How to reduce knee pain when running
I recently posted about 3 approaches that are commonly used to reduce knee pain that don’t work, at least in the long term. But what can you do to reduce knee pain when running?
The first step with any injury/pain is to reduce the amount of the activity that brings it on. In the case of acute injuries, tears, and sprains, this is pretty obvious and initially, this will likely be that the activity is reduced to zero.
This won’t be zero activity just zero in terms of anything that is likely to stress the knee and surrounding structures whilst you go through rehab. As things improve it is ok to have knee pain when running so long as it isn’t a lot. More on that later.
What about more chronic pain or one that has come on slowly? Things like ITB syndrome, runners knee, PFP or similar problems.
The first port of call is to reduce the activity, in this case running, to the point where there is no knee pain.
To begin with this might still be zero but only for a very short period of time and only in the most severe cases. Outside of these, we need to find the combination of duration and intensity that can be done regularly that doesn’t make things worse.