Knee pain is one of the most common complaints in active adults ,and also one of the most frustrating. Many people try rest, ice, and even injections, and the pain just keeps coming back. If that sounds like you, you are not the only one!. The problem usually isn’t that your knee is damaged beyond repair. It’s that the root cause of the pain hasn’t been addressed.
Here’s why knee pain sticks around and the solution to fix it once and for all.
The knee is almost never the real source of the problem, though that’s where you feel most of your pain. The real issues are happening up and down the chain from strength and range of motion deficits in other joints. Movement compensations then affect the knee, making it hurt. So any attempts to fix it directed at only the knee may result in little to no relief OR short term improvements.
People are most surprised that rest doesn’t fix the issue. It’s what everyone tried first. They always find that it helps right away, but as soon as they try to get back to the activities they love, it hurts again. That’s because rest does not fix a LOAD TOLERANCE problem. Meaning, if the muscles aren’t strong enough to handle the activity, rest does not get them strong enough. In fact, resting too long may add to the problem by making you weaker!
Once rest doesn’t work, imaging is typically the next step for most (though we don’t exactly recommend it). Imaging may show some wear and tear, but truthfully those results may have nothing at all to do with your pain issues. Hard to believe, but true! Findings on imaging like meniscus issues and arthritic changes are very common. Pain with movement has more to do with how the joint is being loaded then abnormal findings on an xray or MRI.
The real fix comes with improving movement quality, strengthening the right areas, and then slowly loading the muscles with weight. This is pretty simple, but often takes the skilled eye of a movement expert (a performance physical therapist). A skilled eye can give you feedback on really important movement patterns that can help the forces moving through the joint, help focus your attention on important muscle groups to strengthen, and strategically progress the load to appropriately challenge those muscles and movements.
If you want to learn more about how we treat knee pain in our physical therapy clinic click here or call or message to ask us questions!
Dr. Rachel Atufunwa, PT, DPT