I have been suffering pretty bad pain at the attachment points of the hamstring tendon at the outside portion of both knees. The athletic trainer i saw said it was hamstring tendonitis. I have been doing mostly light aerobic work and icing for the last week. it feels better in daily activities but today i tried to run around 3/4 speed and the same pain occured.
Has anyone had this happen to them?
Is there anything to do other than ice and rest that a regular person would have access to?
Could try massage (anyone can do it). See Charlie’s materials or youtube videos on hamstring work. You could also try foam rolling (which generally sucks for hammys) or better yet a ‘The Stick’ or ‘tigertail’.
Been there. Of course can’t say it’s precisely the same root cause.
But possibly it is tendinitis caused by a recent sudden and sustained “lengthening” of the hamstring muscles due to a change in mechanics - you moving closer to “triple extension” (of hip, knee, ankle joints in the vertical plane) and thereby running “taller” in your training/racing.
I worked with a world top-8 female 400 runner who had strong medal hopes for the 1986 Edinburgh Com Games. She came out of a “traditional” pyramid structured training program, with plenty of tempo in the base and sprints once a week during the GPP.
When she came to Europe she had a couple of cautious early races which she won. And then Andy Norman asked her to compete in a 300m sprint at Gateshead against British 300m recordholder Kathy Cook and world 300m recordholder Chandra Cheeseborough of the US. My girl beat them by “lifting” tremendously over the last 100m. It was very exciting.
But a couple of days later, she was afflicted with extremely painful tendinitis at the upper and lower insertions of the hammies in both thighs. It cruelled her Com Games.
She had to do no running for three weeks and take anti-inflammatory pills to settle down the inflamed tissue. She came back great after that, but we only had a week leeway then before running at the Games. She made a couple of finals but lacked the speed to pull a medal.
After that experience I sought out some of the best minds in the sport, including Charlie and a British national team coach Kelvin Giles for their thoughts on “program theory and structure” and devised the “concurrent structure” which I presented in the lactate threshold thread under Fundamentals on this forum.
The other thing which could be causing your tendinitis on the outter side of your knees is, as has been implied already by mortac, that you have extremely tight ilio-tibial bands (ITBs). Get a good therapist to smash those with massage from hip to knee.
You would be best advised then to not run for a few days.
Coincidentally, even with the concurrent structure to her training program, the afortementioned female developed something very like this problem before the 88 Olympic trials.
Our physiotherapist taped her kneecaps in such a way as to drag them across toward the inner thigh. That brought instant relief.
But racing, much less training, with kneecaps taped is a very short-term remedy because the tape went slack three-quarters through her 400m race.
So the long term remedy appears to be massage (probably in combination with accupuncture, ideally) and some rest until the inflammation settles completely.
please excuse the long and probably boring tale:o