 Have you ever been curious if your posture affects your ability to run or how well you can run, how fast you can run, or maybe you've been curious if your posture is causing some form of joint pain. These are some of the things that I wanna answer in this video, my name is Dr. Molly, and I'm with your Goals Physical Therapy. This is national posture month, I am super excited, and I thought I would do an entire series on how posture can affect different sports.
In this video, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk about what posture is, how it directly relates to each individual sport. This week I'm gonna talk about how posture affects running and then some common injury, just to see if you're on the right path. If you're dealing with something yourself, and maybe you have questions about what's going on with you. I'm gonna give two examples of things that can be tied into your posture, like running injuries that can be tied into your posture, and then what you do about that, because why talk about it unless we can come up with a solution to the problem.
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 Recently, I was asked a question that I thought a lot of people might want to know the answer to. I was asked why on earth are we training my feet when it's my knee that hurts? My name is Dr. Molly and I'm with Your goals Physical Therapy. Let me explain how this question came about. I am working with somebody who came in complaining of knee pain. She literally feels a knot in the back of her knee and then with that, she's getting tingling in her leg. Which is very alarming, especially since she used to be a runner. However, because of some ITband issues then going to the doctor and being told her ITband, needs to rest and maybe she shouldn’t go back to running. She rested it, her ITband issues went away and she transitioned out of running. She conceded that obviously something was going on with the running. It just wasn't fun because she was always injured even though she is at heart, an avid runner and absolutely loves that sport, she has taken into weight training to replace that adrenaline rush. She really likes the adrenaline rush and the surge and the quickness from playing tennis and running. She just likes being very active. But now she's got this injury. She was doing a knee extension, where you bend your knee on a machine, the machine that has a bar underneath your ankle and you pull your ankles down, bending your knee. She was on that and she felt a very dramatic pop in the back of her knee. She told her trainer I'm done. I'm not doing that anymore. That hurt. I don't like it.
 Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy, boxing is so much fun. It used to be that you could only hit heavy bags or hit pads, if you went to a boxing gym, like a place that only did boxing. But now it's becoming increasingly more popular to have boxing kind of sprinkled into the workouts, or have your trainer be able to box with you. Which I think is fabulous. But it has brought in a lot of people asking me why their knees hurt when they're pivoting. Everybody that comes to me with this problem, has been shocked their knees hurt. Naturally when you think of boxing, you think of it as being an upper body activity. Even though they tell you to stay on this way, you are moving your whole body. You really only think about injuries of boxing being an upper body, specifically more shoulder and wrist. Right? Well, it isn't that uncommon to have knee pain when you're pivoting.
And so in this video, I want to go over what can be causing the knee pain and then how you can get rid of that knee pain. That way we can all calm our minds down and not blame our poor knees on just being weak because that's what a lot of people do. They try boxing because they know that their legs are weak and they’ve always had knee problems or knee pain. And this is just one more thing that gets added onto their bad knees. Well, it's not your knees. Okay. So let's talk about a few reasons that your knees would have extra stress while you're boxing.  Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical therapy. Recently, my family invested in bikes. My son is six and I was able, up until very recently, to run next to him while he was riding his bike, to make sure he's safe, but he can now bike faster and for longer distances than I'm able to run to keep up with him. So we have decided to buy bikes so now everybody in the family has them. My daughter is a little young, so she now rides on the back, but this opened up a whole other world that I had almost forgotten about because I'm such an avid runner. Bike riding is a lot of fun, especially when you have green space around your house. So you don't have to deal with traffic and your six year old.
This new adventure reminded me of a patient I had about two years ago named Nicole. Nicole was 47. Nicole had three boys that were in high school and their favorite thing on the weekend was to go for bike rides, probably along the same kind of green green spaces that are behind my neighborhood as well. She called very frustrated that she wasn't able to bike without her knee popping and clicking. It was kind of freaking her out because sometimes it would swell up afterwards. Just thinking about all that popping and clicking was taking the joy out of spending time with her family. She was telling me that she just wants to find out what the problem is. And her doctor told her “there was nothing wrong with her ligaments, there was nothing wrong with the muscles. They just couldn't find anything on the x-ray, it's probably just arthritis.”  Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy it's December. And so this is the time of year where lots of people are wrapping presents and putting new furniture together and all sorts of things. Which means that you tend to want to sit on the floor because it's just easier to put all the wrapping paper and everything around you and try to put things together. But for a lot of people sitting on the floor can be painful for your back or your hip or your knees. And that is what prompted this video, because I feel like people might need a little bit of encouragement that it is possible to sit on the floor without pain.
Patricia is my wonderful example of this. Patricia is 42 years old and she called me roughly a month ago. She called because she was having some severe pain and she couldn't tell me if she thought it was her hip or her back, because it was kinda of blended all together. Hi, I’m Dr. Molly, with Your Goals Physical Therapy. Are you not doing your squats because the inside of your knee bothers you while you're doing them? You're not alone. I'm sure that you've tried doing stretches for the front of your thigh. You've tried stretching the back of your legs, but did you think maybe your calves need to be stretched? I know personally that I've totally forgotten all about my calves. My calves never hurt so I don't ever think about them. In fact, I went to get a massage one day and it was nice until the lady that was doing my massage went like this to my calf. (motion moving from my heel to my knee). As she did that I stood straight up, which was hugely embarrassing at the time. But we found out that apparently my calves were tight.
So I know that people often forget to stretch their calves. And often people are confused on how to stretch them. In a few minutes, I'm going to show you how to stretch them without having to do a whole lot of thinking.  Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I wanted to talk to women out there that are noticing that when they look in the mirror, they can see their knees are getting closer together. It's like their thighs are trying to touch in the middle and their feet are actually staying in the same space or rather the same distance apart. Now, is this just like an aesthetic thing? Like does, does it really matter if your knees are getting closer together?
It does. In fact, if you're having aches and pains and popping or clicking in your knee, it's probably directly related to the fact that your knees are starting to come in together and touch in the middle. Because this change puts a lot of stress on the outside of our legs and our knees. Our knees are not supposed to be that close. When your knees turn inward and get closer together you're getting one part of the joint that's stretched out and the other part that's getting compressed. This change happens slowly over time so a lot of people won't even notice it happens until it's too late and they need a knee replacement. They just think that they have bad knees. Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I speak to hundreds of people every month and a common theme is that people don't like to, or don't do squats because they feel that their knees are bad, meaning their knees hurt while they're doing squats. This is very alarming because squats are very important. So I thought I would go over and explain one, why your knees hurt while you're squatting. Then two, why it's important to work on getting through that pain, like figuring out what's causing the pain and then getting to where squats are not painful.
Hi I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I was asked the same question multiple times this week. So I figured why not talk about it? I was asked, "Why is it that my knee makes this grinding noise? It almost sounds like two pieces of wood rubbing on each other when I go to stand up and sit down." The interesting thing was these people were asking me this question only as a point of curiosity, because their knee didn't actually hurt. It just sounds horrible. And so they couldn't figure out why your joint would make a noise that just sounds like two pieces of broken wood rubbing into each other, and not even hurting.
My answer started with first talking about the anatomy of your knee. Are you trying to figure out what is causing the pain on the outside of your knee, like Melinda?
Melinda called me worried about knee problems that she'd been suffering with for months. Melinda’s left knee would ache when she sat longer than 30 minutes. Then when she stood up to stop the discomfort would limp for 3 or 4 steps before she could walk normally. She said her knee just didn’t feel right when she first stood up but it would work itself out after a few steps. She called me because she started to have difficulty going up stairs and was having to walk down the stairs sideways. Not being able to go up and down the stairs was interfering with her ability to do house work. She was willing to deal with not sitting or standing for long periods of time. However, now she couldn’t do her normal house work without help from her husband and kids. This was causing a lot of stress and resentment in her family. |
WE HELP ACTIVE ADULTS OVERCOME THEIR ACHES AND PAINS TO GET THEM BACK TO THEIR FAVORITE ACTIVITIES WITHOUT MEDICATION, INJECTIONS OR SURGERIES.
Dr. Molly McDonald
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