Like many critical areas of your body, we ignore, abuse, or try to desire our pain away. The VMO attaches to your kneecap (patella) in a 55-degree angle on the top inside edge. The VMO is part of the strong quadriceps muscle group popularly called the quads. The VMO’s most crucial role is to pull the kneecap medially (indoors ). The other three more quad muscles are either neutral or pull the kneecap laterally (external ).
Issues with the VMO can present itself in many ways. It can speak with you once you bend your knees as popping or snapping noise. It can really get you in your knee when you go downstairs. It may yell at you as your knee inexplicably buckles beneath you. Plus it may scream at you on a long-distance run like a stabbing feeling on the inside of your knee. The result is you being forced to drag your leg like a dead weight. All these symptoms may result in swelling and pain around the knee that could result in surgery and, eventually, an entire knee.
How do you save yourself from this growing menace?
To deal with these problems, we must understand the reason for the symptoms. The kneecap is v-shaped in which it sits in the “valley” that is formed by the condyles of your femur (upper leg bone). The noise that it makes is the kneecap dragging along one ridge of the valley.
The knee collapsing is your kneecap grabbing of the exterior ridge. The pain on the inside of the knee is the stretching and tearing of the connective tissues (medial retinaculum) as the kneecap pulled laterally.
The swelling in the knee (supra patella bursa) is due to the aggravation of the patella-femoral joint (kneecap on the femur). We will need to examine how your knee got to this sad state. The causes are many. The abuse could be years in the making or it might be one traumatic event. If you’re a female, you’ve got one strike against you. When the hips extend out after puberty, the entire mechanics of the knee varies. The Q-angle raises (the angle of the knee that dictates where the kneecaps ride). The kneecap rides high and to the exterior.
Females are more inclined to subluxations and dislocations before the VMO stabilizes the kneecap. Trauma to the knee in the kind of impact, twist, or surgery can leave the VMO defenseless. 20 cc’s of swelling in the knee essentially shut down the VMO. It takes 80 cc’s to close down the vastus lateralis. As a result of this gap, the vastus lateralis muscle pulls the kneecap to the surface, dragging the kneecap across the lateral femoral ridge. Unless VMO weakness is dealt with, it will continue to occur until pain and degeneration of the kneecap make it too painful to walk. Another often overlooked reason for kneecap issues is leg length discrepancy.
The longer leg will get a greater Q-angle and an externally rotated foot since the leg attempts to shorten. The VMO is under stress.
Solutions:
The ideal exercise for your VMO is kicking a soccer ball. Kicking the ball with the inside of your foot is a fantastic warm-up exercise. The same nerve innervates the adductor Magnus (inside of thigh) as the VMO. After the warm-up, begin by dropping your toe and making short passes. (see picture) Increase the number of your moves as ordered by your comfort zone.
Unfortunately, most people can’t tolerate kicking the ball straight away. Exercises off the area should include the past 30 degrees of the knee extension to protect the kneecap’s bottom.
The”Parker Pinch”; could be achieved using a foam pillow and a horizontal surface (see image ). Wall slides utilizing a soccer ball between your knees help fire the VMO. You squeeze the ball and bend your knees to 301/4 and raise back up (see image ). McConnell taping will help”re-align”; the kneecap before the VMO is powerful enough to handle the load (see image ). A custom knee brace may be used if your skin becomes irritated. A strong and healthy VMO can go a long way to helping fix faulty biomechanics of the knee joint.