3 Tips To Reduce Your Knee Pain Today

One of the things we see coming into summer is an increase in knee pain, particularly at the front of the knee. This type of knee pain isn't caused by a fall or being tackled. Quite often it involves too much running, sport or walking.

Most of the time it's caused when your kneecap is not tracking very well with the bone underneath (your femur). Imagine a train on a train track and the train's just slightly coming off the train track. This is essentially what is happening to your knee cap.

Common symptoms are pain going up and down stairs. It can feel like it's giving way. You can start running and your pain increases 3kms into a run. It's a really common injury and there are three things you can do to get your pain under control.

Isometric exercises can help settle your pain and wake your muscles up

An isometric contraction basically means, you contract your muscles without moving. It's a nice, safe contraction that should be pain free. You can hold them anywhere from 10 seconds to 45 seconds and the goal is to do five to six reps and do at least a couple of sets to get that pain under control.

Tape Your Knee

Taping the knee, can help get the “train back on the track” therefor reducing your pain and waking up your quadricep muscles which the knee cap sits in. Tape the knee for at least 1 week reapplying the tape every two days. If it is itchy take it straight off. There is no point getting a nasty skin reaction over it!

Reduce Your Stride Length

The final tip is to reduce your stride length. A lot of the time with this injury, it's caused by people that have a big stride length or over stride where they walk or run landing quite hard on their heel. This increases the ground reaction forces or your body weight through your knee and not through the rest of your body. So a simple hack is simply reducing your stride length. You can do this by slightly increasing your foot speed or just being conscious to not over stride. It is impossible to do this for an entire run so focus on it for a couple of minutes and then going back to your normal running or walking style. Do another couple of minutes and then change back.

That should be enough to improve things. As always this condition needs a proper rehab program, we need to film your running or walking technique and modify if needed. There can be other things contributing tot he problem also. So click HERE to book an appointment or shoot me a message HERE and I can see if we can help. If you know someone that just can’t get their knee pain under control, click the share button below. Nick