Why Knee Mobility Matters

Your knees play a crucial role in just about every movement you make—from walking and running to squatting and standing up from a chair. As hinge joints, they allow your legs to bend and straighten, and they’re deeply influenced by what’s happening both above (at the hips) and below (at the ankles). That means if your knees aren’t moving well, it’s not just your lower body that suffers—your entire movement system is affected.

When knee mobility is restricted, your posture, balance, and stability can all take a hit. Tight quads, stiff hips, and limited ankle range of motion can cause your knees to compensate in ways they weren’t designed to—leading to discomfort, poor mechanics, and eventually injury. In fact, many common issues like runner’s knee and pain during squats can be traced back to poor movement quality, not just weak muscles.

Some of the most common causes of limited knee mobility include:

• A sedentary lifestyle (aka too much sitting, not enough movement)
• Past injuries that were never fully rehabilitated
• Muscle tightness in the quads, hamstrings, calves, or hip flexors
• Inflammation or joint irritation from repetitive overuse

The good news? You can improve how your knees move and feel—often with just a few minutes a day. Consistent mobility exercises for knees help reduce stiffness, reintroduce natural range of motion, and build more durable, pain-free movement patterns.

Whether you’re dealing with discomfort or simply want to stay ahead of future problems, exercises to improve knee mobility are a smart investment in long-term performance and joint health.

Simple Exercises to Improve Knee Mobility

Mobility is a major player in keeping your knees healthy, functional, and pain-free. Whether you’re bouncing back from an injury or just trying to move better every day, a few targeted mobility drills can go a long way.

Below are some of the best knee mobility exercises to improve flexibility and control—so you can walk, squat, run, and move with confidence.

Best Knee Mobility Exercises to Enhance Flexibility and Movement

These exercises help improve your knees’ ability to bend, extend, and move freely through their natural range—crucial for everyday comfort and injury prevention.

1. Heel Slides

Lie on your back with legs extended. Slowly slide one heel toward your glutes, bending the knee, then extend back out. Repeat 10–15 times per leg.

Why it works: Encourages gentle knee flexion and extension—especially useful after long bouts of sitting or in early rehab.

2. Seated Knee Extensions

Sit tall in a chair. Extend one leg straight out, squeezing your quad at the top, then lower slowly. Perform 10–15 reps per leg.

Why it works: Strengthens the quadriceps, which play a key role in stabilizing the knee joint during movement.

3. Quadriceps and Hamstring Stretch

For quads: stand and pull one foot behind you.

For hamstrings: place your foot on a low surface and hinge forward at the hips.

Why it works: Releases tension in major muscle groups that often restrict knee motion and cause pain or discomfort during activity.

Exercises for Knee Mobility That Promote Better Control and Stability

These drills support joint stability, balance, and proprioception—all essential for athletic performance and daily movement.

1. Knee Circles

With feet together and knees slightly bent, slowly circle your knees clockwise, then counterclockwise. Perform 10 reps in each direction.

Why it works: Lubricates the joint and enhances spatial awareness of knee positioning during movement.

2. Step-Through Lunges

From standing, step forward into a lunge, then swing the leg back into a reverse lunge—all in one smooth motion. Alternate legs for 8–10 reps.

Why it works: Builds strength and coordination through a full range of motion while reinforcing single-leg stability.

3. Wall-Assisted Deep Knee Bends

Stand with your back against a wall and feet slightly forward. Slide down into a deep squat and hold for 15–30 seconds. Repeat 2–3 times.

Why it works: Helps restore confidence and control in deep knee positions without overloading the joint.

When it comes to knee health, mobility equals longevity. Practicing these exercises for knee mobility just a few times per week can help you maintain functional movement, reduce stiffness, and feel stronger doing the things you love.

This article has been reprinted with permission from www.thesteadystate.com

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The first of the four horsemen is the rectus femoris. This long muscle in the quadriceps connects the kneecap all the way up to your pelvis. So, this is a knee-to-pelvis connector. It has a tendency to become stiff in a lot of people.  

Next is the iliacus, coming from inside the pelvic bowl to the femur. This muscle sits deep inside the pelvic bowl and just doesn’t often get much love when it comes to mobility. Though hard to reach, it’s not impossible, and we’ll discuss some great ways to get in there. 

The third is the psoas muscle, which connects the trunk to the femur and forms the iliopsoas system with the iliacus. The psoas crosses a lot of real estate and is a powerful hip flexor, or spine forward flexor, or spine extender. It also swells to keep the spine stable. I like to think of this amazing tissue as the quads of the low back. 

Last but not least is quadratus lumborum (QL), which connects the bottom of your rib cage to the top of your pelvis in the lower back. As I often say to athletes during mobilizations, “The QL is not a bone! No matter how much it feels like one.” The QL actually shares a common attachment to the psoas and can be considered the hamstrings of the spine (yes this is over-simplified).

While all of these four tissues have incredibly diverse functions, they all can potentially create an extension load on the spine. This is one of the reasons why stiff quads can contribute to low back pain, for example. If you think about couch stretch for a second, that position loads the iliacus, psoas, and rectus femoris by challenging hip extension, or three out of the four horsemen. When we are able to relieve some of the passive extension forces  on the spine, we often see significant improvements in spinal and hip function, and decreases in back pain. 

Addressing The Rectus Femoris 

The rectus femoris is one of the four quad muscles, connecting your pelvis all the way through your patella. This tissue system can become especially fibrotic and jerky-like, and doesn’t typically respond as well to stretching. It’s hard to stretch jerky, but you can mobilize it.

To find the rectus femoris, we’re going to mobilize in the same position as the basic quad smash on a roller, starting just above the knee.

Lay down, belly facing the ground, and get your leg on that roller. 

Roll across that patch of tissue, looking for anything that feels tight and fibrotic. If you find a tissue that clunks back and forth each time you roll across it, that’s the rectus femoris. We’re gonna go all the way up the quad, scrubbing across and focusing on that tissue. Don’t worry, the rest of the horsemen are less gnarly. 

Take this mobilization, moving and scrubbing, from just above your knee to just under the bottom of the pelvis. 

Reaching The Iliacus

The iliacus sits deep inside the pelvic bowl, making it one of the most difficult muscles to reach with stretching or tissue mashing. It is simultaneously a major player in creating stability for your trunk and torso, but can easily become the main contributor to immobility and pain.

We’re going after the iliacus by laying a ball (a large hardball, or even a kettlebell handle will do) just on the inside of our hip bone. 

You can find this point by laying on the ball with the tip of your hip bone on either side and then just falling off it into the musculature on the inside of that pelvic bowl. 

We want to breathe and sink into these tissues, tracing the pelvic bone down towards the femur. 

Know that as you move towards your leg, you may run into the nerve and artery in your groin. You can stop when you feel it!

Rolling-Out The Psoas

Often people refer to the iliacus and psoas together as the iliopsoas, but these two muscles are different systems. The iliacus connects the pelvis to the femur whereas the psoas connects the spine to the femur, so though they do similar things, they are quite different in terms of connections. 

With a heavy ball, or a lacrosse ball, and a kettlebell for more pinpointed work, we can address the psoas while laying on our back instead of laying on top of the ball with our stomach. This lets us receive a different input and have access to hip flexion within the mobilization. 

To go at the psoas this way, lie on your back, take a lacrosse ball, and press it into your gut about halfway between your belly button and your hip bone. 

Then put a kettlebell on top of the ball and hold the bell handle to press the lacrosse ball into your psoas. From here you can floss the muscle by flexing and extending your leg, and internally and externally rotating the hip in combination with that. 

Breathe into the mobilization and move the ball to different places in that system. We want to spend about three to five minutes per side, if possible.

The other mobilization I like for psoas work is to lay on a textured, hard foam roller and use it to scrub out these tissues. 

Focus on the area at and below your hip bones right in that pelvic bowl. For five to six minutes, scrub back and forth, contract and relax. Think of cutting yourself in half over that roller. 

After you feel your tissues change, move down a notch towards the bottom of your pelvis. 

Talking to The QL 

The QL runs from your pelvis to the bottom of your ribs in the area of your lower back. In athletes, this muscle can become so stiff and ropey that it feels like a bone. Instead, we should be able to feel the QL on our back with our fingers and even grip around it. If you try this, you might find it like trying to press your fingers through a wall. 

Using a larger soft or hard ball, we’re going to “bend” across these tissues. Sounds horrendous? Don’t worry, this is actually one of the best feeling mobilizations we do and should feel like satisfying a deep itch. 

Grab a large ball and place it away from your spine over towards your obliques, but below your bottom rib, on the right side of your low back. 

Laying on the ball in this position, bridge up and let your right leg fall to the side, knees bent and feet on the ground. 

In this position, breathe into that musculature and think of scraping across that QL muscle in your back slowly and with focus on taking full, deep breaths. 

Once you get to the other side of that sausage, reposition the ball back in the starting position but down a notch from your ribs towards your pelvis. Keep scraping across that QL all the way down to just above the pelvic bone. 

You don’t need fancy tools to get started on improving your horses. Happy mobilizing. I hope this helps you get into your Ready State.

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Photography by The Ready State

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You’ve heard it a million times before. The perplexing assertion that you’re not stretching enough and that it’s why you’re injured or sore, slow or clumsy. Think of your first coach admonishing you to stretch after practice or your gym teacher preaching about the importance of stretching. Oh, your back hurts? No problem! Just stretch your hamstrings and it will feel better. You can’t get into a good squat position because your quads are tight? Just stretch them out.

Conventional wisdom tells us that if we want to optimize athletic performance, improve flexibility, prevent muscle soreness and reduce potential for injury, we must stretch. For a long time, stretching has been a catch-all modality for dealing with soreness and pain, for range-of-motion restrictions and for joint troubles. Just keep stretching. But here’s the problem: stretching doesn’t work by itself. It doesn’t improve position, it doesn’t improve performance, it doesn’t make you faster, it doesn’t eliminate pain and it doesn’t prevent injury.

Let me clarify: When I say stretching I’m referring specifically to end-range static stretching or hanging out in an end-range static position with zero intention. I’m talking about purposeless stretching. Consider the classic hamstring stretch: You lie back, grab your ankle, pull your hamstring to end-range and then hang out while you dreamily watch the geese overhead flying south for winter. This type of stretching can theoretically lengthen your hamstring, but doesn’t tell you, or your coach, anything about your motor-control or ability to get into good positions. In other words, taking your hamstring to end-range and keeping it there is not going to help you run faster or change your capacity to deadlift more weight. Yet when most people have a tissue or joint restriction that prevents them from getting in to a good position, they think “Man, I suck! I need to stretch.”

An example, by way of analogy: if you pull on each end of a T-shirt, what happens after a minute or so? It becomes all stretched out, right? What do you think happens when you take your beautiful tissues to end-range and keep them there? They get all stretched out like your pitiful T-shirt. Imagine lengthening your hamstrings then sprinting down a field or attempting a max-effort deadlift without developing the strength or motor-control to handle that new position. You might as well get down on your knees and beg to be injured. Lengthening your muscles is not a bad thing if you have the motor-control to support that end-range position and you are expressing those end-range positions with load-bearing to full-range exercises. This is why we deadlift, squat and practice full-range functional movements in the gym.

The issue is not that static stretching lengthens the muscle. The issue is that it addresses (albeit poorly) only one aspect of your physiologic system – your muscle. It’s doesn’t address motor-control or the position of your joints or what’s going on at the joints.

If stretching is not the answer, what is? In short, we need to systematically deal with each of the problems that prevent us from getting into the ideal positions and keep us from moving. Addressing all the components that limit position and challenge movement efficiency will solve your specific problems and stimulate measurable improvement.

MAKING THE SWITCH FROM STRETCHING TO MOBILIZATION

I have deleted the words stretching and flexibility from my vocabulary and replaced them with movement and mobility – or mobilization.

I define mobilization as a movement-based, integrated, full-body approach that considers all elements that limit movement and performance. In short, mobilization is a tool to improve your capacity to move and perform efficiently.

The idea is to get you to stop thinking that stretching is important. Are you truly ready for this? Stretching is not important. Position and the application of position through movement is what matters most. If you can’t get into a good position because you’re limited, or you have a tissue restriction of some kind, stretching alone won’t give you the results you want. What will is a system that helps you figure out which of the variables are compromising your ability to move correctly and then engages effective modalities or techniques to resolve each of them.

TRY THESE AT HOME

Skin-Pinch Test

This test illuminates how your body compensates to adaptively short tissues. Stand up, hinge from your hips and grab a handful of skin around your hip flexors. Now stand up. What happens? You must overextend and keep your knees bent to lift your torso upright. This is exactly what happens when you sit for long periods of time. Your hip flexors start to reflect your working position, becoming adaptively short and stiff.

Belly-Whack Test

Just like it sounds, have someone randomly whack you along the belly. You should always have enough abdominal tone to take a whack to the belly. We do this at our gym and around the house. If you’ve got a spongy middle, you get caught right away.

Organizing the Scapula

A lot of coaches, athletes and physical therapists seem to think that an impingement of the shoulder automatically means a rotator cuff issue. Here’s what’s really happening: When your scapula is in a disorganized position, it turns your rotator cuff off. So, if someone tells you that your rotator cuff isn’t working correctly, you probably need to restore the scapula position so that your rotator turns back on.

• Lay on the floor and place a lacrosse ball between your shoulder blade and spine.
• On your back, bridge your butt up as high as possible, driving the ball deep into your soul and reach your arm overhead, parallel to the floor. Keep your elbows locked out.
• Push that arm as far as you can. Then bring it across your body and try to touch your opposite hip. The idea is to bring the shoulder over as far as possible so you can get maximum range in the tissues.

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Read about our 2021 Canada’s Top Fitness Instructors – our top 30 from across Canada! Go beyond traditional thinking to optimize movement through stretching, find out about 7 DIY hacks to improve the air quality in your home,  learn about taking care of your heart through proper nutrition, enjoy some of our best plant-based recipes yet, and work out with our Canada’s Top Fitness Trainers!