Today I would like to speak to those with knee pain. I, myself, am in that category, and have had to do extensive and ongoing research into this area of the anatomy to get even the slightest grasp of what may be going on. Now, there are many types of knee pain, as well as many causes of knee pain. For this entry, I will be focusing primarily on knee pain that derives from torsion, or twisting, in the joint.
The pain associated with this abnormal movement could be in numerous areas of the knee, so it’s impossible to correlate exactly. Instead of focusing on the exact symptoms, I’m going to jump straight to what I have found the cause to be… lack of hip mobility. More specifically hip rotation, both internal and external, but primarily external.
The knee is a hinge joint, similar to a door. It just opens and closes and is not supposed to have a rotational component to it. There are ligaments and tendons in place to help give support against abnormal movement in the joint, but many times we ask our knee to perform outside of its intended purpose.
In exercise, I have found the truest assessment tool for a person’s overall mobility is the squat. I can tell so many things about a person just by the way they perform the movement. One area that is very telling is what pattern their knees follow. More times than not, they are not healthy patterns, and the derivative of this is a tight hip joint. There certainly could be other factors involved, but I firmly believe that focusing on the inability that their hip conveys will solve a huge chunk of the problem.
So why is this?
Although there are many instances, I will use just one example of where the hip forces the knee into a compromised position, and it is one that you do all the time: sitting in a chair. When you go to sit down, there is always a rotational component that occurs at the hip that is necessary for you to descend. If there is tension in the hip joint that decreases that rotational capacity, the knee is called upon to take up the slack, and it is not designed to bear that burden. Over time, repeated stress like this will create the same structural wear and tear as an acute injury on the ski slopes or a basketball court.
The distribution of movement responsibility is magical in the body, there is give and take and it will drive you mad trying to understand the entire balancing act. However, certain roles are known, and those must be supported, or else other areas of the body will suffer. Such is the case with knee pain as described here. Take care of your hips and they will take care of your knees.