Knee pain and running

Running with knees that hurt and are not getting better trough time is no fun, and being addicted to running doesn’t help either.

Fortunately, pain isn’t always a definite sign of tissue damage; instead it can be protective pain that is coming from entities called myofascial trigger points.

Pain from trigger points can feel like its coming from knee joint or patellae, while it’s actually coming from contraction knots in the quadriceps muscles.

What makes things quite enigmatic is that these knots can sometimes reside high in quadriceps muscles, far from where the actual pain symptom is felt.
It’s not uncommon for knee pain to be solely or partially muscular. It’s also common for doctors to overlook trigger points as a possible pain cause, because at this point there is no imaging equipment in use, which could verify their existence.

For now, only way to find out if trigger point are part of the pain equation, is manually palpating and searching for them from the muscles. There are not many doctors who do this, or know how to do this, or think that it’s even beneficial to do this.

Fortunately finding and treating trigger points is quite easy, and you don’t need an expert to do it for you.
You just find tender spots which refer pain to your knee when pressed, from those muscles that are reported to be involved in knee pains.

Usually, even a few days of self-massage to those points, can make them stop referring pain to your knee area. And make it evident that they where indeed behind the pain.

Finding and massaging trigger points in the quadriceps and calf muscles, and the small muscles behind the knee (plantaris & popliteus), should give you good results.