Do you struggle with knee pain?
Are you wearing knee braces when playing a sport?
Do you have pain walking up & downstairs?
Addressing knee pain can be tricky because many of us fall into one of two categories – debilitating pain with significant damage to the tissue like an ACL tear where we have to seek medical help or nagging knee pain that comes and goes where we find ways to work with or work around the pain, and often settle into a story of having “bad knees”. In the second scenario, the pain or discomfort you’re feeling is annoying, but perhaps it’s not significantly impacting your life enough to seek treatment, or you’ve tried getting help from a PT or similarly qualified professional, but it didn’t help.
There are two things we want you to know:
- When you feel pain in your knee, you may need to look at the joint above and below to solve the issue. That is, check your ankle and hip mobility and strength because if either is lacking, this can cause referred pain in the knee.
Why?
The knees are load transfer machines, meaning they distribute load and force between the ground and the rest of your body. Example: if you have a stiff ankle(s) that has less than average range of motion to dorsiflex and you’re trying to land from a jump, this limited motion in the ankle can be felt as pain at the knee. This is because the lack of mobility at the ankle means the force can’t effectively transfer to “share the load” between multiple joints. When the ankle can’t do its job, the knee then absorbs more than it’s capable of causing strain or pain.
The force of the landing should move through the body and distribute the load between the foot, ankle, leg, hip, and core. When one part of the chain (chain = joint connections of the body) can’t move the way it’s supposed to, other parts of the body try and absorb the additional load which is often when we feel pain. The example given above can be addressed by doing exercises that improve ankle dorsiflexion to relieve knee pain.
2. Your knee is supposed to rotate – it’s just a small amount that should happen naturally, but for various reasons, we can lose or limit this rotation which can be a cause of knee pain.
Why does our knee need to rotate?
It has to do with the way the bones are shaped as they meet at the knee. The small but important rotation is what allows the knee to stabilize by ‘locking’ as the knee fully extends/straightens, and ‘unlocking’ as the knee bends. This is called the screw home mechanism – want to hear more? Listen to Threes instructor Giulia Pline talk about this HERE.
Dealing with knee pain doesn’t have to be something you get used to and accept as the norm. If you’ve been struggling with discomfort and have not yet tried working on mobility & strength in your ankles, knees, and hips, try our new program available on the Threes Online Studio: Build Resilient Knees: Mobility + Strength for Knee Pain
Members of our Online Studio have access to this program and so much more. The bonus of being a Threes member is we have ample classes to further your progress! If you take this program and find relief, keep going with even more classes to improve mobility and strength in your lower body. Simply search by body area to find more classes.
Become a member today and experience how Physiyoga can help!
All memberships include a 7-day free trial, and monthly memberships start at just $37 per month – that’s a bargain for expert-led classes.
Program structure for Build Resilient Knees: Mobility + Strength for Knee Pain
- Intro video with a brief explanation of the program
- Assessment class: Self-assess your current ankle, knee, and hip mobility
- Ankle mobility
- Knee mobility
- Hip Mobility
- Foundational lower body strength: start to build stability around the knee
- Lower body strength: bigger movements with weights
Classes are intended to be taken multiple times over 3-6 weeks. See the program link above for a full description.