Common Knee Pain Explained! Identifying Causes & Finding Relief

Hi there. I'm Doctor. Killer Worthum, back with another home edition of house call. And in a previous video, I promised to discuss one of the most common causes of chronic knee pain in younger adults So here we are. And the name of it is Petelo femoral syndrome.

You may be saying, what is that? We may know if it's more a colloquial name, jumper's knee, or runner's knee. So Patellofemoral syndrome is a big, long, fancy word, But if we break it down, it's pretty simple. Patella, which is the kneecap I'm showing you here, and femoral, which refers to the femur, or the biggest longest bone in the body. So patella femoral syndrome basically happens when the patella begins to rub incorrectly on the femur underneath it. This issue usually happens from kind of like a tracking issue, a misalignment that can result from weakness or tightness of certain muscle groups and the opposite.

It's kind of like osteoarthritis, which we mentioned before, but in this case, it's the cartilage under the patella that's the issue, not the cartilage on the, basically, the bottom of the femur or the top of the tibia.

So we've talked about it before, but basically a knee is a hinge joint, and the patella serves a crucial function because it helps us get more leverage as we're extending our leg. It kind of acts like a fulcrum, but because of that, it has to endure a lot of tension and stress. And the patella tracks in a little groove here at the bottom of the femur called the trochlea.

And the patella has smooth cartilage underneath it to help it track in that groove. Now sometimes, genetically, people just have a shallow groove so the patella can kind of slip out of it. And other times, like I said, people may have anatomical differences or may have muscle imbalances that kind of pull the patella out of that group. So what we wanna do today is focus on the major muscles of the leg and how they might affect the alignment of the patella in that group.

So like I said, one of the major problems is an imbalance of different muscles. And primarily the hamstrings, which are the the muscles of the back of the leg, and the quads, the quadriceps, which are the muscles in the front of the legs. Okay. So the first exercise is just a calf wall stretch.

You're basically just gonna come to a wall put your hands up and just push back with your heel against the ground so you get a nice stretch in your calf. The cap is a very important muscle spanning the knee. So we wanna make sure that it gets a good stretch. Like all stretches, you can hold this for about thirty seconds.

And then release and move to the other side.

The second exercise is just a standing quad stretch with a chair, you're basically just kind of gonna pull your heel up to your butt and give a nice stretch of that quad You can engage the muscle to stretch it further. Nice, nice, nice, nice, relaxed there, and then let it back down. And you can repeat that. Most of these stretches can be done by basically kind of holding it for about thirty seconds and then moving to the other side.

The third exercise is what I call a wall slide with the ball. Basically, you're going to sit against the wall, holding a ball between your knees, and just basically sitting in a squat position and squeezing those knees together against the ball. You can hold here for one two, three, four, five, and release.

And then again, And you can do these kind of sets of a squeeze of five for as many times as you can stay in this position, and then of course you would come out of the position. I would try to get at least five rounds of the five squeezes. So if you have to break out of that wall sit to continue, you can do that. The fourth extra size is a lying down hamstring stretch, which I've demonstrated in other videos. So let's take a look at that. To stretch your hamstrings, you just need a yoga strap, or if you don't have a strap, like I said, you can use a belt or a towel, and very easy.

You're gonna lie down and put the strap around the ball of the foot that you're working on, you can do this bare foot, and you're gonna lie comfortable the ground and your mission is to basically bring your leg up towards the ceiling. At some point, you will have to bend your knee. Because it'll be tight.

You let your knee bend, and then once you've got a little bend in your knee and you're to come position, you're going to push to open those muscles.

It is so important to lock out your knee and just ratchet this back until you heard something.

Pull back slowly. Allow a a bend in the knee to happen. And once you've got a little of a bend, then you use the muscle itself to stretch itself by straightening the leg in that position. Then you relax, You can pull it back a little further and then you extend again.

Okay?

I like holding this for at least ten seconds. And then relaxing. And if you can pull it back a little further, and then do that again, you can do another ten seconds here.

And then relax. And then you let it go slowly down.

And of course, you do the other side.

Our fifth exercise here, which is great for telefamil syndrome because it involves no bending of the knee. It's just basically lying down and doing a straight leg raise. So just holding the leg up, holding it there for five seconds and bringing you back down, holding it up for five seconds, and bringing it back down. I would try to do about a set of ten of these holding for five seconds each and then move to the opposite leg.

Because we want to work the various inside and outside muscles of the leg, we're going to also do something called a side leg raise, which is basically lying down, supporting ourselves here, keeping our hips in line with the rest of our body, and then just raising our knee, excuse me, our leg up to the side, holding for five seconds, or three, if that's easier for you, and coming back down.

One, two, three, and back down. This is working the abductors and some of the deeper glutes, which can help kind of bow out those muscle discrepancies that might happen between the inside and the outside of the leg that can lead to the patella tracking in the wrong area. I would try doing a set of ten of these, holding for three seconds each, and then move to the other side. And the last exercise is something that they call affectionately the clam.

It's basically a very similar thing to what we're doing except you're gonna have your knees bent at about ninety degrees, and then you're just going to open up this way and come back down. You're keeping your heels together there, opening up, one two, three, and coming back down, and one, two, three, and coming back down. Again, a set of ten, holding three seconds up each time is a great place to start and then move to the other side. A couple quick nose for patellofemoral syndrome Don't do squats or use a squat machine.

Don't use the leg machine where you're basically kind of extending the leg there against a bar that puts a lot of stress on the kneecap and then also deep lunges.

So if you implement the exercise as I've showed you, you can start to kind of strengthen the various aspects of the quads and the hip flexors, and hopefully that will help the patella start to track naturally in the groove at the bottom the femur that was made for it and really help relieve the pain from patellofemoral syndrome.

If that's not working as with all things, talk to your doctor and see what other advice they can give you.

Again, I'm doctor Keller Wortham, and thanks for hanging out for this home edition of Housefall, and I look forward to seeing you. Real soon.