Does your knee hurt when you play golf?

The knee is usually the victim in most of these scenarios. I wanted to write just a short snippet about why you should consider other sources of your knee pain.

Yes, your knee hurts but is it the cause of the problem? Sometimes yes, more often no.

Consider a patient scenario: Long standing knee pain on the right, aggravated by the downswing.

As you see above, the right hip is turned in (internally rotated) and the clubface is ready to make impact. There is weight transfer from the right to the left leg and the pelvis stays level.

But what if the pelvis does not remain level? And there is an inefficient or minimal weight shift to the left?

Because of for example, a restriction in the left hip or the left side of your low back?

Such was the case for one of my patients. He was placing over 90% of his weight on his right leg to start. He was also unable to weight shift to the left without compensating at his pelvis, so naturally he dropped his right hip, which increased the torque on his knee and resulted in a sore and painful knee after playing a round of golf.

All the knee strengthening in the world will not make that better as long as his strategy remains the same.  Because the source of the problem was not his knee. The knee was the poor victim. Treatment to the left side of his low back and some corrective exercise to train a new strategy was the key.

 

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