How To Treat A Hyperextension Injury Video

A hyperextension injury of the knee can lead to an ACL tear if left untreated. Learn how to treat and care for a hyperextension injury specific to the knee in this health video.

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Consult a doctor
Restore normal extension to the knee
Strengthen quadriceps muscle

About this Author

Russ Paine is a well-known physical therapist with the Roger Clemens Institute at Memorial Hospital. After getting his degree in physical therapy from Texas Women's University, he trained for several years under David Drez, MD, a renowned surgeon and sports medicine specialist. He has been a rehab consultant for the Houston Rockets, Houston Astros and NASA. He has given hundreds of presentations in his career in the US and abroad, and has published many chapters in text books and papers in peer review journals.

RUSS PAINE: In this segment, we're going to talk about a hyperextension injury of the knee. And again, this type of injury can lead to an ACL tear. It can injure other ligaments of the knee also. So when you hyperextend your knee, actually what happens is your femur goes back and your tibia moves forward as the weight of your body kind of pushes that femur back. So we're going to show that on our model. And again what happens when this occurs is you may tear the anterior cruciate ligament. So what happens typically as you come down from a jump and you're landing, your foot hits the ground, your knee pops back like this, so again, popping back like in this direction. Go ahead and lay on your back now. So that can cause you not necessarily to have a ligament tear but it can cause you also to have some damage to the menisci of your knee. So rehabilitating this problem, obviously, you need to get to check out first with some imaging, see a physician and make sure you don't have damage to other structures of the knee. And one thing we want to do is make sure that you restore full motion in the knee. Extension of the knee is really important, not hyperextension at this point, to make sure that we restore normal extension of the knee. Again, we're going to work on quadriceps strengthening, controlling the swelling of the knee and then we'll direct this particular injury to the specific structures that are injured during a hyperextension injury of the knee. But hyperextension of the knee is a very painful injury which really requires a medical doctor to look over the situation and help us direct on what to do next.

How to Treat a Hyperextension Injury Video

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