View Full Version : knee pain
squeezebox
09-03-2014, 19:28
In the past I've sprained my knee or ankle and wore one of those big elastic braces for a while.
Now I have a knee problem just below the middle of the joint and medial.
About the bottom of the knee cap and center of body.
So do I need a big knee brace or one of those knee straps
Ask your doctor or physical therapist for the best advice, I think. I've used the band with limited improvement in knee pain but I rarely use anything anymore.
Good luck and I hope you find relief. Knee pain is horrible.
Ask your doctor or physical therapist for the best advice...
Surely, you jest. Why would one rely on the advice of someone who has wasted years of study, cut open the knees of cadavers to have first had knowledge and proven through testing mastery of such things. Isn't it wiser to source your medical care to the anonymous and untrained willing to treat you through the internet?
My son fell and hurt his knee recently, apparently three orange Tic Tacs is an effective remedy for knee pain.
Don't see how an asinine response was needed here. But thanks for sharing a little bit of your character.
Traveler
09-03-2014, 20:10
I had a rather startling experience with some chronic knee pain, primarily from what I have read here. For a number of years I have been wearing fairly heavy boots. Knee pain was off and on, but lately it was on all the time. Last week I bought a pair of Merrill Moab trail shoes. The difference was amazing and felt nearly instantly. Since then I have put on about 55 miles and can hike for the first time without a knee brace. The lower and lighter shoe has changed my gait a bit, I am a little faster now.
I found most of my chronic knee pain has subsided due to a change in footwear, which I remain fully and pleasantly surprised.
The last post brings up a good point. There are a few talented doctors who specialize in knee pain. When you go to them the first thing they look at is not your knees, but your feet and the shoes you are wearing.
Agreed. Proper footwear and fit is a great solution to many knee problems. Also watching how you're landing, like not heel striking for example, makes a difference.
kayak karl
09-03-2014, 20:30
i hurt my knee on the approach trail. right where you said, under my left cap. i tried different straps. a member on here was hiking with me and had a few different ones. none helped. it took me a week plus to walk it off. favoring the one knee made the other one start hurting.
ever since that i never try to lift me and my pack more the 12". i will take two steps off to the right or left. this has worked for years and it never came back. i could probably do exercises for higher lift, but ???? :)
the comment about the tic-tac's was wrong, just wrong. green are for knee pain( and skinned elbows), orange are for tummy aches.
Second Half
09-03-2014, 20:50
It happens every time someone asks about knee pain. Someone else will jump in with a snarky comment about asking for medical advice on the internet.
That said, and with every caveat about different strokes for different folks, in my experience I have knee pain hiking without Cho-Pat dual action knee straps. Hiking with them I have no knee pain. None. YMMV, FWIW, etc.
P.S. Isn't this the point of discussion boards? To discuss what different people have experienced? No one here is dumb enough to take someone else's advice as gospel.
rocketsocks
09-03-2014, 21:26
i hurt my knee on the approach trail. right where you said, under my left cap. i tried different straps. a member on here was hiking with me and had a few different ones. none helped. it took me a week plus to walk it off. favoring the one knee made the other one start hurting.
ever since that i never try to lift me and my pack more the 12". i will take two steps off to the right or left. this has worked for years and it never came back. i could probably do exercises for higher lift, but ???? :)
the comment about the tic-tac's was wrong, just wrong. green are for knee pain( and skinned elbows), orange are for tummy aches.
...that's is eggsactlyy what happen to me, craziest/not so crazy damdest thing.
life savers always worked for my chillren.:)
I had bad knee pain not from hiking but from ramping up my weekly mileage too quickly training for my first marathon. I had to dial things way, way back and defer the marathon for a year. I also started taking a glucosamine and chondroitin supplement each day which is controversial in terms of efficacy. Since I didn't have time to do a control study on myself, I'm not sure whether ramping up my running mileage more slowly or the supplement did the trick but I haven't experienced that kind of knee pain again when running or when on an extended hike. I still take the supplement figuring that it cannot hurt. The cost is minimal. I think that a year's supply is only around $30-40 when purchased in the value packages at Wal-Mart.
At the moment, I'm having some sustained pain on my hip and a numb/burning sensation on my upper thigh a week after finishing my Colorado Trail thru hike. These symptoms appeared during the last week of my hike and mysteriously haven't dissipated all that much yet. I do think that seeking the advice of a medical professional, preferably one versed in sports medicine and *supportive* of what some may consider "extreme" athletic outdoor endeavors if pain persists for an extended period.
MuddyWaters
09-03-2014, 21:55
Slow down, ease the weight onto downhill leg on steep downhills works wonders
Pedaling Fool
09-04-2014, 09:02
In the past I've sprained my knee or ankle and wore one of those big elastic braces for a while.
Now I have a knee problem just below the middle of the joint and medial.
About the bottom of the knee cap and center of body.
So do I need a big knee brace or one of those knee straps
I don't know anything about knee braces, since I've never worn one. However, I do have a chronic knee pain from an accident when I was very young and my strategy is to manage it thru weightlifting and that works really well for me and it allows me to NOT show my age (nearly 50) compared to many in my age group. Doing one exercise, such as hiking, will only wear down the knee in the long run, so weightlifting helps build up the muscles not used so much in that one exercise (whatever it may be)
My mistake early in life (besides what lead to my injury) was that I did too much cycling and nothing else, which worked certain muscles, but not others. I was fooled by the same misconception that many cyclists/runners/hikers get fooled by: The I don't need to work my legs with weights because I cycle all the time mindset.
That is totally wrong, it actually is harmful, because it creates muscle imbalance. Then you got the issue of ageing and weightlifting answers that question perfectly http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/everything-you-know-about-fitness-is-a-lie-20120504?page=3
Excerpt:
"Two years after I'd signed that first gym contract, I'd mastered all sorts of freak-show Cirque du Soleil balance-ball exercises. I could knock off a dozen squats while standing on a giant inflatable Swiss ball and holding 20-pound dumbbells, and the guy I saw in the mirror was a certified badass. But in reality I wasn't much more than the perfect health-club customer: a middle-aged man with a fast-fading ability to paddle a surfboard into big winter waves at San Francisco's Ocean Beach. I was getting weaker with every passing year.
My conversion moment came in a garage-like industrial space next to an ATV rental yard in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was lying on a concrete floor, near puking, having just humiliated myself on the king of all strength exercises, the old-school back squat. "The best thing I can do for an athlete," coach Rob Shaul said to me as I struggled to get up, "is to make him strong. Strength is king, and you're ****ing little-girl weak."
Shaul makes a living by designing strength-and-conditioning programs for Special Forces units heading to Afghanistan. He also owns Mountain Athlete, a private gym in Jackson, Wyoming, where he trains pro ski racers, sponsored ice climbers, full-time international mountain guides, and Jackson locals who keep fit so they can play hard in the Tetons.
I'd come here because I'd gotten a call from an old climbing buddy, Christian Santelices. Santelices had left the Bay Area and moved to the Tetons, where he'd worked his way up to the top mountain-guiding job in the United States, co-chief guide for Jackson's Exum Mountain Guides. I admitted to him that three-hour climbing-gym sessions and four-hour surfs were a thing of my past, but said I was making serious inroads on using the gym. I was inventing killer stability-ball exercises, I told him, stuff he wouldn't believe. "Funny thing," Santelices told me on the phone. "I'm in a gym a lot too. Working with this guy who specializes in training people for mountain sports. Maybe you ought to come check it out."
I jumped on a plane, slept in a motel, gulped a crappy coffee, drove down a lonely highway, and presented myself. Beneath the Mountain Athlete banners, I saw nothing but dumbbells, barbells, iron weight plates, braided climbing ropes hanging off the ceiling, pull-up bars, and dip bars. No mirrors, no TVs, no music, no elliptical trainers, no weight machines, and, to my annoyance, absolutely no rubber bands or stability balls.
That worried me. How do you get sport-specific without rubber bands and stability balls, or at least Bosu platforms? And, shoot, I'd really been hoping to show Santelices and Shaul my stability-ball dumbbell squats. They take serious core stability.
No decor either, I noticed: just a few thank-you letters from military units, a wall-mounted baby pacifier with a sign saying "Emergency Use Only," and a piece of paper with Shaul's strength standards for men (BW = your own body weight):
LIFT
Front Squat – 1.5x BW
Dead Lift – 2.0x BW
Bench Press – 1.5x BW
Running the numbers in my head – I weigh 205 – I was about to raise my hand. Ahem, Coach? Yeah, I'm just wondering about your strength standards, see, because, uh, yeah. You can't be serious.
Then Shaul started the session, calling me and a dozen others onto the floor. Shaul grew up in Wyoming, served in the Coast Guard, and spent years as a self-described gym rat, devouring every training book he could find before he opened Mountain Athlete. Shaul's gift for this work comes from his unique background as a fitness fanatic who happened to grow up in Wyoming, surrounded by elite-level mountain athletes. He has close-cropped hair, a face that always looks as if he's just been sucker-punched out of a slight drunkenness, and a military demeanor. He ordered us over to the barbell racks, telling us to work our way up to the heaviest squat we could do once. I realized that I had never done this particular test in my life. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I'd never even done plain old squats. Wasn't it far better to squat on a stability ball and get all that additional balance and core work?
Fifteen minutes later, I had my answer: I possessed the weakest legs in the room, bar none. As a sport-specific stability-ball superstar proudly squatting a grandma-level 40 pounds, I had developed a pair of wobbly, hide-your-head-in-shame chicken sticks, even in comparison to a couple of short middle-aged women Shaul was training for climbing and trail running. The rest of the session – more barbell moves, along with push-ups, pull-ups, and dips – revealed more of the same. I was, in a word, weak. Not even middle-aged-lady weak – little-girl weak.
But Shaul gave me a great gift that day, cluing me in to a little secret: True sport-specific training, for literally everybody except elite athletes, isn't sport-specific at all. It's about getting strong, durable, and relentless in simple, old-school ways that a man can train, test, and measure. Nobody does crunches training this way, nobody watches television from the stationary bike, and 60-year-old women dead-lift 200 pounds and more.
Shaul was the smartest man I'd met in terms of getting truly fit, but I wasn't about to move to Jackson. And I didn't want a coach, anyway; I wanted to become my own coach. And now I knew this wasn't about a gym or about gym equipment; it was about an ethos, an understanding that nothing on Earth beats the fundamentals, a commitment to regular, measurable improvement in everything that a gym trainer won't teach, for fear you'll walk away bored: push-ups, pull-ups, bench presses, squats, dead lifts, and even such military-seeming tests as just how fast you can run a single mile."
Read more: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/everything-you-know-about-fitness-is-a-lie-20120504?page=3#ixzz3CMZinMff
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Make sure that your toes are pointed straight ahead when you walk, or do anything for that matter. If your toes point out like a duck, your arches colapse, your ankle bone drops to the inside and your knee is in a valgus state. This puts a great deal of stress on the knee ligaments. This is how people tear their ACL without even being touched.
Make sure that your toes are pointed straight ahead when you walk, or do anything for that matter. If your toes point out like a duck, your arches colapse, your ankle bone drops to the inside and your knee is in a valgus state. This puts a great deal of stress on the knee ligaments. This is how people tear their ACL without even being touched.
I see so many people walking like that, hunched over like they're carrying packs even when they aren't. I developed a problem in my knee after doing the approach trail. I started standing up straighter when I walk, improved my gait, and bought better shoes. No more pain. It's a miracle!
rocketsocks
09-04-2014, 16:36
Make sure that your toes are pointed straight ahead when you walk, or do anything for that matter. If your toes point out like a duck, your arches colapse, your ankle bone drops to the inside and your knee is in a valgus state. This puts a great deal of stress on the knee ligaments. This is how people tear their ACL without even being touched.
What happens to the knees if your slew footed/pigeon toed? I tend to roll my ankle.
I would suggest that you continue to wear the knee brace/strap, slow down and take it easy on the down hill grinds with a lighter load, for me when I hurt me knee ( it pretty much happened on all my major hikes ) I had to just slow down for a few days and it seemed to work it self out, but if the pain continues and it doesn't seem to get better, ask your doctors advice, You can really do some major damage to your knee, I know people that had to have surgery on their knee/ankles only because they didn't know to slow down and take care of them selves. Good Luck.
AfghanVet
09-04-2014, 17:00
As I've posted in my own thread, I have knee pain when hiking. Mine usually starts about 4 miles or so into a hike and it comes from the left side right in the dimple created between your kneecap and leg bones. Over labor day, I did Woody Gap to Neel's Gap and back which is somewhere around 22.6 miles or so. The first day, I just hiked and took a lot of breaks to see how that treated me and the knee pain persisted. The second day I was taking advil, two capsules every two hours. It didn't completely eliminate the pain but I finished the hike, still hurt when I got home, still have yet to find out what is causing it but I have a doctor's appointment scheduled. I'm hoping it's correctable, IT band for example. For the feet pointing straight thing, when my knee hurts the only time it stops hurting is if I point my left toes out. I don't know how any of this helps your cause in any way, shape or form but for me, I've tried a few things, none have worked so off to the doc I go.
i hurt my knee on the approach trail. right where you said, under my left cap. i tried different straps. a member on here was hiking with me and had a few different ones. none helped. it took me a week plus to walk it off. favoring the one knee made the other one start hurting.
ever since that i never try to lift me and my pack more the 12". i will take two steps off to the right or left. this has worked for years and it never came back. i could probably do exercises for higher lift, but ???? :)
the comment about the tic-tac's was wrong, just wrong. green are for knee pain( and skinned elbows), orange are for tummy aches.
this is huge - don't take deep steps up.