What causes hip and knee pain?
Your hips and knees carry you through every step, stair and squat, and they depend on each other. The knee is not one simple hinge: it has several small joint surfaces that must roll and glide in their preferred path for the shin to rotate and the knee to fully bend and straighten. The hip depends on the pelvis and low back moving well above it. When any of those joints get stuck, the muscles around them spasm, and pain shows up wherever the load ends up.
Many hip and knee complaints are a mechanical joint dysfunction. The cartilage and ligaments are intact, but the joint is being loaded incorrectly, the way a car out of alignment wears its tires unevenly. That uneven stress triggers pain receptors, a secondary muscle spasm and a false weakness, even when imaging looks normal.
Hip pain, groin pain and even knee pain can start at the pelvis. Every movement of your legs passes through the sacroiliac joints first. When they are not moving well, the hip muscles tighten, your legs can feel uneven in length, and the knee takes extra strain on every step.
Adding miles too quickly, running on hard surfaces or pushing through fatigue can take a joint past the range you can control. Pain behind the knee, along the outside of the thigh or at the front of the hip often follows. Fix the mechanics, rebuild your control and you can wean back into running.
After a total knee replacement, scar tissue and protective guarding can limit how far the knee bends and straightens. Restoring the joint's preferred path gently, rather than forcing range through severe pain, helps the knee keep improving. Our Post Surgery program is built around this idea.
Arthritic changes alter the surfaces of a joint, which makes it more vulnerable to a mechanical dysfunction. You can have significant arthritic change without pain, so separating the arthritis from the mechanical problem on top of it shows how much of your pain can be resolved.
When a joint cannot move fully, the muscles around it are inhibited, a false weakness. Your quads and hip muscles stop absorbing load the way they should, so more of it lands on the joint. Once motion is back, rebuilding strength and power is what keeps the knee and hip protected.
