Knee Pain Causes

 

Background

After finding a physical therapist with a background in muscular alignment and from my own research in reading books on body alignment, trigger point therapy and yoga, I realized that the cause of my knee pain was postural and muscular imbalances in my body. As with many of the other conditions listed in my web site, when I started doing trigger point therapy and yoga to balance and align my muscles better, my knee problems cleared up simultaneously along with my TMJ, neck pain, back pain, sciatic pain and many of my other orthopedic issues.

My knees were in pain not because there was anything wrong with my knees per se, but because tight muscles in my legs and other parts of my body were exerting pressure on my knee caps, pulling them out of alignment towards the inside of my legs. When I would try to bend my knees during normal walking, they would hurt and creak. At times my knees would lock, and I would have to shift them around a bit to get it them snap back into place in order to bend them again.

Treatment

It's a mistake to assume that the problem is at the place that hurts. Clair Davies, writing in the Trigger Point Therapy Workbook

In the end, the things that ended up helping my knee pain were the same treatments that ended up helping most of my other orthopedic problems - gentle yoga exercises and trigger point therapy. The initial physical therapy I had didn't work because the PTs focused only on strengthening knee exercises. My knees were where I hurt, but they were not the cause of my pain. The cause of my pain was unbalanced muscles and trigger points and tight muscles in my thighs, feet, calves and ankles. The strengthening exercises made me worse because my leg muscles were already overly tight in places, and the exercises just tightened up even more.

The specific treatments that did help me were:

1. Trigger point therapy - I had a lot of trigger points (tiny contraction knots) in my outer thighs, inner thighs and the inside of my calves. Massaging my trigger points each day really helped to release muscle tightness in my legs and to help my knees move back into their normal position. My knees look perfectly normal these days, and no longer are pulled inward towards each other.

Recommended Book:

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook by Clair Davies

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook was very helpful because it has a whole chapter called Hip,Thigh and Knee Pain. Plus, it has many detailed diagrams of the muscles inside of your leg that show where common trigger points are in these muscles, where pain is referred to when these trigger points are activated, and detailed instructions on how to release these contractions using some simple massage tools and self massage techniques.

One thing I found especially helpful was to sit on the floor with one leg stretched out in front of me, put a tennis or massage ball under that leg and then roll my leg around on the floor, letting the weight of my leg on the ball massage my trigger points. This was especially helpful for me because I also have problems with my hands, and saves some repetitive stress hand movement in doing the trigger point therapy.

2. Yoga Therapy - While I've found a number of books helpful to try to solve my various orthopedic problems, I think the book I would recommend the most for knee pain would probably be Structural Yoga Therapy. I found it very helpful for understanding the cause of my knee problems and how to correct them through therapeutic yoga exercises.

Recommended Book:

Structural Yoga Therapy: Adapting to the Individual by Mukunda Stiles

It always seemed odd to me that I was diagnosed with so many different orthopedic problems when my husband and friends had none (or at most one or two), but the doctors I went to see always treated my neck, shoulder, back, TMJ, fibromyalgia, ankle and other problems as distinct and unrelated health issues. This book was one of the few books I found that helped me to understand that my knee pain and other problems were most definitely interrelated, with one structural imbalance in one part of my body leading to a compensating imbalance somewhere else.

Included in this book is a series of yoga poses called the joint freeing series, which I found good for freeing up locked knees as well as other joints. The book also contains a section specifically on knees with diagrams of common knee problems such as hyperextended knees, knock-knees and bowed legs. Besides the joint freeing series, the yoga poses from this book that I felt helped my knees the most were:

As with the other books I recommend in my site, I didn't do all of the poses in the book as some of them aggravated some of my other health problems. I had to pick and choose which exercises to do initially, though over time I'm trying to get to the point where I can do all of the exercises in the book.

Return to Part I of Knee Pain - my saga and the treatments I found helpful.

Other pages in my site related to this topic include: