Quad Injury from Biking
by Ed
(Columbus, Ohio)
I am a 51 year old male and fairly active cyclist in otherwise pretty good health who injured my quad tendons through over exerting on a training bike in February 2009 - spiraling downward at the moment!
Working with a PT, have but not currently taking nsaids considering acupucture and witch doctor :) - still have some sense of humour but fading fast!
Tried icing, heat wraps, ultasound, iontophorisis, and general PT therapy. Icing done intermittantly.
Have one "hot spot" three inches above the knee cap on each leg, but experience overall pain, tightness and stinging from upper thigh to just above the knee cap.
Getting to a point of pain at rest; activity seems to lead to more pain and irritation.
My questions are:
1)Why does the pain radiate to the upper thigh?
2)Do you recommend excercise or rest while doing the heavy icing?
3)From what I have read, tendon repair takes up to 9 month - how does relief under your program occur so quickly?
Thanks for your thoughts and advice.
----
Joshua Answers:Hi Ed.
1)Why does the pain radiate to the upper thigh?
Could be for any number of reasons. Let's come back to that question after we chat back and forth a few times.
2) Exercise or Rest while icing?
I recommend -movement-. And there's something of a balance to achieve. You want to keep the structures moving, even if it's just a tiny bit of shortness and length.
Rest is fine, immobilization is bad. I wouldn't exercise per se, but I would keep moving.
This can look like just contracting your quads and then hamstrings a few times, several sets a day. Or reaching down and punching/pounding on/shaking the quad muscles.
Keep it moving. Lots of good reasons. (I'm making a note to make a long page to answer this important question.)
Walking, light stretching, a slow bike. You want to pay attention, and make sure you are using your structures without straining or putting too much load on your presently acutely unhappy structures.
Make sense?
3) Tendon repair can take up to 9 months. Why does icing reduce healing time?
Now that is an interesting topic. 9 months to repair tenodonitis? Or a rip or tear? Or just for pain to go away?
It really all depends on how much actual damage there is, if any.
My suspicion with you is that you didn't actually -injure- yourself.
I think you had an increasing
Pain Causing Dynamic that had been building up and making changes under the surface of the skin, your body compensating for it as best it could, and then you went past a threshold with that last
workout, and BAM! you entered a whole new dynamic.
The
Tendonitis dynamic consists of increasing tightness, irritation, pain, and can include actual tendon fiber damage.
See:
What Is Tendonitis? Maybe you have actual wear and tear damage to the tendon, but that's not going to take 9 months to heal. If your nutrition is good enough, that heals fast.
But you are still left with chronically too tight muscles, shortened constrictive connective tissue, pain enhancing chemical flooding the tissue from the
Inflammation Process, and a freaked out nervous system that thinks you are injured (You've been in pain since February, you must be injured!) and is trying to protect you....by tightening your muscles, keeping an inflammation process in place, both of which make you hurt more....which makes your nervous sustem think that you are injured, which makes it....
So, icing helps because it gets waste product and pain enhancing chemical out, new blood and nutrition in, which helps muscles relax and literally reduces the pain in the structure, then the nervous system isn't getting so much 'I'm injured' signals from the body, so it can start turning down the protective dial.
Icing as I describe is, in my experience, much more effective than the common ice pack routine.
Old stuff out, new stuff in, helps tendons heal fast by delivering the necessary nutrition and building blocks, and maybe even more importantly, it reverses the dynamic that caused the pain in the first place.
So. That felt long winded.
Before I tell you how to ice your quads and give you a couple other to do's, I have some questions to make sure I'm on the right track.
1. Any pain or problem in these areas before February?
2. Quick history of previous injury.
3. How active are/were you exercise wise?
4. Give me a brief picture of a normal monthly/daily routine up to getting hurt.
Answer those, and then lets set you up to get yourself out of pain.
----------------------
Please reply using the comment link below. Do not submit a new submission to answer/reply, it's too hard for me to find where it's supposed to go.
And, comments have a 3,000 character limit so you may have to comment twice.
----------------------- Joshua Tucker, B.A., C.M.T.
The Tendonitis Expert
www.TendonitisExpert.com
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