In this video, we're going to talk about the basic anatomy of the knee. Now, I'm not going to go too into depth about any of the one structures, but it's important to have an overall understanding so that you can know which part of your knee hurts, what's injured, how you injured it, and things of that sort. Later on when we speak about specific injuries, we're going to go a little bit more in depth about each individual structure. The knee has four main structures that you need to know about the bone, the cartilage, the meniscus, and the tendons and ligaments. Let's talk about each one of those four briefly. The bone There are three main bones that make up the knee joint.

There's the femur, which is the thigh bone, the patella which is your kneecap, and your tibia, which is your shin bone. Now your shin bone splits into two there's Also fibula, but that's a little bit lower down so it's not quite relevant for this course. What's important to understand about the bone structure is that the femur at the bottom part has two small round shapes that sit on the tibia, which is a flat surface. Now, when a ball sits on a table, it only touches at one specific point. This allows it to rotate in and out and this is actually what creates the movement of your knee. How that pressure spread out.

This is where the meniscus comes in. You have two meniscus in each knee, they're shaped like a horseshoe. Or more appropriately, you can think of it like one of those pillows that you sleep with on an airplane. If you put a ball in the middle of those pillows, they have two main jobs. One is to absorb the shock. And the other one is to spread out the pressure onto the tibia.

So like a ball sitting on the table, it won't touch in one point in only one point. The meniscus has two main functions. One of them is to absorb the shock as you're walking, running, jumping, and the other one is to spread out the pressure so that as the femur and the round shapes, the femur presses on the flat surface of the tibia, the pressure doesn't hit just in one point, rather spread out along the whole flat surface of the tibia. That flat surface is called the tibial plateau. Okay, those are two of the bones. The last one is the patella.

And this is the kneecap. Now, the kneecap is the one that connects your quadricep muscle which is your big thigh muscle to your tibia, which is the bone again your shin bone. It connects them by a tendon that runs over the kneecap. Now, as you bend your knee, your kneecap slides through a groove into your femur. And this sliding groove this motion and the track that it slides through is absolutely imperative and it's also A place where a lot of problems are caused. We'll get into that a little later.

Okay, now we finished talking about the bones. And we also mentioned the meniscus. Let's talk about cartilage for a second. Cartilage is the tissue, which wraps around the bone in a places where two bones need to slide one against each other. This is mostly done in the joints of the body, all of the joints, whether it be the fingers, the shoulders, the elbows, the waist. This cartilage wraps around the round part of the femur.

It looks like an eggshell take thing, it's very smooth, it's white, it should be anyway. And as the two bones slide one against another, the cartilage makes the sliding motion easy and painless. Okay, now we've mentioned the bone, the meniscus and the cartilage. Lastly, I want to talk about ligaments and tendons. ligaments are structures that are fibers like structures connecting from bone to bone. tendons connect from muscle to bone.

They're both the same type of tissue, but that's the only difference. There are four main ligaments that you should know about in your knee. There are two collateral ligaments, one on the inside and one of the outside. Those structures provide support so that your knee doesn't move from side to side. There's also two ligaments inside your knee and a criss cross. These are known as the ACL, your anterior cruciate ligament, and your PCL, your posterior cruciate ligament, these ligaments preventing me from sliding forward and backwards.

So these four ligaments together provide the strengthening and the supportive structure to prevent your knee from moving out of place. All right, this brings us to the end of this video, we've covered the bone, we've covered the meniscus cartilage, and ligaments. We'll see you in the next video when we start talking about specific types of injuries to these structures.