Inner Knee Pain: Why Does The Inside Of My Knee Hurt? 5 Common Causes
Do you have pain on the inner part of your knee? Well, there’s five Common causes for pain on the inside of the knee. And there’s a specialist physical therapist, I often see people are mis diagnosed by their healthcare professional, because really, their healthcare professional just doesn’t do a whole lot of examination, they won’t physically examine their patients most of the time. And even then, they’re not specialists in physically checking the knee and knowing the ligaments, the tendons, the cartilage, all the stuff that’s in there.
They’re more specialists or experts in issuing out pain medication, which really does not solve any sort of knee problem for the long term. Today, I’ll be explaining to you the five Common causes for knee pain so that you can best determine which one you have. And watch out because some of these problems can overlap, there is a possibility that you might have two of them happening at the same time, so you have to use your best judgment to figure out what’s going on.
For most of these problems, I’ve got a separate video that shows you exactly how to test yourself. In some of these videos go into the treatment that you can do on your own, so that you can begin to get relief for this specific problem that’s causing your inner knee pain. The videos are linked in the description below. So let’s get into the first of the five reasons for inner knee pain.
Number one is MC l injuries. MC L stands for medial collateral ligament and what that is, is in the knee, this is the right knee. So here’s the outside of the knee, and here’s the inside of the knee, there’s a bunch of ligaments all throughout the knee, but on the inner part of the knee.
On the medial side, we’ve got the medial collateral ligament on the outside, you get the lateral collateral, and on the inside, you have a couple of ligaments, I won’t go into too much detail, but injuries to the knee where the knee bends this way where it’s forced to pushed to be pushed in this direction, and it bends inward, will stretch out that MCI ligament and it could aggravate it. Now this commonly happens in sports activities.
So we typically see people that are in their teenage years 20s or 30s that end up with this injury. But it can also happen to people from accidents like car accidents, motor vehicle accidents of any sort. So if you’ve been in those types of situations, sports accidents, or more motor vehicle accidents, and you’re getting into knee pain, and you feel like you got your knees shoved in then there’s a high probability that you have an mcl injury.
Now these don’t heal quickly as they should, then you might get some clicking or popping that stays with you for a while afterwards. It’s not always painful. But if you get some repetitive clicking and popping, like I mean, every time or every other time you bend your knee a certain way you can make it click or pop, then there’s likely some instability, meaning the ligament isn’t providing the stability to the knee that it should.
And so you’re getting some extra motion in there that’s causing that popping and clicking. I’ve got more details for MCs injuries in that video linked below in the description. Number two Pez and serene bursitis. This is not a term you hear a whole lot, but this is bursitis on the inside part of the knee. And the thing to note about this type of bursitis is the bursa is down here on it’s below the knee joint, so you’ll get focal swelling.
In other words, it’ll swell just right there may not swell throughout the knee. And this tends to happen with repetitive activities like running, cycling or other activities like that. It rarely ever happens with somebody who just wasn’t doing anything like somebody who’s got a desktop or has been relatively sedentary or hasn’t been involved in some exercise. It’s just the same repetitive motion over and over again.
The good news about this problem is that it heals relatively fast once you start doing the right things, you should see that pes anserine bursitis go away. And it shouldn’t be with you for more than a few weeks, at most, a couple of months. If you’re doing everything right, go check out the video in the description below. If you’ve got pes anserine bursitis, I go into detail about how to treat it on your own at home.
Then number three is nerve pain. Specifically, the name of the nerve is the saphenous nerve. It’s a nerve that runs on the inside part of the knee and it comes off a bigger nerve up in the front of the thigh called the femoral nerve. And that saphenous nerve runs down the inner part of the leg into the ankle and a bit into the foot as well.
Now what’s different to note about this one is there is likely not going to be any popping or clicking associated with it. You may not even have any swelling, it’s rare to get swelling, but it’s just purely a nerve problem. If there’s something else involved like it’s something inside the joints or that bursitis that I was just talking about that pes anserine bursitis then you might have some swelling with this but it for a standalone nerve problem.
There usually isn’t much swelling that’s notable anyway, you’ll have problems spread out you’ll have pain or issues not just at the knee with this, but you might feel some shakiness or tenderness up in the thigh in the lower lag even down into the ankle. And another thing that’s associated with this is back pain and hip pain, and even pain into the ankle, the joint itself of the ankle and even into the foot.
Because it’s a nerve, you can easily get other nerves involved when one nerve is irritated. So a nearby nerve is the sciatic nerve, which runs on the back side of the thigh and knee and into the calf as well, that sciatic nerve can actually go it does go all the way into the foot, the arch of the foot into the toes, so it’s possible to get pain in the bottom of the foot into the arch.
And if you have those kinds of problems, and your inner knee is also hurting quite a bit, then I think there’s a higher likelihood that you’ve got that that inner knee pain due to the saphenous nerve problem.
Now, I don’t have a video for this yet. That’s coming soon. So don’t forget to subscribe to our channel so that you don’t miss out on that video. Coming in at number four is meniscus tears, meniscus problems, you might not have a tear, the meniscus is a huge chunk of cartilage.
You actually have two in each knee, and they sit right here, my fingers are between the thigh bone and the shin bone and those meniscus, the plural way to say it, the mini sky are cushions that help to support the weight of your body and your everything above your thigh bone, actually all the bodyweight above you onto your shin bone.
And they act as shock absorbers and they help to make the knee joint moves smoothly as well. Well, if you’ve got certain problems, which I talked about in depth in other videos in our channel, check out the one that I linked for meniscus problems, we get a lot of information out of that.
But if you have certain problems, you can misaligned the knee joint, you can cause excessive pressure to the knee joint, which over time begins to wear down on that meniscus and can tear it initially people get irritation of the meniscus. But then over time it develops into a meniscus tear.
There’s usually some swelling associated with this, and it’ll be right at the joint line. And that video will talk to you about how to check for the swelling. And another thing that happens often is clicking you’ll get a repetitive click or pop when you move your knee a certain way. In severe cases of meniscus problems, you’ll get something called joint locking, which means your knee gets stuck if you if you move in a certain way.
This often happens in the middle of the night to people, they feel like their knee is a lock, they can’t straighten it out, it stays in the best position or vice versa. It stays straight and they feel like they can’t bend it. And they have to move their legs straight away and it’s painful, and then it freezes up and they can move it normally again intended and straighten it out.
That is called joint locking. And when if if that’s happening to you whether or not the pain is bad, you’ve probably got a really good meniscus tear. And it doesn’t mean that you need surgery, by the way, which is the goal of our channel. We want to help you stay healthy, active and mobile while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and pain medications having to rely on pain medications. Just because you’ve got a meniscus tear does not mean that you need surgery.
There’s great research coming out. It’s been coming out for the past 10 years about how people get better in their knee problems despite having a meniscus tear. So go check out that video and you’ll hear more about that.
Number five is knee arthritis. Now arthritis is when the inside of the joint all the cartilage surfaces of the knee joint begin to change the cartilage can thin out the ends of the bone might get bumpy instead of smooth. So the motion that happened between the kneecap the thigh bone and the thigh bone in the shin bone, it isn’t as smooth as it should be. arthritis is progressive and happens over years.
So it tends to affect people that are in their 50s 60s 70s and beyond. Oftentimes, there’s swelling associated with this, especially if you have an arthritis flare up cause arthritis can flare up and flare down. And it can flare down quite a bit to where you don’t have any pain and you don’t feel anything. But if you took an X ray, you’d still see that there’s arthritic changes inside the knee joint. And that’s a good situation.
By the way, if you have died, if you have been diagnosed with arthritis, but you feel great, you’re not going to need surgery, that’s a fantastic situation to be in. You just have to get really good at finding out what makes you feel great and what sets off your knee arthritis so that you can make sure that you’re not setting it off and now throwing it up, because every time you flare it up, you’re going to progress it faster than it should go.
You need to make sure that it does not progress which we talked about this all throughout our channel, go check out the video that we’ve linked below for knee arthritis problems. You’ll learn a ton about it. Just to give you a few other symptoms that people have with knee arthritis. The big one is stiffness in the morning when people wake up in the morning and they go to take their first few steps.
They feel their knee is stiff. They have trouble getting to the bathroom. Most people like to go to the bathroom in the morning or getting to the kitchen or wherever they’re going to go. In the first few minutes of the morning, they tend to be kind of brutal. Sometimes you freeze up within 510 minutes, sometimes it takes an hour. In the more extreme cases, people are stiff for a while, like an hour, and they can’t walk normally.
And then it starts to free up and they feel better. And in the very severe cases, there’s lots of motion. People that have really bad in the Arthritis can’t fully straighten out their knee sometimes, or sometimes they can, but they can’t fully bend it, the knee just stops at one point, whereas the other knee that isn’t involved can bend further or straighten out further, there’s a notable difference from one side to the other side.
Unless, of course, they’ve gotten the arthritis in both sides and is progressing very similarly. And they’ll notice that both knees don’t bend right or don’t straighten out right. If you thought this information was helpful for you, and you want some more specific help from an expert in diagnosing your knee problem and getting a proper treatment plan that’s going to resolve the issue so that you can be more healthy, active and mobile, then I strongly suggest you inquire about applying for one of our discovery visits.
A discovery visit is a 20 minute appointment with a specialist physical therapist. When we take a good look at what’s going on inside your knee problem. And we diagnose the issue. We’ll also hear all about how your knee problem began and what it’s progressed to today, so that we can give you the best information possible and how to resolve this knee problem.
We’ll let you know off the bat if we can help you or not, because if we can, we want to send you to the right experts so that you can get the relief that you’re looking for. And if we can help you then we’ll talk about what treatment will look like with us and what to do and what not to do. And our goal with you is when you leave the appointment that discovery visit appointment that we want you to feel like you know what the next best step for you is regarding your knee problem.
All you’ve got to do to apply for one of these free discovery visits is find the button below if you just scroll down a bit or it might be over to the side, find the button that says apply for a free discovery visit or request a 20-minute discovery visit.
Click on that a little window will pop up. Leave us your details there. And once you submit those details over my staff will get that and they’ll give you a call back as soon as possible to let you know the next steps on applying for that discovery visit. I wish you the best of luck in recovering from a knee problem. Thanks so much.