Do you shock absorb with your hips or your knees? If you’re having knee pain when you run, you might be using your knees excessively for shock absorption.
In order to find out, we take the angles of your hip and knee at heel strike (initial contact) and mid-stance, which in running, is the point where your knee has the deepest knee bend. Then you compare what the angles do between the 2 phases.
Ideally, you want both angles to go up, which would tell me that you’re using both joints (along with your ankle) to shock absorb. However, what I usually see in knee pain patients, is that the hip angle goes down and the knee angle goes up dramatically (as in the case above). This shows me that there is NEGATIVE shock absorption happening at the hip and excessive shock absorption at the knee, which can cause an increase in forces and thus pain.
Find a health practitioner who can find out WHY you have pain, not just treat the symptoms.
SHOCK ABSORPTION
