Back of knee pain/stiffness? Hamstring tightness? Could be Popliteus muscle tightness. In this video, we're going to talk about knee pain and specifically, pain located behind the knee, especially after activity that required a lot of rotational change of direction. Think about tennis, basketball, basically anything besides straight line jogging that required the knee and the lower extremity to have a lot of rotational components to it. The knee joint is not just a simple hinge joint. There's a small but important amount of external rotation and internal rotation. The external rotation occurs when we go into full extension, which is the knee locking out. Then, in order for us to bend the knee, we have to have a little bit of an internal rotation of this tibia in order to have full flection. So, this is the tibia. I'm exaggerating the motion, but you can see external rotation when we go into full extension, internal rotation when we come into full flection.

The muscle's called the popliteus, and it's located behind the knee and it's responsible for helping to stabilize the knee, especially to help unlock the knee during flection. As you can see, the popliteus is a pretty small muscle, but it plays a very important role. It starts on the outside edge of the femur, crosses diagonally behind the knee, and inserts on the inside top edge of the tibia. In addition to helping stabilize the knee, the popliteus is also responsible for internal rotation of the tibia during knee flection.

The muscle starts on the high side of the femur, goes behind in the popliteal fossa, and inserts broadly on the under surface here on the inside lateral part of this tibia.

In order to find the popliteus, you'll go on the inside edge of the tibia until you start to feel the bone flare out a little bit for the tibial plateau. What you'll do is you'll take your thumb and dig back there behind there until you feel that muscle, and if it's sore, what I want you to do is work that for about 30 seconds to a minute, massaging that muscle out a little bit. If it's involved, it is usually really pretty sore. So, inside edge until you feel the bone flare out, drop your thumbs back, and feel the muscle. Now, I'm going to show you how to stretch your right popliteus. So, what you'll need to do is bend the knee a little bit, slightly toe out, and then rotate your legs straight. Hands on your knees and you're going to slowly bend and straighten out your leg until you feel a stretch right behind the knee.

Now, you might get some stretch all the way up the hamstring, but the focus is behind the knee. Let's take a look again. Toe out. Then you're going to ... so not straight, but tow it out, rotate the leg in, slightly bend over, and then work that knee into full extension. Pause for a second and then bring it back, and what you'll feel is you should feel the stretch right behind the knee. Let's take a look at it from another angle. Slightly toe out, rotate the femur back immediately, slight bend in your leg, bend over if you need to, and then I want that focus to be right behind the knee. So, we're going to post that just a little bit here. Stick your butt up in the air if you need to. Bring it down until you feel a stretch right behind the knee, and then you can assume that you're stretching that popliteus.

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Thanks,
Ed Deboo, PT