Where Does Your Knee Pain Really Come From?
The knees are the largest joints in the human body. Unfortunately, these large joints also seem to be an even bigger area for pain and injury. In the U.S. alone, surgeons perform around 700,000 knee replacements annually–that’s a lot of bionic knees! Other knee-related injuries include ACL tears, MCL tears, patellar tendon tears, patellar tendonitis, dislocated patellas and osteoarthritis. In my opinion, many of these surgeries or injuries are easily preventable. With the proper training protocol, you can avoid knee pain and inevitable surgery down the line.
We use our knees for a lot of different activities from walking and running to jumping, squatting and lunging, and therefore they withstand a lot of impact. It is incredibly important to prioritize solid movement patterns to avoid any further stress.
I should warn you, that this post will be fairly heavy in anatomical jargon. Brace yourself.
The “knee” covers an area of four bones: the femur, the fibula, the tibia, and the patella. As a hinge joint, the knee can only flex and extend. Though its actions are simple, the muscles around it are vast and complex. Some of the important muscles that directly help the movement of this joint are the hamstrings complex (semimembranosus, semitendinosus, and biceps femoris), the quadriceps complex (vastus medialis, vastus lateralis, vastus intermedius, and rectus femoris), the calf muscles (gastrocnemius, popliteus, tibialis anterior, and the peroneals). If you feel overwhelmed with the laundry list of muscles I just mentioned, fear not! I will elaborate.
Now, we need to remember that the body acts as a chain.
One part of the body reacts to the feedback of another part. What are the two major joints near the knee? If you guessed the hip and the ankle, high five! We cannot just consider the knee in the case of knee pain, but rather, we must think about how the surrounding joints are compromising the integrity of the knee. If you have poor hip or ankle stability, the knee is going to work a lot harder to compensate for the lack of stability elsewhere.
Let’s start from the ground up, at the ankle. The ankle can plantarflex (point), dorsiflex (flex upwards), invert/supinate, or evert/pronate. Check your feet. Are your arches exceedingly high or collapsed? What happens to them as you squat or jump? Ideally, we want to strive for a perfect balance between pronation and supination when standing. Both of these two movements are completely natural ankle movements when walking or running, but we do not want either in excess.
If, for example, you squat and your ankle collapses (pronates) completely, you will likely experience some collapse of the knee with it. The muscles on the inside of your leg (adductors) are over-active or tight, while the antagonists (abductors) will be lengthened. Do you often feel pain in your IT bands? Well, you may fit into this category of people. Your IT bands may be tense because they’re working really hard for some other guys. Think about how this position is going to effect the ligaments and tendons in your knee!
Look at the relationship between his knees and ankles in the squat.
Conversely, if you drive your knees out too much and shift your weight laterally (supinate) your feet, the opposite will happen. Your adductors are going to be lengthened while your abductors will work over time. I was one of these people. The lateral areas of my knee always caused me pain, because I was nearly rolling my ankles as I squatted.
Obviously, the ankle position will effect the knee and hip mechanics, and vice versa.
If one lacks sufficient strength in the gluteus medius and the peroneals, the lifter will, again, revert to a valgus (collapse) of the knees. Weak gluteus maximus will result in an abuse of the quadriceps complex, which is going to pull onto the patellar tendon for dear life.
Put more simply, if your glutes aren’t strong enough, your knees are going to pay the price.
As I said, we want to maintain a balance in how we shift our weight as we move. Too much outward shifting of the hip or ankle is just as shifting too much weight inward. True strength comes from a balance.
Some of these inefficiencies may be a matter of learning. You might not understand what a proper squat should look like, and there for cueing and repetition will go a long way. If cueing has not helped, then you need to follow a strengthening and mobility routine. The exercises I’ve listed below will be tremendously helpful.
Now that we’ve made it through the meat of this article, it’s time to learn how to correct these faults. Figure out where you lie on this spectrum of movement dysfunction, and correct your mechanics as necessary.
Here are some great ways to mobilize the hips and the ankles:
Subtalar eversion and inversion
Resisted half-kneeling ankle mobility
Soleus and gastrocnemius release
Plantar fascia mobilization
Once you’ve mobilized, the next step is to strengthen the targeted muscles:
Where there is pain, there is weakness and dysfunction. You don’t have to “accept” being in pain. Strengthening the hip and ankle muscles are vital in perfecting your mechanics and preventing unnecessary stresses on the soft tissues of the knee. Pay attention to those stabilizers and you will save your knees for many years of heavy lifting to come.
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