High Knee Walk Exercises

Series Summary

Functional movements are those which are based on real world situational biomechanics. They usually involve multi-planar, multi-joint movements that work out the body's core muscles and nerves. Functional exercises attempt to incorporate as many variables as possible, including balance, joints, and planes of movement, therefore decreasing the weight on the muscle while increasing the complexity of motor coordination and flexibility. Functional movement typically involves gross motor movement involving muscles of the abdomen and spine.

So, what are a few examples of functional movement exercises? Can I do these exercises at home? Which exercises promote strength in certain muscles? In this free video series, our expert will answer all of these questions and more. Not only will you receive instructions on exercises that promote functional movement and injury prevention, but you'll also be shown how to perform these exercises properly, and how they specifically will benefit your body and overall health. You'll learn lunge and lateral walking exercises, shoulder and back exercises, and some unique exercises like the crab and bear crawls. Improve your functional movement, get in shape, and prevent future injuries with these training instructions!

Video Transcript

"KIRK VICKERS: The next movement that we're going to do the exercise--the first exercise that we're going to do in our functional movements are what's called the high-knee walk. I'll demonstrate that in just a second. What we want to do--what do we do most in life, we walk all day long. So we want to improve our mechanic of walking. And I think many times, this is not taught properly. What we're going to do is we're going to go into what's called the high-knee position. Our knee comes up real high. We want to point our toe up towards the ceiling, lift our knee as high as we can. A big mistake that's made with this particular motion is the heel comes behind the body. We want to go here, the down foot should be pointing straight ahead, and we want to go in and we want to strike with the heel, come through and come up. We're trying to go through full range of motion, bringing that knee up and that toe up as high as we can. Again, not coming behind. We want to activate the hip flexor muscle right here, and we want to create stability and control through the foot and the ankle. If we can do this, this improves our walking and even our running mechanic. This gives us a greater range of motion and flexibility through our hips and our pelvis which is an important area. This is the true center of our body and we need to have good control through this area of our body."