Yoga for Knees: 3 Videos to Save Your Joints

Last month, I shared a series of YouTube Shorts focused on your feet and building a foundation from the ground up. I’m excited to continue providing video content to help you enhance your body awareness, mobility, flexibility, strength, and balance.

Today, we shift the focus to supporting the knees. As someone who has had multiple knee surgeries, including a partial replacement, I find this topic particularly important to address.

In anatomy, the knee is often called the "middle child." It sits between the ankle and the hip, and its health is almost entirely dependent on how its neighbors are behaving.

Unlike the hip (a ball-and-socket joint that can move in every direction), the knee is a hinge joint. It primarily moves in two directions: folding (flexion) and unfolding (extension). However, the knee joint is more sophisticated than a door hinge.

When your leg is straight, your knee locks into place to help you stand effortlessly. This is a built-in safety feature. In those last few degrees of straightening, the thigh and shin bones actually rotate slightly against each other to click the joint into its most stable, locked position.

However, once you add even a small bend to the knee, the ligaments loosen just enough to allow for some amount of rotation.

• The Good: This rotation allows us to navigate uneven ground and pivot gracefully. This is why we recommend a 'micro-bend' in the knees during standing poses in yoga—it keeps the joint unlocked and ready to move.

• The Risk: Because the knee can rotate when bent, it’s also where we’re most vulnerable. If the hips are tight or the feet are flat, that rotation can become torque, twisting the joint and straining the meniscus or ligaments. This is why we focus so much on where the knee points in poses like Warrior 2 or Chair Pose. Since the knee is unlocked and can rotate, we have to use our muscles (the glutes and thighs) to steer that rotation into a safe alignment.

The Danger of the "Cave-In" 

When your knees track inward (collapsing toward each other) during a squat or a yoga pose, it's called medial collapse or valgus stress.

Why this can happen:

• Weak Glutes: Your Gluteus Medius is the primary muscle responsible for abduction—the movement that pulls your thigh bone (femur) away from the midline. If the glutes are sleepy, the femur rotates inward, dragging the knee with it.

• Disengaged Thighs: Engaging the quadriceps and adductors (especially when squeezing a block) creates a corset-like effect around the patella, ensuring it tracks smoothly in its groove.

By engaging your thighs and firing up your glutes, you aren't just "doing a pose"—you are creating a stable structure that protects your ACL, MCL, and meniscus from unnecessary wear and tear.

If you experience knee pain or notice your knees cave in when you squat, start by taking a look at your feet. Then, use the tip provided in this video, to engage your thighs to support your knees. 

Yoga should feel good, and your alignment shouldn't cause pain. If your knee caves in when practicing Warrior 2 pose, check out the second video in this series to protect your inner knee. Engage your glutes to help keep the knee open. 

In the final video of this series, I provide an alternative to pigeon pose in case it causes discomfort in your knee. Try deer pose instead to get the same hip stretch without unnecessary leverage on your knee.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more content. Next month, we'll be featuring a series on the hips.

If you missed our series about the feet, you can access the videos using these links: Focus on the Foundation, The Toes Pose Challenge, and Deep Tissue Release to Ease Foot Pain.