UNIQUE ANDERSON: Hello. My name is Unique Anderson and I'm a certified personal trainer. Okay. In this clip, we're going to talk about baker's cyst. A baker's cyst is not what bakers have or a cyst on a hand or something like that. But a baker's cyst is really a popliteal cyst. What a popliteal cyst is that it means that is you have inflamed tissue at the joint. Normally it's at the knee joint, in the back of the knee here, right in the back of the knee here, or you can have them in the joint of your wrist or your elbow. But the more common places to have a baker's cyst are in the back of the knee. The reason for a baker's cyst is because you have this fluid that helps keep your joints mobile and be able to move. What's going on is that it's sipping in to a different part instead of going into your patella, sipping in the back of your knee to actually just hold it like a little cyst, like a little cup. So think about if you were pouring water in a cup, that's what a baker's cyst is. It's pouring your fluid that's in your joint in the back of it. Now the thing is what happens is a baker's cyst, you really don't have too many things that you can do to prevent it, meaning that you can focus on prevention of landing properly but sometimes it just happens. So what you can do is RICE, rest, ice, compress and relaxation, elevation. All you have to do is focus on 15 to 20 minutes on the knee where the cyst is at and you can elevate it, making sure that it's chest width, a little bit higher than your chest so you could keep the elevation, and also you can even use a brace. Now the brace is kind of tricky because if you think about it, if you put a brace around the knee, it's going to rub in the back of where that cyst is at so it just depends on what you can tolerate, but you will increase nerve fiber around that. Also too you can talk to your doctor and make sure that this is definitely something that you can do, and your doctor could even give you a steroid shot called a cortisone steroid shot to help kind of like take that cyst away from you. But what I want to focus on is showing you different exercises that can help strengthen the muscles around your quadricep and your back of your legs to help prevent that in the case of a baker's cyst. So what we're going to focus on is lay on your back, making sure your stomach is nice and see what I'm talking about. We're going to flex the quadricep and you want to think about lifting up. Remember you want to flex this as if you were almost doing an extension and back down. The reason why I'm doing these exercises is because you want to do as many exercises that are not going to aggravate it right now. You could definitely go back to squats and lunges but you don't want to do something that's going to aggravate it and make it worse than what it really is. So this right here is a great exercise to strengthen your intermedius, which is the muscle that connects from here to your hip flexor, your rectus femoris, which is the big part of the quad, and the different parts on the outside and inner part of your thigh. So you're going to be up and down, squeezing the thigh. You can even do circumduction where you're doing circular motions around. You want to do about 15 reps to the left and 15 reps to the right because you're trying to create muscular endurance, meaning strength. We're not trying to get you extremely powerful. We just want to keep you strong. The next thing that you can do too if you want to get your hamstrings involved is do a bridge. You're going to have your head on the floor and you squeeze in your hips all the way up. Again, my cyst would be here so it shouldn't be too much aggravation. I'm still working on the hamstring. I'm bringing it down and squeezing it back up. Again, guys, if this hurts you, modify it, don't do it. Wait till you get a little bit better but this is definitely something to keep you going for the long run.
