maratoolOne Knee To Chest
How to do the one knee to chest
- Start off by lying on the floor.
- Extend one leg straight and pull the other knee to your chest. Hold under the knee joint to protect the kneecap.
- Gently tug that knee toward your nose.
- Switch sides. This stretches the buttocks and lower back of the bent leg and the hip flexor of the straight leg.
Muscles worked
The muscle under tension is the gluteus maximus, which is the strongest hip extensor you have and drives the pelvis forward at the top of the movement.
A stretch loads it at the far end of the range it normally works in, so the position you hold is itself the resistance.
Nothing travels, but holding the position is not the target muscle’s job alone: the hamstrings assist hip extension and slow the knee down; the lower back keeps the spine from rounding.
Every exercise for:GlutesHamstringsLower back
How this movement works
Several joints combine to set the position, and then everything stops. Because the shape is held rather than repeated, the limit is how long the whole chain stays where you put it — not how strong any single muscle in that chain happens to be.
It is filed under stretching, so the target is range of motion rather than force — a position you can settle into and breathe in, held long enough for the tissue to give.
What you need
These train the glutes too, using equipment this one does not:
- One Legged Cable Kickbackcable
- Physioball Hip Bridgeexercise ball
- Piriformis-SMRfoam roll
- Seated Glutebody only
- Barbell Glute Bridgebarbell
Difficulty
Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.
Of the 24 glutes exercises in this database, 13 are listed at beginner level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.