Introduction
In this week’s health article we look at a recent systematic review into training your hip muscles to improve knee pain, which in science is referred to as patellar-femoral pain syndrome (PFPS). Once again this is a reminder to train the whole body, not just where the pain is, to achieve better outcomes with joint pain.
Article Title
The outcome of hip exercise in patellofemoral pain: a systematic review, by Thomson, Krouwel, Kuisma & Hebron, in Manual Therapy (2016)
Background
All studies assessing the effects of hip strengthening exercise reported beneficial effects on both pain and function. Although control exercise programs also revealed beneficial effects on pain and function, there were superior effects on both pain and function of adding hip exercise to existing exercise programs. Of the 3 studies that compared the effects of hip and knee exercise on pain and function, although there was an improvement after both types of exercise, there was a tendency for superior effects to be observed in respect of both pain and function after hip exercise. There were varied reports available in respect of the effects of hip strengthening exercise on biomechanics, but no clear trends. Finally, there was a tendency for the incidence of Patellar-femoral pain syndrome (PFPS) to be reduced after a program of hip strengthening exercise.
Conclusion
The researchers concluded that there was strong evidence for the benefit of hip strengthening exercise in the treatment and prevention of PFPS, both in respect of pain and function. The findings in relation to biomechanics are less clear.