After a doctor has diagnosed the injured knee (with an MRI or manual tests for ligament structure) and determined there is no structural damage, it is time to find out why there pain in the knee. The thing about this knee pain is that the knee itself is not the problem. It’s easy for doctors to say “Oh there is no structural damage, just have your son/daughter do some exercises to strength the knee like leg extension or hamstring work.” This is just trying to mask the symptoms instead of resolving the problem. In fact, those recommendations are terrible because you may be putting more stress on the injured knee – place shear forces on your knee by doing leg extensions or partial leg extensions and isolate your hamstring muscle by doing knee flexion exercises. First off, your hamstrings primary role in functional movements is not concentric knee flexion so don’t waste your time doing hamstring curls. You are training the body to do something that it would not normally do in a baseball game or volleyball match. Instead, let us start to look above and below the knee for what is causing the problem. Most times chronic knee pain is the result of dysfunction of the ankle or hip joint. We need to make sure the ankle and hip have the proper amount of mobility and stability. The pain may also be coming from the core, back or even the shoulder. That’s right – shoulder girdle dysfunction can cause lower body injuries. Once we have determined the weakness within the kinetic chain, then it is appropriate to design a program to alleviate this knee pain.
Train Hard-Train Smart,
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