Hello! And welcome to Session 10 of your Knee Pain Questions Answered. I have a question this week from Zaheer. The question goes I injured my right knee four years playing soccer on concrete. After stepping on the ball I lost my footing with my knee bent and fell on the concrete edge. The impact was directly on the front of my right kneecap and effectively took the full force of my weight falling onto it. I did not have surgery; I did go through rigorous physical therapy program for about a year-and-a-half. I was told that the MRI scans did not indicate a problem with the bone, but there was severe bruising on the kneecap and ligament damage around the knee. My knee gained full strength and I was back playing soccer again after two years.
Over the last two years I've not been as active and my exercise levels have dropped. About six months ago I began running 1 to 3 miles every other day on roads and I'm also exercising at home doing push-ups and sit-ups. After a period of two to three months running I began to feel pain in my knee. This was not during running, but more so as I was walking up and down the stairs at home or at work the next day.
I did not stop running immediately and I've not run for the last two to three months. There've been no improvements since I stopped running. I can walk without any pain. This only occurs when I'm squatting and trying to stand up or when going up and down stairs. The pain is basically behind the front of the kneecap, just to the left side of the kneecap and it's a sharp pain that I feel about straightening the leg from my bent position. Can you help? Zaheer.
Thank you for your question Zaheer. A big part of what's going on when you're experiencing knee pain like this from an injury that happened a while ago, it's important to zoom out a little bit and understand a bigger picture of what's happening when your body is experiencing the knee pain. It's looking at the nervous system in what happens. The body naturally moves away from pain to a position of comfort. This happens when you have a knee injury. When you fell and smacked your knee, the knee, the leg, the body tensed up to protect the knee from being injured further. This was functional for that injury. It was important for your body to tense up like that and protect itself from the injury while it healed, because you had said the bruising and the ligament damage.
That heals over a period of time and that's like short-term healing. The long-term pattern though your body is still holding onto that tension pattern to protect itself from getting injured further. So, your body is still holding onto that pattern that is going on from that initial fall on that concrete and the subsequent life stresses that take place as a result of that. When you begin to stress the body more like running or exercise without understanding how the body works, you can exacerbate an issue making the issue worse, causing you to experience the sharp pain like you're feeling now.
What I have done, I will have a link probably to the left of this video going to the Knee Pain Guru website. Now what I'm putting together is a comprehensive program that addresses five key components that I believe are essential to achieving full recovery after a knee injury and they're water, exercise, nutrition, stretching, and breathing and they all really play a key role with each other and it's difficult to separate them, however they're all very important.
When you're feeling the sharp pain, when you go to extend it, the tension pattern is when the leg is bent. It's like the body is holding onto that tension pattern the way the leg was bent so it resists extending. The leg is resisting extending straight. So the body is holding onto that pattern in a bent fashion.
So, go to my website www.thekneepainguru.com. I have lots of information in addition to I have an e-book, I have videos as well as this membership area that I'm going to be going into greater detail as to how you can begin to empower yourself to get rid of the tension and pain and discomfort that you're feeling in your knee. Thank you very much and we will see you in the next session. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye!
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