Grumpy Knees and Wobbly Legs: Rethinking Knee Training in Pilates

Knees are tricky. When they hurt, we stretch, strengthen, modify, and adapt around the pain… yet many clients still struggle.

Why? As instructors, we’re great at addressing the surrounding muscles—quads, hamstrings, glutes—but what if that’s not enough? What if the missing piece isn’t in the big muscles at all, but in the joints themselves?

This was the central question in my workshop, Grumpy Knees and Wobbly Legs, at Pilates Method Alliance Educates. We know how to modify around knee pain, but modifications don’t solve problems—they work around them. If we want to create lasting change, we need to move beyond strengthening alone and start thinking about how the knee actually functions.

Most knee training focuses on building strength in the major muscle groups, but the knee is not a muscle problem—it’s a joint problem. When a knee lacks joint capacity, compensation patterns form, and those patterns often lead to even more discomfort. Clients with knee pain are usually told to strengthen their quads or stretch their hamstrings, yet they continue to struggle because their knees aren’t learning how to handle and distribute force properly. Because you cannot strengthen what you cannot access!

One of the biggest takeaways from the workshop was that a stable knee is not the same as a strong knee. Stability is often misunderstood as keeping the knee from moving, but real stability comes from controlling movement, not avoiding it. The knee isn’t designed to be a rigid hinge—it has rotational capacity, which is rarely addressed because conventional methods, including Pilates, don’t train it. When we ignore this, we reinforce stiffness rather than increasing capacity.

A key principle from the workshop was understanding that the knee does not work in isolation. It’s directly influenced by what happens at the foot and hip, meaning that knee pain is often the result of poor load distribution before it turns into a knee-specific issue. If a client’s knee is unstable in a lunge, for example, the problem may not be weakness in the leg muscles—it could be a lack of tibial rotation or poor proprioception in the foot.

Instructors who attended the workshop experienced this firsthand. One instructor tested a simple drill—isolating tibial rotation—and immediately felt more control in her lunges. That’s the power of specificity. It’s not about adding more strength; it’s about improving how force is distributed through the joint, expanding capsular range, and re-educating the nervous system to recognise those newly accessed ranges.

So how do we apply this to Pilates? That’s where M.F.A. classes come in. This is where we learn how to screen movement accurately to understand the why before choosing the how! We need to stop thinking of the knee as just a hinge joint and start incorporating targeted exercises that improve movement quality in the joint, which can dramatically improve knee function.

Second, instead of always modifying for pain, we need to ask: why is this movement painful in the first place?And third, we need to shift from just strengthening the muscles around the knee to training the knee itself—teaching it to absorb force, control rotation, and adapt to movement demands.

This approach doesn’t mean changing your entire class structure. It means layering in smarter strategies that help clients not just get through a session, but actually build resilience in their knees for long-term movement health. The more we understand how the knee functions, the better we can guide our clients toward lasting change—without endless modifications that only mask the problem.

If you missed the workshop but want to feel these principles in your own body, I have a Hip class for you that will help take some torque off your knees. Just visit: https://www.movebeyondwithava.com/fitness-academy

The goal isn’t just to work around pain—it’s to change the narrative. Knees don’t have to be grumpy. With the right training, they can be strong, adaptable, and resilient for life, where knees over toes is not a taboo in training, but a necessity—because life doesn’t happen in perfect angles and alignment!