Winter Qi Chats | Week 9
Your hands can help your knees!
This week we go over the anatomy of the knee so you can learn to use a cool hands-on tool to relieve pain!
The hip bone is connected to the….
How well do you remember basic anatomy from your high school education? Are you able to distinguish a ligament from a tendon? If not, it’s okay because that’s exactly what I’m going to break down right now.
A tendon is the connective tissue that ‘tethers’ muscle to bone. It’s reactive in how it’s stretched and send singles (mechanoreceptors) to the brain that helps the navigation of the musculature.
A ligament (the main point of our conversation today…) is also a connective tissue and it ‘links’ bone to bone. We have ligaments surrounding all our joints and while we often focus on the musculature to help support a joint, we can take away from today’s Qi Chat that ligaments ‘feel things too’.
What’s that?
The strength and suppleness of a ligament is very important to pain-free knee movement. They are highly resistant to ‘stretch’ motions but with that said, are innervated with ‘threat’ receptors, aka nociceptors that are highly stressed at their boney insertion during slow movement.
The ligaments can be under a weak point at this insertion and so ‘pinning’ the ending points of the ligament can help reduce threat.
Another directional application for the ligament is when a ligament is under a stretch load and the middle of this fibrous connective tissue narrows and nerve endings will fire under this compressive force.
What’s exciting is, with a hands-on technique we can change the compression of the ligament to decrease threat input and increase strength and ROM by ‘spreading’ the middle of the ligament.
So in today’s Qi Chat video, we’re going to play with the game of, what does the ligament need. Does it need pinning or spreading?
Neuro-Qi Tip o’the day!
Poke or Pinch
Know your history and don’t try to hurt yourself as you palpate the MCL and LCL
Sometimes, you CAN go directly to the sight of pain (if you have a plan)
I’ll demonstrate the hands-on technique and combine it with movement so you can assess/reassess to see what works for you
*Video posts every Friday by 11:30am MDT
