Top 5 Reasons For Pain On Outside Of The Knee

If you’ve got pain on the outside of your knee, and you’re looking for answers on what it could be, you’re going to want to watch this video today I’m going to be covering the top five reasons for pain on the outside of your name. My name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile, while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and pain medications.

Please consider subscribing so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we post every single week. So, let’s get to it guys. Reason number one that you could have pain on the outside of your knee is arthritis. Let me just show you on the knee model here. Here’s the foot. This is the right leg. So, it’s the right foot. And then there’s a knee kneecap.

So, if you have pain on the outer part here, the reason why it could be arthritis is osteoarthritis affects the entire joint, it just depends on where you get it, it can eventually spread to other parts. And I don’t mean spread in the sense of like a like a mold growing or a disease spreading like on your skin how a rash might spread.

It is dependent on the forces that go through the joint. And if for some reason, the way that you’re putting extra force on your knee joint happens to be more on the outside of the knee, it’s usually a collapsing this way, then the outer part of the knee right here can develop arthritis.

Sometimes people have arthritis in multiple spots within the same knee joints, but it can affect the outside of the knee. In fact, that’s the number one reason that I see people have pain on the outer part of their name. Now some symptoms of this include stiffness, especially when you wake up in the morning, the first 10-20 minutes can be torturous because that knee is just stiff and painful to walk on. And it can last over an hour in some severe cases.

It also affects people if they’ve been sitting for a while say they’ve been going to a movie theater or they’re just sitting at home watching TV or having a meal. And then they get up those first few steps can feel tremendously stiff on the outer part of the knee, when they’re first going to go walk. There could be swelling with this and may not be consistent.

If the Arthritis flares up, then you may see some swelling in that case on the outer part of the knee. And this does tend to affect people that are 50 and older typically people in their 60s is when arthritis hits but it does affect people in their 50s. Quite often arthritis is really easy to diagnose through an X-ray. If you go to your doctor and they give you an X-ray.

They’ll be able to tell you how severe it is and whether or not you should take the next steps on seeing a specialist for this. I want to let you know that knee arthritis is completely treatable without surgery almost every time there are some situations where it gets bad enough that a knee replacement might be indicated, or some other surgery can be a good thing for you.

But if you’re looking to avoid having a knee surgery and healing your knee naturally and keeping your arthritis under control so that you can still walk and do everything you need to do. I’ve got a playlist of all our best arthritis videos for the knee, just go down to the description below and you can check it out there.

Reason number two for knee pain on the outer part of the knee is LCL injuries. LCL ligament is right out here. It attaches from this area on the knee to this little bone here. It’s called the fibula on the outside outer part of your knee. The LCL stands for lateral collateral ligament sounds kind of like ACL, which is the anterior cruciate ligament, and there’s a bunch of other ligaments in the knee. But without going into too many details.

You’ve got a big giant ligament here that connects this bone to this bone. And it’s important for stability in the knee, it is possible to strain it. The most common way to strain that ligament is by having some accident where your knee gets pushed from the inside. And it over stretches the outer part of the knee over here, stretching that LCL ligaments, this injury tends to happen in the younger population. So, we’re talking teenagers, people in their 20s, 30s, even 40s. People that are typically doing sports are more active.

We do see it in older people as well people in their 50s, 60s and beyond if they have some sort of accident or if they’re quite active individuals as well. And there are situations where that LCL can get stressed. Even without an accident. It doesn’t always have to be an accident that injures the LCL ligament. Sometimes if people have muscle imbalances and are prone to being bow legged, or where the knee starts to go outwards like that, that LCL can get quite tender that there is swelling associated with LCL injuries.

It just depends on how acute it is. Meaning how recent was the injury and also it keeps getting flared up. If you just got injured you just got hit on the inside of the knee and it major outer knee stretches, you’re probably going to have swelling immediately or within that same day that might last for several days to several weeks depending on how severe was. Now you’re going to want to get some stability for your knee.

It’s a big, big, stabilizing structure that LCL So if you check out our video in the description about how to choose a knee brace, because you’re going to need a knee brace, if you’ve got an LCL injury, that’s just a hard and fast rule, you need stability because you just lost ability from your LCL.

So, you need to brace a certain kind of brace, go check out that video to find out which kind of resource need, you might also get buckling or getting away. Because you lost ability, your knee might all of a sudden just bend backwards or bend forwards without you expecting it. And that’s just because you lost stability from your LCL. And you need strength from other muscles and strength from that LCL. But until you get it to heal, if you might be buckling or giving away your knee joints.

Reason number three, for pain on the outside part of your knee is a meniscus injury, the meniscus is a big chunk of cartilage, you actually have a parent each joint that sits on the outer part of your knee right between the thigh bone in the shin bone, and another one that sits on the inner part of your knee. And its job is to cushion the weight of your whole body above the knee joint on the top of that shin bone and safely produce motion as well control the motion as you walk and move and bend your knee and straighten your knee.

That cartilage is tough, it’s resilient, it’s designed to take a lot I mean, just think of people that run or jump or do all kinds of extreme things, their meniscus tissue has to take that safely. Now the way that you get a meniscus injury, there’s two ways typically number one, is by overdoing it, you just did way more activity than you were prepared for your body wasn’t in shape. And your meniscus has to get in shape.

Whenever you get in shape. And it just broke down, it started to wear down maybe you tore it, maybe you just irritated it. I’ve had people that have come to me with knee pain. And I’ve asked them what happened. They said oh, I signed up for a half marathon. And I didn’t train before that I just went cold and did it. I could run a few miles but never 13 miles or 26 miles. And they just overdid it, and they just need some time to let the meniscus calm down.

The more common meniscus injury we see is due to all muscle imbalance. And it’s more chronic and tends to affect people that are older 5060 and up where they’ve got very dominant quad muscles on the front and muscles up in the hip that are weak, and it’s causing excessive force onto the meniscus a little at a time, over years and even decades. And that wears down the meniscus and causes a tear or it to thin out. And that’s when you can, you can get that pain on the outside of your knee.

If it’s your outer meniscus, it’s over compressed. Usually when there’s a knock-kneed position, in addition to that muscle imbalance, then you can get that meniscus on the outside part compressed really good. Unfortunately, it’s fixable in most cases, if you can fix that muscle imbalance or if you can recover after you overdid it.

If that was you, then your menisci should heal, and you should be able to get away without surgery and get back to doing active things. Again, no problem. If you want more help from meniscus problems, we’ve got a playlist full of our best meniscus videos, just go down to the description below. You’ll see it there.

Reason number four for pain on the outside of the knee is nerves. There’s a big nerve in particular that runs right over this little bone right here called the fibula. It’s called the fibular nerve or the perinatal nerve. It’s got two names depending on which book you read, but it is a branch off the sciatic nerve that runs on the back of the thigh and from the back of the hip. And it could be coming from a hip problem even a lower back problem.

Or it could be irritated right at the knee joint somehow because of the way that you move or some force that hit it in that area. If you hit your knee directly in the in this spot, you could get the nerve and it’ll zing it’ll easily zing down or up your leg and you’ll feel it I happened to me recently I was getting out of the car and the corner of the door bounced from an open position open to a little forcefully and it bounced back and hit the back of my knee and oh hit me right in the nerve did not feel good.  It was achy for about an hour afterwards. Luckily, I’m fine now no issues.

But if you repeatedly get pressure to hear somehow it can aggravate the nerve and cause pain on the outside of the knee. Now associated with this you’ll see pain that goes down into the legs, sometimes it’s numbness or tingling sensations, and it can go down into the end of the top of the foot because the nerves from there innervate the top of the foot so you can have ankle problems or pain associated with this outside knee pain coming from that fibular nerve.

And oftentimes there’s sciatica associated with this as well. So, you had back pain, hip pain, or sciatica type pain, and you’re having pain on the outside of your knee, it may likely be that nerve pain that I’m talking about.

The fifth reason for pain on the outside of the knee is something that I’ve already alluded to it’s been knock-kneed, or bow-legged. If you’ve got a visual deformity, like on one of your legs, or maybe both legs in some cases, your knees come in quite a bit or bow out quite a bit. Then you could be getting pain on the outside of your knee because of Either of these positions and let me tell you why this is associated.

By the way, with arthritis and LCL injuries and meniscus problems is kind of a variation of the other problems I’ve mentioned. But it looks very different because you’ve got an obvious deformity, the knees coming in or out. There’s a genetic predisposition to this Meaning, if your parents had this or if your grandparents or great grandparents had this bow-legged position, or they’re not, they were more knock kneed, then you’re more likely to get it likely because of your genetics.

Not everybody gets this, but they can still get pain on the outside of the knee, obviously. So, if you’re not need, then it’s preventable. In most cases, you can strengthen muscles and move better and position yourself improve your posture to not be so knock kneed to a degree to another degree, that’s the way you’re built, and you’re going to be knocked need a little bit, but it doesn’t mean that it has to be painful.

Now, if you’re already genetically knock kneed, that’s just the shape that your body’s in, that’s okay, you can still probably be very active and do things that you want to do without knee problems. You’ve just got to manage your strength properly in your movement properly, so that it doesn’t get worse and causing problems.

Same thing with being bow legged. It’s an adaptation that people are predisposed to it’s it runs in your genes. But if you keep strong in the right muscles, typically glutes going to be strong foot muscles need to be strong, and you don’t get too dominant in certain muscles like your quads, then you’ll be okay, and you can be a little bow legged or a little knock kneed and get away with it.

Nobody’s going to tell you anything, nobody’s going to stop you from doing anything, your knees going to feel fine. And as long as you’re strong in the right areas, you should be able to tolerate this just fine.

Guys I hope this video was helpful for you give us a thumbs up don’t forget to check out those links in the description. And please consider subscribing so you don’t miss out on any of our helpful videos that we put out to help you prevent surgery, injections and medications. We’ll catch you in the next video guys. Bye