a long inactivity, post-surgery and also in injury preventive programs.

There are a lot of exercises and multitude of researches which help us to perform properly this rehabilitation programs. In our clinic we have one of the simplest items, effective and easy to use. This item is a “Tirante Musculador” or “Muscular Belt”. With this belt, we can perform eccentric contractions, correcting the whole lower limb during the exercises performance.

We are able to graduate the range of movement working within painless range of movement. It is very important to include proprioception exercises in the rehabilitation programs to prevent musculoskeletal injuries such as tendinitis, ligament sprains or muscles tears. Tirante Musculador is supported by a lot of *researches and the most important professional teams and players around the world.

If you want to try the benefits of the Tirante Musculador and want to know the easier way to perform an eccentric strength program without complex machines, please, do not hesitate to contact us. You can also benefit in case of injury and do not know how to recover. We will be very happy to help you.

Pablo

*http://www.slideshare.net/CristinaLpez24/russian-belt

http://www.uco.es/cmfd/new_cmfd/articulosPublicados/pdf/Tirante_short_comunicacaion_EMG_Da_Silva

http://www.efdeportes.com/efd115/entrenamiento-de-la-fuerza-con-ayuda-del-tirante-musculador.htm

https://prezi.com/be1bbncdvb1z/tirante-musculador/