Free online courseKnee assessment

Course Description

Accurate knee assessment is a core physiotherapy skill that influences every clinical decision, from identifying red flags to choosing the right objective tests and tracking progress over time. This free online course is designed to help you approach knee examinations with clarity and confidence, bringing structure to your reasoning and consistency to your hands-on technique.

You will learn how to run through a full knee assessment in a logical order, starting with observation and moving into palpation and movement testing. The training reinforces what to look for and why it matters, so you can connect visual cues and patient-reported symptoms to meaningful clinical hypotheses. By focusing on both the involved and uninvolved side, you will strengthen your ability to recognize normal versus abnormal findings and reduce bias during examination.

As you progress, the course guides you through active and passive range of movement testing, including how to interpret patterns, quality of motion, pain behavior and end feel. You will also practice resisted testing with appropriate grading of muscle power, improving your ability to document findings clearly and communicate them to colleagues, supervisors or other members of a healthcare team.

Special tests are demonstrated in a way that emphasizes safe handling, positioning and purpose. You will become familiar with common ligament and meniscal assessments and how each test biases specific structures, as well as patellofemoral and flexibility-related screens that support differential diagnosis. Functional testing is included to help you relate impairments to real-world performance and guide return-to-activity decisions.

To help you retain knowledge and sharpen clinical reasoning, the course includes question-based exercises that reinforce key concepts behind each step of assessment. Whether you are a physiotherapy student, new graduate or clinician revisiting fundamentals, this learning path supports more confident examinations, better documentation and more informed next steps in patient management.