3 Quick Tests To Know If You Have Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome

Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome causes pain in the front of the knee behind the kneecap, it often starts out as an ache in the knee when sitting around. And it usually gets worse with exercise. If it gets out of control, it can lead to constant pain at rest. And of course, it will get worse after doing any sort of physical activity.

Most people with patellofemoral pain syndrome aren’t ready to go to the doctor yet. And they’re looking for ways to figure out if they’ve got it at home because they don’t want to go get an x ray and have to take time out of the day to go see the doctor.

So in this video, I’m going to show you three quick tests that you can do right now to see if you have patellofemoral pain syndrome. And if that’s not what’s going on, I’ll also talk about what else it could be, these tests are supposed to cause a little bit of pain.

So that’s how you have to test the patellofemoral pain problem. So be careful with proceeding with these tests. In fact, you might watch this whole video before you go into it. And some of these tests, you might already know they’re going to hurt you without even having to do the test. I’m also presenting these tests from easiest to most intense.

So if you have pain on the first test, or the second test, don’t proceed into the next test, because it’s probably going to become more painful, the further you go, I’m going to show you the test in just a moment. But just to understand the anatomy. So you know why these tests work is the kneecap right here is the patella, and it sits on the end of your thigh bone. Now on the skeleton here, it’s attached with a wire.

But normally the kneecap is floating in tendon of the quad tendon right here, the muscles that are on the front of the thigh, they form the quad tendon at the at the bottom here, it connects to the kneecap. And then there’s another tendon or ligament that connects from the bottom of the kneecap to the shin bone right here on the bump.

Now the kneecap slides up and down on that groove on the thigh bone right here. And it doesn’t really ever connect or touch. It connects but doesn’t touch the shin bone directly, it just slides in this space right up here. So understanding that the first test to check for patellofemoral pain syndrome is a quad contraction test.

Those quads are the muscles on the front of your thigh. So what you’ve got to do for this test, it’s the lightest test. If you think of your thigh muscles right here, you’re just tightening them up as much as you can do it gradually so that you don’t set off pain all of a sudden. But if you can begin to tighten up that quad all the way, it’s going to pull the kneecap up in towards your thigh bone.

And if it hurts to do that, then you have irritated tissue behind the kneecap. And that would be what we call a positive test. And it’s a sign that you have a patella femoral pain problem, and you are looking for pain right behind the kneecap, that’s where you would expect to have it if you have pain somewhere else that can your hip, behind the knee on the inside or the outside of the knee or somewhere in the thigh muscle up here, then it’s not patellofemoral pain syndrome, it’s probably something else.

The second test is a full knee bending test. Now the theory behind this one is of course your quads run on the front of your thigh and connect to your kneecap here. And so when you bend your knee all the way like this is the test you’re just pulling your knee up towards your chest and getting it to bend. It’s for range of motion.

You’re stretching all the tissue, all the muscle here, the tendon and you’re pushing the kneecap against the thigh bone. So when you when you bend the joint all the way this tightens up, and it compresses the kneecap into the thigh bone. And if that kneecap back there, the cartilage behind it is irritated, then you’re going to compress it and it’s going to aggravate it very much like if you had a bruise on your skin or a cut. If your skin was injured somehow, and you press it, it’s going to hurt.

That’s kind of what you’re testing for here. You’re, you’re bending it to compress the joints. And if it hurts, then you probably have a patellofemoral pain problem. It’s got to hurt right behind the kneecap though in order for you to count this test. Now the third most aggressive test is a kneecap compression test. In the research, they call this Clark’s test.

Now I’ve modified it to make it less aggressive, but it’s already kind of aggressive. You have to sit somewhere where your leg is supported like this. So up on a chair of find someone where you can rest your leg like this, you could technically do this with your foot on the floor just with your legs straight. Then what you’re going to do is gradually apply pressure on your kneecap, so my kneecap is right here.

So I’m going to put that my palm over the kneecap and begin to push gradually down against my leg. If it begins to hurt right behind the kneecap right there. You’ve got an irritated cartilage behind your kneecap; you have patellofemoral pain problems.

Now if you did all three of those tests, and they all bothered you, you can have pretty darn good certainty that you have patellofemoral pain syndrome even if you’ve never been to the doctor before. So let me tell you what these tests do and don’t tell you all these tests tell you is that the cartilage Behind your kneecap, right.

And here, it could also be the cartilage on the end of the thigh bone, you really don’t have 100% certainty if it’s the thigh bone, or the kneecap. And it’s not really a big difference anyway, because it’s a problem in the same area, and they have the same root problem. All the tests are telling you is that that tissue in there is irritated. That’s it. You don’t know why at this point, you don’t know what’s causing it, all you know is that it is irritated back there. And that is why you hurt.

That’s why you would do these tests. If you did these tests, and it didn’t really set off the pain, like I described, then it’s probably something else. And I’ll speak more about what else it could be here in just a moment. Let me tell you a few more points. So what these tests don’t tell you is the root problem, what cause the patellofemoral pain syndrome, because this is not a normal thing that people are supposed to get when they hit a certain age.

This usually affects people in their 20s or 30s. It can even affect teenagers that are very active, especially those that are doing running sports like soccer, basketball, and football. And of course runners of all ages run into this kind of problem at some point or another.

The root problem that I typically see that causes patellofemoral pain syndrome, is if the quad muscles in the front of the thigh are over dominant, they’re overdeveloped, and they’re compressing the kneecap against the thigh bone too much and rubbing the kneecap against the thigh bone excessively, that causes irritation either on the cartilage behind the kneecap or on the thigh bone, we don’t really know how to present.

But either way, that’s what’s causing the problem. And what mainstream medicine says is the cause for patellofemoral pain syndrome is they talk about patellar tracking, which I agree with to a degree, there’s parts of it that are that I think are true, they make sense. And there’s other parts that are not.

Now the patellar tracking idea, because if you’ve been researching patellofemoral pain syndrome, you probably found ideas or thoughts, you found something about patella tracking. If you look at the kneecap right here, zoom in here, but it’s got a bump right here on the bottom of the kneecap that sits in the groove of the thigh bone right here, there’s two ridges or bumps on the thigh bone, and that kneecap just sit in there nicely.

And so when it slides back and forth, there’s supposed to be an appropriate tracking. And what’s discussed as the problem is when the track is off, they call it the track and the train. So the kneecaps, the train and the patella, I’m sorry, the thigh bone right here, the femur is the track. And if the patella is not sitting in the groove properly, and it’s moving in appropriately like that, then it’s going to rub inappropriately, and begin to irritate the cartilage either here on the kneecap, or here on the thigh bone.

Now, I agree that patellar tracking is an issue, the patella should move in a certain way on the kneecap on the thigh bone. But the reason for it is not 100% clear in the medical research, that the medical community largely focuses on correcting patellar tracking, by working on quad muscles. So the idea is that they think that the if the kneecap is moving this way, this way on the thigh bone, that you need to get muscles stronger on the quads out here to pull the kneecap over or vice versa.

They say the kneecaps too far out. That’s the more common presentation. And so then they’re saying that the quad muscles on the inner part of the knee are weaker and need to pull that inwards that way. Now this is wrong thinking I disagree with that part 100%. Because what is forgotten in that thinking is what about the track?

What about the thigh bone, like you’re just trying to move the kneecap over with the influence of the muscles from the quads up here. But if you think of the of the thigh bone here, it has the ability to rotate. So if the kneecap is still like that, and you can get the thigh bone to be in a better position for the kneecap, then you have a much better shot at improving your patellofemoral pain syndrome for the long term.

So in order to fix the position of the thigh bone, you have to go up into the hip and down into the foot to see what influences those are causing at the knee joints to hope that makes sense. I’m going to explain more about that. I’ve got a series of Patellofemoral Pain videos coming out right now. So I’ll dive deeper into it. Let me go into next what the doctor is going to tell you. If you go to the doctor’s office with your patellofemoral pain syndrome problem.

They’re going to look at you here symptoms you’re going to tell them it gets worse with activity kind of aches and thrives when I’m sitting still sometimes hurts at night. Sometimes it feels better when I start to exercise and move but then it hurts worse later on. And that’s like the classic presentation for patella from real pain syndrome.

So your doctor will recommend you get an x ray. And what they’re going to look at is the space between your kneecap and your thigh bones, they’re going to do an extra with a knee bent, where they’re looking right here, because they’re interested in how much space is there right there. Because if the space is decreased, or if the patella looks like it’s off the track, then they’re going to start to make recommendations to try to improve that.

And like I said, it’s, I wouldn’t trust the recommendations, or I would take them with a big grain of salt and make sure that they’re coming from a logical place when it comes to this stuff. Now, they’re going to offer you pain medication, the standard first treatment, pain medication, maybe a steroid, pack by mouth, to bring the inflammation down, and of course, relieve the pain.

And then they’re going to tell you to wait four to six or eight weeks and rest it you know, don’t do that activity, don’t run, don’t do sports, get off your legs for a while, so that you can arrest the cartilage. And that’s going to definitely make you calm down. That works for a lot of people, because you’re just not irritating it just like if you had a bruise.

If you keep poking it, the bruise stays bad, it could even get worse. But if you leave it alone, it gets better. Now if that doesn’t work, if the four to eight weeks go by you go back to the doctor, and you tell them you know what it hurts again, and they’re going to offer an injection or possibly refer you to a surgeon if the problem continues to persist over time.

Especially if you’re the person that comes in every six months, every three to six months, you get better you do good with the medications, maybe you have an injection and you improve, you get back to physical activity, and then it comes on again. And that just cycles over and over people go years like that, that’s when they get referred to a surgeon to look at possibly doing a surgical repositioning of the kneecap to align it better, which I think is a bad idea because we’re going to look at how that thigh bone moves first, and muscles up in the hip area.

Now that root problem that I’m referring to, of looking at the hip and the foot, I’ve got a program just want to make you aware I’ve got a program called the 28-Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program that’s designed to fix the common muscle imbalances that set up patellofemoral pain syndrome and a bunch of other problems too, that affect the knee joints.

It is heavily focused on getting stronger glutes as well as foot muscles so that your knee joint, the pressure on your knee joint is reduced so that the cartilage can be as healthy as possible for the long term.

This really is a long-term solution. And the program is designed so that you can walk through it step by step you can scale down the exercises so they’re not as challenging for you if you’re especially flared up in your knee joints. And you can do the program over and over again. You don’t have to its 28 days but once 28 days ends, you still have access to it and you can repeat it and get even more improvement each time you go through it.

Now some of the questions I get about patellofemoral pain syndrome are what’s the difference between patellofemoral pain syndrome and Kandra Malaysia patella and runner’s knee. And truthfully, they’re all about the same. They’re just looking at it from different perspectives. Kandra Malaysia patella just means that the cartilage behind the kneecap is thinning out or shrinking. Khandro means cartilage. Malaysia means thinning or shrinking. And Patel is referring to the bone. So thinning shrinking cartilage behind this kneecap, bone.

Runners knees, just the reason they call it runner’s knee is because runners often get this problem because they tend to be very quad dominant, if they’re not conscious about getting their muscles in balance. And this issue begins to affect them. So we see this in runners all the time. That’s why it’s there’s that diagnosis of runner’s knee.

Now what if these tests didn’t work for you like them of them were painful for you, you felt fine with all that, but you still have pain in the front of the knee. What else could it be, there’s a possibility you might have a meniscus injury. The meniscus is a big chunk of cartilage that goes right here where I’m sticking my finger between the thigh bone and between the thigh bone in the shin bone.

You could also have a nerve problem in the area, there’s nerves that are in the knee and around the knee. And if those are irritated, it’s usually associated with pain up the thigh or into the lower leg as well. But that could mask as pain in the front of the knee to could have a ligament problem like an ACL injury.

And there’s also a fat pad. And even if you’re a thin person, everyone has a fat pad that’s kind of right here below the kneecap, in front of the knee joint, it’s on the front side of the knee, and in some cases that can get irritated and cause swelling in the area. And it can be painful just sitting at rest and doing very simple activities throughout the day without anything aggressive or any sort of exercise, but exercise will definitely set it off worse.

I’ve got links to playlists for most of those conditions down the description below as well as a link to find out more about the 28th date and the health and wellness boost program. I hope you enjoyed this video. Give us a thumbs up and please share it with somebody who needs to see You thanks bye