hey man, am i correct in thinking you had some problems with quad tenodnitis?
how did you get around it in the end?
I had patellar tendonitis. I'll try to make this as simple as possible.
The problem:
- Patellar maltracking. Aka my knee cap was shifted over laterally a bit.
- This was caused by too much tension on the lateral side, and too litte tension on the medial side to counter it.
- The effect of this is that the top of the tibia scrapes the cartilage under the knee cap since the tibia it's not fitting in the "under socket" of the kneecap perfectly.
The solution:
- Relieve tension on the lateral side by foam rolling the IT band
- Increase tension on the medial side by activating VMO and strengthening it
Longer explanation:
Relieving the tension on one side is simple. However, increasing tension on the other side was pretty cool to do. During the time I had tendonitis, I was squatting to parallel. As you know, this doesn't activate the VMO very much. What does activate it, however, is either extreme of the range of motion. So this means things like peterson step ups (
http://www.jumpusa.com/PetersonStepup.jpg) and ATG squats.
Unfortunately, peterson step ups caused some pain in my knee. To mitigate this, I would foam roll my IT bands a ton before performing them. This made them nearly pain free. I also switched from parallel to ATG squats to further strengthen my VMOs. After this switch I noticed my VMO's getting crazy sore for the first few workouts, but nothing from the peterson step ups. I ditched the peterson step ups since I found them not effective enough.
But this part was damn interesting... I needed to ACTIVATE my VMO first! Take a look at this vid of my quads. My LEFT knee was the painful one. My right knee was okay. Notice how the left quad flexes all at once, but in the right quad, the VMO flexes just before the rest of the quad!
<![CDATA[<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2neCEbA6Pw" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2neCEbA6Pw</a>]]>On the RIGHT quad (the okay one) the VMO contracts first, stabalizing the knee, and then the rest of the quad contracts.
This tells me the VMO on the left quad was a bit under active. Anyway, I learned (forgot where I read this) that the best way to change movement patterns are using NEGATIVE lifts. So what I would do before I played basketball was foam roll the IT band, and then perform negative knee extensions beforehand on my left quad. Then I could play pain free, temporarily (for as long as the effect lasted).
Over time, as I continued to foam roll the IT band, the effect became permanent. Also, my VMO's got strong as hell from the ATG squats. Finally.... see the vid I just posted? Well, once my pain was all gone, and still to this day, when I flex my left quad now, the VMO will contract just before the rest of the quad, just like my right quad!
