hurtin wrote:
Has anyone here had patella tendinosis? Have you recovered from it? I developed it this past track season and have been doing PT all summer. It's taking a heck of a long time to heal. I've been able to jog 15 minutes 2 times a week. Any hope that I will be able to train 100% again
I had it throughout the latter half of my college career and for about 3 years afterward. I went through many different phases of rehabilitation plans, long rests (4-6 months on multiple occasions), and eventually resigned to just run through it for as long as I could muster. Eventually it got really bad, but even before that point it severely limited my competitive career. I've been pain free in the knee for about 2.5 years now, doing around 70mpw currently. Yoga was the answer for me. Nothing else--not squats, not chopat bands, not elaborate strengthening and stretching programs--nothing but the full-body attention that yoga requires helped my patellar tendenosis.
I wouldn't presume to give you any more specific advice than that, cause you really ought to find a competent physical therapist and work closely with that person to work through this issue.
But I will say some more general things about patellar tendinosis, and what I have learned about it. One big thing is: if you have patellar tendinosis you have to understand that this is NOT an issue that will go away just with rest. As a previous poster alluded, ice will not really help the problem, it just treats symptoms.
You have to fundamentally change something about how your body works when it runs.
If you research the knee you will learn about how it can withstand an enormous amount of work. Serious flexibility and strength issues are almost certainly at the heart of the injury. The essential problem is that you are channeling a lot of energy through that one tendon (actually a ligament), a lot more than you think, and more than it can handle. This is usually from hip inflexibility, which itself is a complex of other inflexibilities. Because the hips are so tight they don't share in the work, muscle imbalances develop to compensate, and as those imbalances increasingly fail to cover for flexibility issues more and more work gets channeled through the knee.
So, again, if the problem is the mechanics of how you run, it won't help to just take time off. Your knee might feel better at first, but if the same forces are in play that caused the problem in the first place then it's guaranteed to come back. So take a long term approach, think about how to make your body looser and stronger today than it was yesterday, and above all connect with an talented and experienced physical therapist.
The good news is that if you are successful in treating this problem it will be because you have improved how your body works together when you run, and so you will become a faster and more efficient runner as well. I'm faster right now than I ever dreamed I could be back in college, and if I hadn't developed knee problems I might never have made those improvements.