When The Knee Speaks For The Whole Body
I’ve been deepening my work with Anatomy in Motion, and this week I joined another session in their Phase 5 Mastery series - this time with a special focus on the knee.
The knee is an interesting place to spend time. It’s caught between the foot and the hip, influenced by everything above and below it, and often where the “noise” shows up first.
Whether we’re talking about skiing, running, or simply walking through daily life, it’s worth stepping back and asking better questions about what the knee is actually doing and what might be driving what we feel in it.
Is the knee the problem, or the outcome?
In some cases, “knee issues” are actually the effects of what’s happening at the foot, hip, or even higher up the chain.
• How are the foot bones moving to meet the ground?
• What options does this then give the femur and hip to rotate, load, and share force?
• How are the pelvis and spine influencing what the leg (and foot) can do, i.e. are they supporting friends or interfering?
The knee often becomes the place where reduced options elsewhere finally show themselves. It’s worth asking:
Is the knee really the driver of the problem—or just where the noise is showing up?
The knee isn’t just a simple hinge
It’s common to think of the knee as a basic hinge joint, like a door swinging open and closed. But that picture is incomplete.
A more accurate image is this: The distal end of the femur glides and rotates along the tibial plateau.
When we coach or cue knee bend with this glide and rotation in mind, something interesting happens. People often feel:
• A more integrated connection between the foot, knee, and hip
• Less “isolated” effort at the knee and more shared work across the whole leg
• Tissues lengthening (or shortening) in response to structures (bones) moving
(For skiers in particular, this might shift how you see “flexing your knees”.)
Foot–femur relationships matter
The specific way and the degree to which the foot and femur relate to each other, both at rest and in motion, matter a lot.
Those relationships can:
• Increase or decrease the load on structures like the ACL or medial meniscus
• Change how well we absorb and redirect force
• Influence whether certain movement patterns feel fluid or fragile
Change the way the foot and femur communicate with each other, and the story at the knee can change as well.
Ski boots also change the equation; it’s worth noting how this external constraint affects the foot-femur relationship, nd sometimes requires the hip to do more work to achieve similar outcomes (rotation, pressure management, and edge control).
Additionally, if the relationships in your body are less than optimal, then a ski boot can place additional load onto structures and tissues already under tension or compression, thereby increasing risk factors.
When one knee won’t straighten
Another common pattern is that the knee doesn’t fully straighten.
If, for example, your right leg can straighten easily and your left one can’t, you’re not just dealing with a local knee quirk - you’re likely building a full-body bias around it.
Over time, that can look like:
• Favouring the left suspension or midstance (a more bent, shock-absorbing position)
• Consistently pushing off the right leg more than the left, because it’s the “easier,” more available straightening side
• Subtle but persistent asymmetry in gait, stance, and weight shift even if everything looks “okay” at a glance
• In essence, this equates to one foot on the gas and one on the brake
You don’t want to be left living in a knee that won’t straighten. Restoring the knee's ability to bend and straighten gives the whole system more ways to share load, adapt, and move without one side always doing the heavy lifting.
Zooming out
What I’ve shared here is the broad-strokes version of a much deeper dive we explored in the webinar: knee mechanics, injury mechanisms, spinal relationships, and applied progressions.
If you’re dealing with persistent knee discomfort, or you’re curious about how a more whole-body view of movement might change your knee story, I’d love to explore that with you. Book a free 15-minute chat here.
(Shout to Gary Ward for the fantastic knee webinar.)
