Dear Docs,
my left knee is clicking (I know, nothing serious) and sometimes hurts, especially while riding a bike or walking up stairs. The pain is not severe enough to actually interrupt squats or deadlifts, but it is very annoying.
However: When I do RDLs, the pain goes 99% away and the clicking gets way less. This lasts for ~24 hours until the pain/clicking comes back.
I would really like to unterstand what is going on in/with my knee and if/how I can rehab that.
Sure, I could just RDL every day, but that seems a little unproductive to me?
Hello Michael, thank you for your response!
I am 31, and I have had this issuse (clicking + pain) for 5 years now. Never had any knee issues before the following happend:
For a little back story: I went skiing when I was 18 and tore my intraarticularligament (english is not my first language, so to clarify: the ligament on the inside of your knee) and my patellar tendon. Had both surgically reattached.
Since then, i always had the above mentioned pain problems. It was weird at first, since i was so weak because of the surgeries, my body always wanted to shift at the hips, so that my knee didn’t have to carry so much weight. Now that I am stronger, this still occurs, but i can just “muscle through”, since the pain is not that severe.
So, single leg squat movements do cause short bursts of pain (as mentioned: walking up stairs, pushing the left pedal down on a bike or shoving my left knee forward while standing).
Interestingly though: the forward knee shove gets less and less painful the more i do it. The pain sets in later and gets more tolerable. Pain comes back though, usually after sleeping at the latest.
The clicking however didn’t start until 5 years ago. I am not worried about it though.
Will read through the article now.
Edit:
After doing tempo squats yesterday, my knee felt actually pretty good overall, only slight discomfort (no pain) while walkin up stairs. So today I added a set of 15 3-0-3 leg extensions and 15 reps 3-0-3 leg press.
Knee is completely pain and discomfort free.
Let’s see what happens tomorrow.
Update:
Tempo Squats make the knee feel very smooth. After a good session of tempos there’s barely any pain in my knee. Same goes for RDLs.
Tempo leg extensions feel awful at first, but ease in after a couple of reps. Riding my bike and walking up stairs feels easier afterwards.
However: This always only lasts until I go to sleep. The next day, everything is back to how it was.
Also: on some days, when my knee is slightly worse than on other days, it’s crunchy. Like a grinding sound coming out of my knee.
I can’t really say what makes the knee worse, though. It jusst feels super random which days are gonna be “good” and which will be “a little less good”.
What you are describing sounds like fairly normal aspects of the process when working through symptoms. I also wouldn’t put much stock into the sounds you are hearing with your knee: https://www.barbellmedicine.com/crep…ns-vs-reality/