Chondromalacia patellae + vmo inhibition. May I found a solution?
Hi all! I'm dealing with knee pain in my left leg for like a good year now. The interesting part is that this pain occurs only in some specific positions.
- One, is when there is a slight bend in my knee (like 10-30 degrees or so) and my weight (or more) is only on this one leg. This could be a single leg RDL, or a Peterson step up, or a single leg jump, or landing on one foot, or chaning direction, or when planting my foot next to a football (soccer ball) to kick it, etc. The level of pain depends on the intensity of the task and the distribution of my weight.
- The second type is the leg extension machine. I can't straighten my knee if my hip is flexed. There is a point in the 10-30 degrees range where my knee is blocked. It varies exactly as my hip is flexed. If it's fully extended (my leg is completely beneath me) then there is no problem to fully straighten my knee. With external help my knee can go beyond this blockage.
In every other exercises there is no problem. Like with fully straightened knee (kicking a football with my injured leg), or a deeper knee bend (e.g. Bulgarian split squat), or doing bilateral exercises (e.g. deep squats; it's like my body found a way to get around the injury and use muscles in a non-painful, assymetrical way).
The good news is that I hope I got the correct diagnosis recently. It's in the title which was diagnosed by an ortopedic doctor based on MRI scans (so not a home-diagnosis of me). The malfunctioning of my vmo happens in this slight bend range, so not when my knee is fully straightened. It also seems like I lost some muscle mass in my vmo compared to my healthy leg.
Now comes my question. The orthopedic doctor advised proprioceptive training for my vmo. I tried it like 3 or 4 times before workouts and it's absolutely incredible. There is nothing I ever did that was this effective for my knee pain. I did some balance drills on a bosu ball (also with closed eyes when I felt stable enough), and my vmo fired perfectly and so my knee pain went away.
The bad news is that it's only a short term solution, at least for now. After like an hour or so (I haven't measured it exactly yet) my ability to use my vmo goes back to "normal" (described above) and also my knee pain as well. My question is, have you ever experienced something similar? Can this proprioceptive training be a long term solution for my vmo and knee pain, or I'm just overly optimistic now?
p.s. English is not my first language. If my writing feels painful, then I'm sorry for that.