In this blogpost, we’ll take a look at what some of the most common knee injuries seen in athletes are, and what you can do to help manage them.
ACL injuries
The dreaded ACL! The bane of every team-sport athlete out there, and perhaps the one that gets the most attention across media. For the uninitiated, the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) is a ligament that’s in your knee with one end attached to your thigh bone, and the other to the shin bone. It is most commonly injured during high speed pivoting, change of direction and landing awkwardly.
The popular belief is that all ACL tears require surgery, however this notion is being challenged in recent years. Depending on the unique characteristics of the individual and the tear itself, a non-surgical route is a possibility for some.
Regardless of the route you decide to take, recovering from an ACL injury requires 9–12 months of dedicated physiotherapy involving getting the muscles around the knee strong and building up the capacity of the knee to tolerate the demands of sport, along with gradual exposure to sport-specific drills before you can return to playing again. Our experienced sport and spinal physiotherapy team carefully considers your personal circumstances and formulates options best suited for you.
Patellar tendinopathy
Also commonly known as ‘Jumper’s knee’ aptly titled as this is seen in young jumping athletes like basketball or volleyball players. This is characterised by pain just below the kneecap, usually in the morning which gets better through the day. It follows a ‘warm-up phenomenon’ which means as the person warms up, the pain disappears and then reappears once the body has cooled down. Activities that involve energy storage-release like hopping and jumping will be the most painful.
How do you treat this? Tendons love heavy slow loading. Every tendon will be sensitive to load to varying degrees, hence the key factor initially is to find an entry point into loading the tendon early on. Figuring out what the tendon can tolerate at that moment and gradually building up from there is essential and this is something we at Activ8 Physio can help you with. Isometric exercises (such as the Spanish squat) are a great entry point for most patellar tendinopathies and this can gradually progress to heavy slow squats variations and then eventually hopping and jumping exercises.
Iliotibial band syndrome (ITBS)
One of the most common knee conditions seen in runners. This is characterised by pain over the outer aspect of the knee when running, usually felt during or just before the foot strikes the ground. In the initial stages, the pain might come on towards the end of the run without affecting the run itself and might go away as soon as the running has ceased. However, in severe cases, pain may be present at rest and will hinder runners from completing their run. This is caused due to repeated and cyclical compression of an irritable fat pad that sits just underneath the insertion of the ITB on the outside of the knee. This is most common in novice runners, and the biggest reason for this is poor running programming. Too much running too soon leads to intolerable demands on the fat pad causing it to be sensitive.
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