How to avoid tearing a knee ligament
Don’t be injury-prone like Tiger Woods.
Tearing a ligament usually comes from placing a twisting strain on your knee. This is the usual reason for all those knee injuries that so often force sports people to take a break in their playing career. Why does it happen?
Why such twisting strains happen
When your thigh twists, your lower leg needs to twist with it. The lower leg needs to follow the thigh easily, without force. If force is exerted, that force is a twisting strain on the knee. Whilst a knee can tolerate quite big twisting strains, it works so much better without such strain.
But your leg is meant to twist. It’s meant to twist with every move you make. In fact, if you’re like most people, you don’t allow your leg to twist enough.
What does “allow your leg to twist” mean?
It means allow your thigh to rotate around its own long axis.
Let’s see how that works: stand up and place one heel on the ground, slightly in front of you. Now turn your foot so that the toes point first outward, then inwards. Notice, it’s not just your foot turning but your knee as well. Now put your hand on the top of your thigh. Notice that your thigh is turning too. In fact, you’re not turning your foot: you’re turning your whole leg from your groin, from your hip joint.
Turning your leg is meant to be part of every leg movement.
Your thigh is meant to twist as you walk
Unless you stop it happening, your thigh rotates outwards whenever your hip joint bends. That’s how hip joints are made to work. So, every time you put a foot forwards, your foot turns a little outwards at the same time. That’s the turning we’ve just explored. It’s meant to happen: your leg is meant to rotate outwards as you take a step forwards.
Your thigh is also meant to rotate inwards when, having placed the foot on the ground, you step forward over it. That’s because your leg is going back and your thigh is meant to rotate inwards when your leg goes back.
What people usually do instead
Few people allow their legs to rotate freely in this way. Some people keep their legs rotated outward. Others walk knock-kneed, with their thighs permanently rotated inwards.
When they do this, people also hold their feet stiff and balance badly.
What happens to your foot as your leg twists?
When your thigh rotates, there has to be a corresponding movement in the lower leg and foot. However, if you’re standing on the foot, your foot can’t turn in the way it did in our earlier little experiment. Fortunately there’s another joint in your foot that allows your lower leg to twist without your foot turning like that. Let’s see how it works.
Stand again with your foot just a few inches in front of the other foot. This time have your whole foot on the ground, not just your heel. As before, turn your thigh, twisting it from the groin. This time your foot is stuck to the ground so you can’t turn your toes out.
Notice what happens to your foot.
As you turn your leg outwards, you end up standing on the outside (little toe side) of your foot. As you turn your leg inwards, you end up standing on the big toe side of your foot. For this to happen easily, your foot needs to be both strong and flexible (not stiff and not limp either).
Holding your foot joint stiff will mean that your lower leg is not allowed to make the same rotation your thigh is trying to perform. Letting you foot go limp will mean that you can’t support yourself on the big toe side of your foot: you’ll wobble and tend to fall over.
What happens when you turn your whole body?
If you hold your hip joint stiff as you twist your body, even if your foot is nice and flexible, you will need a bigger rotation of your leg than your foot can accommodate. You’ll be pulling your thigh around as you turn and your foot won’t be able to allow your lower leg to turn as much.
If you turn slowly, your knee is strong enough to take the twisting strain. It will simply mean that you can’t turn very far without taking another step.
Turning suddenly
If you turn suddenly, the momentum of your turn will put an enormous twisting strain on your knee. It can easily happen that the strain on your knee becomes too much for it to take. When that happens, something has to give: one of your knee ligaments is likely to tear or even snap.
Even if you don’t get a major tear, habitually moving without allowing the proper turning of your hip and foot will be constantly putting a strain on your knee, creating small ligament tears and damage to the cartilage. Your knees will be permanently inflamed as they try to heal. Being inflamed, they will hurt and you will hold them stiffly. Your knees will be unable to bend properly.
This becomes a vicious circle because, the more your knees hurt, the more you will stiffen your whole leg including your hip and foot. Stiffening you hip and foot will place even more twisting strain on your knee.
Sporting knee injuries
How often do such injuries happen to professional sports people? Typically, constant minor injuries never seem to heal fully. Recovery from a major injury means stopping playing altogether while the knee heals — and it seems to take forever to heal. Not only that, experience of such injuries puts a big question mark over the injured player’s future performance. Many very promising sports careers come to a sudden, early end as the result of such a knee injury.
It happens even to top-flight sports people
Such injuries are not at all limited to second rank sports- men and women. Sporting history is littered with cases of top-notch sports people suffering knee injuries.
Just to take one example, that golfing powerhouse, Tiger Woods, had minor knee surgery in 2002. Tiger played below his normal level in 2003 and 2004 because of knee problems. In 2008, he missed most of the golf season because of ACL surgery (surgery to his knee’s anterior cruciate ligament).
You think of Tiger Woods as a great mover. Indeed, in many ways he is. He could never have been so successful otherwise. Yet none of his knee trouble would have happened if the Tiger had learned to allow his hip and foot joints to move as freely and easily as they should with every single step he took.
This article is included under the following categories:‒
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In more detail:–
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