Top 7 Reasons For Pain Behind The Knee

In this video, I’m going to cover with you the top seven reasons for pain behind the knee on the back of the knee. After I cover the reasons, I’m going to talk about the root problems for most of these reasons, so that you can know where to begin fixing your knee problem.

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 to our channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we post every single week.

Before I go into the reasons for pain behind the knee, I need to let you know that I’ve got a bunch of links for playlist down in the description below this video. So after you watch this video, go look at those links for the playlist. So you can get more specific help on most of the problems that I’m covering in this video with you today. So let’s get to it.

Reason number one for pain behind the knee is knee arthritis. What a lot of people don’t realize is that when you have knee arthritis, most people experience pain on the front and on the inside of the knee sometimes on the outside of the knee. But that knee joint is on the back as well. The whole knee joint is joint. And you can see right in here, these big bumps right here, these parts of the thigh bone, they when the knee bends, it comes into contact with the shin bone. And so you can get arthritis on the surface of this part of the bone right here, which is on the back side of your knee.

So a lot of people don’t realize that when you get a keenness, pain, discomfort, even swelling on the backside of the knee, it could be related to the surface of the joints on the backside of the knee that’s arthritic. Some of the common signs of having the arthritis are stiffness, especially in the morning, or after sitting for a long time and then going to go get up and walk that stiffness can be really bad, there might also be swelling. and in extreme cases of knee arthritis, you might have a loss of motion like where you can’t fully straighten out your knee or fully bend your knee.

Reason number two, and it’s kind of related to the knee arthritis one, but it’s a more specific condition. It’s called a baker cyst, and what a baker cyst is on the backside of the knee, the joint capsule, or it’s another word for all the ligaments that cover up the joint and hold the fluid inside the joints called synovial. Fluid or joint fluid, the joint capsule on the back of the knee is kind of a vulnerable spot in the knee joint.

And if you have an excess of fluid development inside the knee, because of bad forces going through the knee, it’s a response of the joints to generate more fluid. And if that fluid isn’t reabsorbed, because the pressure isn’t removed that extra pressure, then what can happen in the back of the joint is that the joint capsule or the ligaments there can start to bubble out and form what’s called a baker cyst.

Sometimes it’s painful, sometimes it’s not sometimes they’re very severe, where they bulge out quite a bit and impede how you can bend your knees and allow you to bend your knee very well. Sometimes they’re completely painless. And in some cases, they actually rupture a burst and the fluid can trickle down into the calf area. We go into way more detail about Baker cysts in our other videos. So don’t forget to go find that playlist in the description below this video.

Reason number three is a muscle strain, there’s a bunch of muscles in the area, the most infamous muscles for being injured in the back of the knee will be will be your hamstring muscles, those muscles start up in the glute area and then they run down and attach actually to the sides of your knee.

So if you have a hamstring strain or a pulled hamstring problem and it’s affecting the back of the knee, you typically don’t feel it right in the middle of the back of the knee. It’s more off to the outsides of the knee. But there are some muscles that are right in the back including the popliteus muscle. And then there’s some other muscles that run from the bottom of the calf muscles, specifically the gastrocnemius muscle I know it’s a big name, it’s one of the calf muscles, and it runs up over the joints on the backside.

And that one can also be affected, you might have a sprain or pull that muscle that could be causing pain in the back of the knee. muscle strains usually come from one of two reasons. One is you overdid it somehow, like you just did way more activity than you were prepared for you weren’t in shape to do all that walking or running or that level of exercise, or you just had to be on your feet and be active for much longer than you anticipated.

And you overdid it or two you’ve got a muscle imbalance meaning you’re overcompensating with these muscles that you’ve pulled or injured, and there’s some other muscles that aren’t doing their job. And in order to fix this chronic muscle strain that you might be dealing with, you got to fix that muscle imbalance.

Reason number four for pain on the back of the knee is sciatica. Sciatica refers to inflammation of the sciatic nerve that runs down the back of the thigh, the back of the knee, and then it splits in a bunch of different directions. And it sends nerves into the lower leg. It changes names at that point. So they don’t typically call it sciatica when it goes into your calf, ankle or foot but you can get symptoms that go all the way down there.

But right behind the knee is where a bunch of branches come off the sciatic nerve. And so if you’ve got an irritated sciatic nerve, a can refer pain into the back of the knee and cause discomfort whenever you’re going to straighten out your knee or moving.

But typically if you’ve got sciatica, there’s going to be other signs associated with this like back pain, hip pain, or pain down into your lower leg, even into the ankle and foot all the way up into the toes because the sciatic nerve does send nerves all the way into those areas. We’ve got an entire playlist that goes into a lot of detail about the different types of sciatica, because there’s different treatments for different types of sciatica, so be sure to check that out.

Reason number five is a ligament problem. Ligaments connect bones to bones inside of a joint. And in the knee, you’ve got some very important ligaments, the Big Four that everybody talks about are going to be your LCL, your lateral collateral ligament, your MCL on the inside your medial collateral ligament and then on the inside of the knee and deep within the knee.

You’ve got two ligaments that criss cross each other. They’re called the ACL and the PCL, that that stands for the anterior cruciate ligament, that’s the most infamous one that gets injured and then the PCL is a posterior cruciate ligament, if you have an injury to specifically the PCL that is typically associated with pain behind the knee.

But the fact is that injury to any one of these ligaments can cause an instability of the knee which can refer pain to the backside of the knee, it can increase the pressures and affect that Baker cyst. If you have some sort of ligament injury in your knee, you bet it might be causing pain behind your knee.

A key important treatment factor for healing a ligament in your knee is bracing it I’m not talking any simple brace; you’ve got to use a specific brace with brackets. Again, we’ve got tons of videos that talk about braces and ligament problems down in the description. Reason number six is a deep vein thrombosis in the medical community, it’s often called the DVT for shorts. And what it is, is a blood clot that forms in the lower leg in the calf area.

Typically, there’s some major veins that run up the back of the leg and thigh. And as it passes through here, it can cause a lot of swelling, redness, pain, and it can hurt right behind the knee. And if you ever go to the doctor, or if you’re in the hospital and you have pain behind your knee or the back of your leg, that’s one of the first things are going to screen you out and for good reason because a deep vein thrombosis is a blood clot and if that blood clot travels up towards your heart and lungs, you can be in big trouble. It is deadly in a lot of cases not always, but it can cause some serious problems.

DVTs typically happen when somebody sedentary like bedridden for days on end, or like if they’re in a coma or for whatever reason, they just cannot move their legs as somebody who’s like paraplegic, somebody you can’t walk or use your legs very much. If you’re having knee pain that might be you thought you might not be moving very much. And if you don’t get much activity in your lower legs that causes the blood to pool, which can make you susceptible to blood clots.

You’re especially susceptible if you’ve got any sort of circulation problems or heart conditions. If you think that you’re dealing with a DVT you’ve got redness and swelling on the back of your leg, in the calf area, the back of the knee or in pain associated with that you should get to your doctor asap and get screened for a DVT to make sure that you’re safe. And finally, reason number seven for pain on the back of the knee is going to be a meniscus problem.

A meniscus is a chunk of cartilage that’s right between the thigh bone and the shin bone, you actually have a pair of menisci in each knee. So you have four minutes guy between both of your knees. You have a medial meniscus on this side and a lateral meniscus on this side. And they’re very important chunks of cartilage that help to cushion the weight of the body above the knee joint on the shin bone below the knee joint and they also offer some congruency or they make the joints more shaped to fit each other better. meniscus injuries are very common, especially meniscus tears.

They are commonly operated on they do surgical techniques called meniscectomy is where they cut off a chunk of the meniscus or they can repair the meniscus as well. And it’s thought to not heal very well because of its poor blood supply. Although it can heal it can scar down and oftentimes people can get away without surgery. Despite having had a meniscus tear, they can get back to feeling better and being very active without ever having surgery.

It’s often muscle imbalances and knee joint alignment problems that lead to meniscus injuries, meniscus tears, and we talked about that a good amount here on our channel. So go check out that description below to find the link for our playlists on knee meniscus problems. So that covers the top seven reasons for pain behind the knee.

Now let me cover with you the root problems for most of these reasons because if you understand these problems and can begin to address these problems, you can prevent your pain behind the knee from becoming worse and setting you up for some bad situation like having to get any replacements or some unnecessary surgery that if you got better natural You could completely avoid.

Number one is overdoing it. If you’re the zealous type the person that’s kind of intense, the person that doesn’t like to back down from a challenge a competitive type, and you tend to put your body through a lot. You need to avoid overdoing it need to pay attention to what your body’s telling you, if you know that you’re putting yourself through walking or physical activities, some sport.

Whatever it is that you’re doing, playing with your kids, or your grandkids, and you know, you’re going to pay for it in your knees the next day is not a good idea, you need to begin to find your limits, put up some boundaries with what you can and can’t do, it is important for you to be active, but within your limits that your knees can take right now, because if you keep flaring it up, you might just be a few flare ups away from some major knee problem.

Now this is especially important if you’re dealing with a ligament problem like an ACL or PCL injury, or some sort of muscle strain, you probably have tended to overdo it. And kind of related to this. Another root problem is muscle imbalances, which we talked about at length in a lot of our videos. muscle imbalances are when there’s muscles that are too strong on one side of the body and too weak on the other side of the body. And it changes the mechanics and forces at the joint which causes inappropriate rubbing.

The body reacts to it in ways that typically are detectable on X rays or MRIs, but it causes pain. These muscle imbalances can be fixed naturally by doing the right kinds of exercises and by moving better. In fact, we’ve got a whole program devoted to fixing muscle imbalances that lead to common knee problems.

It’s called the 28 day knee health and wellness boost program. You can learn more about it in the description below. It’s a 100% online and on demand program that helps you to address the root muscle imbalance problem that is setting up your knee issue. Go check it out if you want to learn more. If you have a chronic ligament problem like the ACL, MCL PCL MCL issue, you need to be in a knee brace, I can’t stress that enough.

Go check out our playlist about knee braces and about ligament problems. You’ll learn plenty about why it’s so important. If you’re dealing with an old ligament injury and ACL injury, for instance, a sprain or an MCL sprain and you have not been wearing a knee brace to the right point in time to fix your knee problem.

Because you don’t need to wear any brace forever. But you do need to wear one for a certain period of time. They need to go learn about what those timeframes are for you. What kind of brace is best for you, and you need to just troubleshoot it because you should be able to fix this problem for good and not have a recurring chronic knee problem that sets you up for arthritis later in life.

And finally, if you’ve got sciatica, there’s usually some core problem and what I mean by core is your lower back, your abdomen, your hips, kind of the middle part of your body, there’s likely some imbalance or some weakness there that needs to be addressed for your sciatica problem to get better.

Oftentimes, when I see sciatica problems here in the clinic in the back of someone’s knee, the first thing you have to do is go up into the hips go up into the spine, the lower back and see what kinds of problems are there and oftentimes I find weak abdominals, weak glute muscles, and then I go down into the feet as well and I find that weak toe flexors, the muscles that curl the toes can contribute to a sciatica problem as well.

Again, we’ve got a playlist down in the description that goes into sciatica problems at length. Hey friends, I hope this video was helpful for you please like this video and share it with somebody that has pain behind their knee that needs to learn this information. Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see in the next video friends. Bye