No More Runners Knee: Lorna’s Successful Return to Running

Knee pain is something that almost 18 to 25% of the overall population suffer from, with this number increasing as people get older. It can take many forms, and affect many areas of the knee itself.

Causes

From our point of view at Functional Patterns Dublin, the main contributor for people suffering from knee pain is poor biomechanics. This can be a very broad term, but one of the main characteristics we can see a lot as it relates to knee pain is instability in certain parts of the kinetic chain.

Stability vs Strength

When it comes to knee pain one of the common assumptions is that it’s happening because of a weakness of muscles around the hip or knee itself. While most interventions will attempt to strengthen these areas with resistance training, the real culprit is instability. This instability usually starts at the hip in the form of excessive pelvic shifting laterally, or with a hip drop as a person lands. This crates a bad stacking down stream at the knee and can put excessive pressure on the joint itself.

The knee can also become unstable during walking if it goes onto excessive hyperextension or sheering due to not enough functionality in the hip. As we have discussed in previous posts, if there are certain functions in the body missing, it will compensate by using others too much. Many traditional approaches are not getting to the root cause of the issue as they attempt to simply strengthen certain muscles relating to these functions, without actually improving the functions or movements themselves.

What about the Upper Body?

Another more often overlooked thing that can contribute to instability in the hips and knees is the position of the upper body relative to the lower when we walk or run. If the body has a good ability to transfer weight to one side because the spine is comfortable bending and rotating that way, but it lacks this balance when going the other way, this can impact landing mechanics and again create vulnerability in the knee.

Unfortunately, without looking at the whole body as a system it is impossible to get a lasting solution for runners knee.

Lorna’s Story

Lorna came to us because her knee pain was severely impacting her life day to day. Once an avid runner, she had been unable to run for the three years previous due to bad knee pain popping up any time she tried. She had be to conventional physiotherapy and adhered to traditional rehab routines in order to try and strengthen up her body and improve her movement. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, the issue persisted until she found Functional Patterns. Watch her video testimonial below to hear her story, and find out how she used Functional Patterns to overcome these issues!