One of the most common knee condition is Jumper\’s Knee or better known medically as Patellar Tendinitis. It is a condition where the patellar tendon is inflamed.
To extend your leg such as when you kick a ball or jump up in the air, your thigh muscles contracts and through the tendon connected from the muscle to the shin bone, it pulls your shin bone forward. This tendon is the patellar tendon and the knee cap, which is a small bone, floats within this tendon somewhere in the middle. This tendon as you can imagine is crucial to the movement of your leg.
The symptoms of patellar tendinitis are pain and occasionally a swelling over the patellar tendon. Pain is usually sharp during the sporting activities such as jumping or running and persists as a dull ache after the activity. Initially the pain might be present only during the start or after completing the sport or work out which then worsens to becoming more constant in nature. Everyday activities such as climbing up and down stairs might be painful too. Pain on pressing directly over the patellar tendon is a characteristic feature in examination. An X-ray might provide additional information of a bone spur and an MRI is needed in more chronic cases to rule out tendon degeneration.
The commonest cause of patellar tendinitis is overuse. This occurs frequently in jumping sports such as basketball and volleyball and hence it is is often referred to as \’jumpers knee.\’ However it can occur with sports such as running and soccer too. A less common cause is due to direct injury to the tendon.
The inflammation can be a result of numerous factors. Here are some of the causes which lead to patellar tendinitis:
How you train can place \’extra\’ stress on your tendon
1. Training more frequently suddenly.
2. Increasing the training load intensity too quickly.
3. Changing sports which involve movements your body is unused to.
4. The sport surface can vary the amount of the stress the tendon has to absorb. Jumping and landing on a hard surface places more strain on the patellar tendon compared to landing on soft earth or grassy field.
5. If you are not flexible, load or stress from landing will be borne by the tendon compared to when your muscles are more supple and flexible.
6. Weak quadriceps muscles
Bio-mechanical dysfunctions can lead to uneven strain
1. Reduced flexibility of the thigh muscles namely the quadriceps and the hamstring muscles
2. Poor balanced muscle strength can lead of the tendon bearing the load unevenly
3. In some case, the knee cap bone sits higher than the knee joint grove.
4. A heavy body mass
5. Flat feet that fails to absorb the shock from foot falls or landing from a jump will cause the tendon in the knee to strain harder.
Find out more about the treatment for Patellar Tendinitis at Core Concepts\’, Singapore\’s leading and largest physiotherapy group practice.