The Los Angeles Times ran a story yesterday about all the fancy, expensive equipment you can buy if you are suffering from running-induced knee problems.

It reminds me of a joke:

Guy walks into the doctor’s office and says “Doc, I don’t know what to do. It hurts so much when I do this.” Doctor wrinkles his brow, contemplates for a moment then says “Don’t do that.”

Sure, if you have anywhere from $3000 to $30,000 that you would like to part with in order to avoid pain, go ahead and buy yourself the AlterG Anti-Gravity M320 Treadmill. I’d like to think there is a better way.

Pain is the body’s way of saying that your mechanics are slightly off. Sometimes the pain is a result of muscle overload: I went rock climbing for the first time yesterday and today I feel that overload– more on that later in the week. Sometimes the pain is simply a result of poor technique and alignment.

The knee is a hinge joint. It allows the lower leg to swing forward and back from the thigh. But, as a hinge, any additional movement in other directions cause friction. Ever tried to hang a door in a frame all by yourself? I did. Once. Boy, what a mess! You have to hang it just so or the hinges don’t work properly and the door won’t open or close the way it is supposed to ( the lesson, my friends: always buy your doors pre-hung). So much of the way we run is based on the quadriceps muscles, the big muscles right on the fronts of your thighs. All that work from those big muscle draws the tracking of your hinge slightly out of alignment. The result: friction, wear and tear, and possible injury to the ligaments that help hold the knee together, including the ever popular ACL, Anterior Cruciate Ligament.

Doctors and shoes companies will try to convince you that you need shots and lifts and insoles and the special new double action insulated poly-pneumonic running sole that mimics the running position of a gazelle…….whatever.

I’m no doctor. So I am allowed to think outside the box. You need balance. You need to build your inner thigh muscles and your hamstrings, the muscles along the backs of the thigh, so that all the muscles around this injury-prone hinge joint are in balance. That relieves the tension and friction.

On top of that, there is a relatively new trend in barefoot running. I am not totally sold that this is right for everyone, but the argument is a good: all these new fangled shoes have served to weaken our feet and our natural inclination to run in a healthy manner. We are constantly trying to prop up our bad habits. I just finished a fascinating book, Born To Run by Christopher McDougall (I’m not going Oprah on you, but definitely a good summer read), that tells a great story about the history of barefoot running and a tribe in Mexico that practices it as a way of life. Not a whole lot of knee injuries there so maybe, just maybe, they are doing something right?

And I am fascinated by the new running shoes that…..well….that aren’t really shoes, there like slip covers. I’m going to try out a pair of the Vibram FiveFingers just to experiment on myself now that the weather is nice.

I usually run in the Nike Pegasus, a great shoe, but, as my friend Lee at JackRabbit Sports pointed out to me, Nike keeps redesigning the damn thing in an effort to re-invent the wheel and create more product. Very, very frustrating! (Author’s note: if you aren’t quite ready for the barefoot approach, get yourself to a quality shoe store like JackRabbit where they can take a look at how you run and set you up with the shoe that is best for you!)

So, as you are figuring out what to do in the midst of all this information, check out this quick video on some exercises you can do at home to help balance out that knee joint, avoid pain and injury, and make this the greatest running season you have ever had!

Rock on!