What’s your first instinct when you’ve hurt yourself?
Alright, AFTER all the screaming, shouting and obscenities (if that’s your kind of thing!). Seriously – what do you do?
Do you wave around your injured limb and keep using it?
No. You draw it close to your body, hold it (because it’s comforting) and stop using it in an effort to stop it from hurting.
What does this have to do with knee pain?
Well, it’s all about the stories our brains make up about the pain we are having – whether it’s in the knee or not.
Let’s say you’d been out for a run – or a bike ride.
Half way through, you feel a pain in your knee. It’s most likely that as soon as you get the chance, you’d stop, sit down on the ground and hold your knee – maybe even rub it a little.
Because it helps us feel better.
But does it actually make the problem go away?
NO.
But our brains assume that the location of the pain is the location of the problem and that’s compounded by the improvement we feel when we hold the injured area.
It’s NOT true – yet standard industry treatment protocols are STILL based on treating the symptom at its immediate location.
You see, most knee pain actually comes from somewhere else entirely. It’s nothing to do with the knee.
Sounds crazy doesn’t it?
But the knee is actually the victim when either the hip, or the ankle, or both, don’t move properly.
Instead of being able to bend in the most efficient position, the knee gets pushed, twisted and forced into positions it doesn’t really like so much because it’s put under HUGE amounts of extra pressure.
The knee itself is a complex joint, there’s a lot going on, so there’s a lot of places that pain could occur but it’ll just depend on what other stresses and strains your body is struggling with as to which particular area of the knee hurts.
It could be in the front (patella tendinitis, anterior knee pain, runner’s knee, jumper’s knee and more).
It could be on either the inside or the outside (medial and lateral tendon and ligament strains, cartilage issues, IT Band syndrome etc.)
Or it could be on the back (cruciate ligament tears, high calf and low hamstring strains etc.)
But there’s one thing for sure…ALL these problems are actually coming from movement restrictions in either the hip or the ankle, or both.
It’s my experience that there’s a particular order that bodies like to let go of muscle tightness in, and when we follow this order, we get outstanding results VERY fast!
And it all starts with the spine.
It might seem weird that to deal with knee pain we start with the spine, but time and time again the results speak for themselves.
So if you’re having knee pain, or in fact, any kind of pain in your lower body, the absolute BEST place to start is improving your spinal movement.
Inside your FREE mostmotion® account, you’ll find the Spine Revitaliser Playlist (if you haven’t got an account yet, you can create one here) which is a great way to get your spine more mobile and a great time to do it is when you first wake up and before you get into bed at night. Simply follow along with me in the video!
I always remember my high school maths teacher saying to me “there’s sometimes in life when you just don’t need to know why”. He was talking about some complex mathematical principle, but I’ve heard that phrase in my head many times over the last 20 years of working with bodies.
The human body continues to baffle scientists yet nature just continues to get on with the job.
Personally, I’d rather spend my time observing nature and then working with it than bogging myself down in the details of why it might be happening (I’ve wasted way too much time with the details).
We’ve all tried to do things the way science THINKS is right, but still end up frustrated at the results.
Yes, it’s a leap of faith to leave the perceived security of logic, but trusting nature will be the BEST thing you ever did.