Are your knees hurting after you run and you’re looking for answers as to what could be causing that? This is a great video for you.
Hi, my name is Dr. Molly and I’m with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I help active adults overcome their aches and pains to keep them doing their favorite activities without injections or surgery.
In this particular video, I’m going to give reasons, things that cause knee pain after you get done running.
While I talk about those things, I’m going to give you suggestions for what you can do right now to help you stop that knee pain. If you stay with me to the very end, I’m going to tell you the fastest way to get you from being worried about your knee pain to running the way that you want. Stick with me to the end.
Okay, let’s get started. Isn’t running amazing? Okay, we’re just going to praise running just for a few minutes here. Running is absolutely great. You don’t need that much equipment. Pair of sneakers and a road, for most of the year. We live in Houston, where as long as you’re willing to get up a little early or run a little bit later in the day, you can run year round virtually. For most people, it’s not just about the running, it’s about how it makes you feel while you’re running.
It helps you clear your mind and it ends up being a social circle because every weekend you can run for some cause or another, whether that is a research for a disease or a local community event or beer, right? Because there are runs every weekend that help you meet other people and just stay amped up about running. This is what I get to go do this weekend.
It is very alarming when you start to have muscle pain, joint pain while you’re running because you just see all of that slipping away. If the pain has gotten bad enough for you to go to a doctor, that well meaning doctor may have told you that you should just stop running because of your age or because it’s obviously causing you problems or any number of things. If you are a runner and you’ve heard that, you’re like, mm, not giving up running.
The first reason I want to talk about is knee instability.
When I’m using that term, I don’t mean that your ligaments are necessarily gone or that they’re not doing their job correctly because for a lot of people that I’ve worked with, their ligaments really aren’t the issue. Just in case your ligaments hold, are the first line of defense to hold your bones together.
After that, the next stability option is your muscles, because of the other things that cross joints. If you go and you get a medical diagnosis of knee instability, it’s going to be because the ligament is now not functionally doing its job. It’s not able, it’s not short enough and just lets the joint move too much and that can cause irritation and arthritis and all sorts of other things.
Because the bone is now allowed to go side to side instead of just hinging like this, because we’re talking about the knee, right? That’s my example for that.
Now, functionally though, while you’re running your knee may not be stable, but it might not have anything to do with the ligaments. It could be just how your foot hits the ground. It could be one muscle not being able to hold your leg in the proper alignment, whether that’s coming from your ankle or coming from your hip. Because your knee is the monkey in the middle, so to speak. It’s the hinge joint between two very mobile joints, your ankle and your hip.
When your foot hits the ground, it puts on a force. If your foot hits the ground and it causes your knee to bend sideways versus forward and backward or even your hip, if your hip’s not stable and your foot hits the ground and it causes your knee to change position sideways, then functionally your knee is not stable.
I will say that typically the complaint that I hear when that is the problem is my knee just randomly swells. I didn’t feel anything while I was running. It doesn’t bother me when I’m walking. It doesn’t bother me at work sitting – nothing, but I go for a run, it doesn’t even have to be long and all of a sudden my knee swells up and it goes away within a day or so. No big deal. Go running again. It happens again. Not really sure why, but it’s not comfortable right after I run. I don’t know why my knee is swelling.
This is kind of one of those where it’s probably not one structure that’s the culprit. There could be a combination because like I was mentioning, your knee not being able to stay only moving forward and backward could be a result of something that’s happening in your ankle or your hip.
Then the solution for at home, if you want to try to do this, is stretch everything, everything in your hip, everything that surrounds your knee, everything in your ankle, and then try to strengthen it all because something in there will let you know that it is weaker than the other things.
That is what you want to hone in on. The idea would be to loosen everything up the best you can to make sure you don’t have something that’s overly tight that your body just can’t push through.
Then to strengthen everything to make sure that you have equal strength on your right and your left side and that you have equal strength on the front side of you and the backside of you so that when your foot hits the ground, your knee isn’t being forced sideways, it’s able to maintain that forward motion. You just want to bend forward and backwards.
Alright, for number two. You could have Patella Tendonitis at which the other term for that is Patellofemoral syndrome. But we’re just going to call it patella tendonitis because that is all of your quad muscles. Your thigh muscles, there are four of them and they all meet up at this patella tendon and that tendon runs over your kneecap and then attaches to the top part of your shin.
When that becomes tendonitis, meaning it was overworked and there’s some inflammation in there, it is very achy and it gets achy as it gets worked. After your run, your knee would be very sore and achy. There may be some swelling in there, but probably nothing that alarms you too much.
You might even feel like your knee doesn’t have any strength, like your quads are very, very weak. That is another symptom of it.
Some people feel like their knees may buckle, but that’s an extreme. That’s when this has kind of been left to go for a while. Then basically your quads have now been overworked and that is what’s causing the problem. One of the fixes for that is to stretch the front of your thigh or your quads and to strengthen your hamstrings.
I know that seems weird, but if your quads have been doing so much work that they’re now overworked, that means the guys on the back have not been doing enough work. Your quads were taking over. If you strengthen the back of your leg, it should offset the overuse on the front of your thigh.
That’s number two. The third thing that could be causing a problem is iliotibial band tendonitis or syndrome. So your iliotibial band or IT band is a thick ligament that runs on the outside of your thigh. It attaches to your TFL, which is a muscle in the front of your hip, and then travels down the side of your leg and attaches to the side of your knee.
If this is more the problem after you get done running, some of the other symptoms you may be experiencing is feeling like the outside of your leg is stiff. You get a little achy from your knee, possibly all the way into your hip, but definitely on the outside of that knee. When you sit for longer than 30 minutes, you feel like you’re moving, but it almost feels like a rubber band that was overstretched and it just needs a few steps to loosen back up and feel like your normal knee again.
That’s another one of those things that people have is that IT band gets so tight and overworked that it, again, there could be some swelling that you may not be noticing. There’s this achy sensation that you get that starts off relatively mild and then builds to something that you just don’t even want to walk with. You certainly, after you sit for a while, you don’t want to stand back up because that pain gets very, very, very annoying. That can be another cause of that.
What you would want to do with iliotibial band syndrome is you want to stretch your hip and you want to stretch everything around your knee to make sure everything’s nice and loose. Then you really want to drive home strengthening your hip because normally what it is, is your IT band is taking over for a hip flexor.
If your IT band is doing all the hip flexion for you, it becomes overworked and it causes your kneecap to track to the outside. That is where all the discomfort in your knee comes from, is that lateral tracking of your kneecap.
It’s not fun, but it is very fixable. Again, you want to stretch out your hip and your knee and you want to try to strengthen your hip as much as you can to help mitigate all of those symptoms.
Now, the fastest way to get back to running without worrying about your knee is to work with somebody like myself who does this all day, who creates specialized programs for runners to go from having this pain and figuring out what exactly the problem is that’s causing their pain through looking at flexibility, muscle testing, just generally how they move in space. They’re running mechanics and then creating a specialized program
For them, that allows them to get back to running as fastly and as safely as possible without fear that they will injure themselves again in the future. Because once you know how to do all these things, you know how to do all of them. You get to take that knowledge with you.
If this is the type of service that you’re looking for, I’m going to leave two buttons below one that says, ask about cost and availability, where you can fill out a simple form and my team will get back to you and set up a call or set up a session, whichever one is needed after that call.
Then the other one, if you have a few extra questions and you just want to talk to a specialist before you make any kind of commitment, I’m going to leave a button below that says, talk to a pt. You’ll fill out a form and it’ll ask you kind of what time, what times are good for you and a little bit of other information so that we make sure that that call is productive. I will give you a call back and we will have a chat about whatever concerns that you have with your specific injury and your specific goals to see how I can help you.
Until we have a chance to talk, I hope you’re having a great day and see you later.
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All information on this website is intended for instruction and informational purposes only. The authors are not responsible for any harm or injury that may result. Significant injury risk is possible if you do not follow due diligence and seek suitable professional advice about your injury. No guarantees of specific results are expressly made or implied on this website.
