Lifestyler with Josie McKenlay: Stretching is they key to avoid knee pain and tight quadriceps

Josie McKenlay 12:52 19/05/2016
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  • A friend told me how her physiotherapist told her that her knee pain is the result of tight quads – the muscles in the front of the thighs. Tightness in any part of the body will have a detrimental effect on a neighbouring area at some point – I wrote recently about the need to keep the hamstrings long to reduce the risk of back pain.

    My friend, like many, works hard on squats to strengthen the hips and thighs, but without adequate stretching, these muscles become short and bulky and whilst there may be many causes of knee pain lack of stretching is often the main offender. People still don’t spend enough time on this important component of fitness, seeing it as a waste of time or not fully understanding the link between inflexibility and injury. There are many reasons for knee pain but these are the most common causes:

    1. Poor Technique: During exercise this will put a great deal of pressure on the knees. The basic rules, no matter what the exercise, are to keep knees behind toes and in line with toes. I have seen many soft tissue injuries resulting in surgery from forward moving lunges, a favourite of the boot camp style classes. They are often done far too fast which makes good form extremely difficult to maintain, especially when people get tired.

    2. Wrong shoes: A client’s son avoided sports at school due to pain on the inside of his knees. He is flat footed which meant that as his feet rolled in, strain was put on the inside of his knees resulting in pain and damage to cartilage. The pain went once he started to wear decent trainers.

    3. Iliotibial band (ITB) syndrome: The iliotibial band is a piece of tough tissue that runs from your hip down to the outer part of your knee. If it’s irritated by overuse or other problems, it can become inflamed and cause pain on the outer side of the knee.

    This demonstrates very well the chain of events I talked about in that the gluteal muscles (buttocks) attach to the ITB and if these muscles are tight, they will pull on the ITB resulting in this syndrome.

    4. Overuse/intensity: We often spend too much time on one movement to improve a certain area and/or increase the intensity too quickly. This will aggravate the soft tissue, sometimes resulting in tendonitis and other types of injury.

    5. Tight quadriceps: This, the simplest of reasons and often the most overlooked, is well worth exploring. The quadriceps are a group of four muscles (as the name suggests) located at the front of your thigh: rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, vastus medialis and sartorius.

    All four muscles influence movement at the knee. The pain you experience could be from generally tight muscles or from muscle imbalances where one or two of the four muscles have been overworked.

    All of the above common causes can produce muscles imbalances, but it could just be that you don’t spend enough time stretching out after a workout. Strength + length = balance and I would always recommend that you spend as much time stretching one way or another as you do strengthening.

    Josie is a health, fitness & lifestyle adviser & a Pilates & yoga instructor with 30+ years experience. http://www.bodysoulwell.com Follow me on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/Josie.McKenlay/ & Twitterhttps://twitter.com/JosieMcKenlay 

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