Frustrating knee pain (argh.)

[Bad JuJu]

+1 for Speedplay pedals, and you might also consider wearing a cho-pat strap on your knee for support, depending on what the problem is with your knee joint.

My orthopedist told me my kneecaps are ever so slightly turned outward, compared to most people's knees (lucky me ), and as a result I need my feet to sit at kind of a weird angle on the pedals to keep my knees from complaining (though only the left is really insistent about this). My LBS guy recommended Speedplay Frog pedals--they have about a million degrees of float, which is great for my whiney knees.

I also wear a cho-pat strap on my left knee for support. There's some controversy over whether this contraption is really effective, and maybe I'm a victim of placebo effect, but my knee seems to feel much better when I wear the thing.

[OakLeaf]

Fit, fit, fit. I'm not really a believer in float (once you find an alignment that fits properly, why would you want your foot and leg to be able to get out of that alignment?). But I know some people swear by float, so go for it if it helps.

Lyca, what was your childhood injury? A loose ACL can predispose you to patellofemoral dysfunction. I don't know about anything else.

Mr. S, it sounds like you might be dealing with patellofemoral issues like Juju and myself. If each pedal stroke is irritating your knee because of alignment issues, then the faster you're bringing your muscles, tendons and bones through their range of misaligned motion, the less opportunity you have to force your knee into proper alignment, and the more times you're doing it over a fixed distance, the worse problems you're going to have.

Juju, I wear PF straps to do aerobics, and strength moves like squats and lunges, but not on the road bike. (I just get the Futuro brand at the drugstore, which are much cheaper and more widely available, and chafe less than brand-name Cho-Pat also.) I don't need the straps on a bike that fits me (notably, they do help when I'm doing longer errands on my town bike, which has crankarms too long for me). But also, they tend to cut off the circulation to my calves if they're tight enough to stay on through the large ROM of cycling. There's no question in my mind that the straps do what they were designed to do, but they're not a substitute for good body mechanics. Since I started working the Chi Running method, I don't need the straps for running any more! Woo-hoo! Now I wonder if I can wean myself off the foot orthotics?!

[pinkychique]

What I have heard, after fit, is that knee pain can also be attributed to muscle imbalances so that the knee is being pulled side to side. If one of the quad muscles on one side of the knee is stronger than the other, things get pulled out of alignment. I do weights just for this, low weight, high reps are the way to go.

I do knee extension, hamstring curls, squats, and hip weights.

good luck!

[KSH]

Switching to Speed Plays and getting some float on my pedals... and getting a computer with cadence and keeping my cadence between 90-100 fixed my accute knee pain.

It took about 2 months of slow riding to get past it... after the damage was done... but those two things mentioned above are what did it. No knee pain since there.

Good luck!