Anyone have any experience with the cho-pat knee strap for dealing with minor patellfemoral knee pain?
I’ve got some knee pain in both my knees. I’ve used a patella strap like that the last two times I’ve ran.
My “A” race is Saturday and it dawned on me that there is nothing magic about some strap. So I’m just gonna tape both my knees with medical tape before. That way I won’t have to be messing with the thing at T2 for the run.
But for me they do work. It helps the knee track properly, it’s just that I think medical tape could work just as well.
It didn’t do a thing for me, but I think some people around here have had better experiences with them.
I tried it for patellar tendonitis and it was more of a nuisance that anything else. The dam thing kept on sliding down.
I was seeing a PT for a while for knee pain last year and he had this great taping technique for my knee.
He used two kinds of tape. The first layer was some stuff that stuck to the skin really well but did not hurt very much coming off, it was white in color and very thin. (sorry I can not remember the actual names of these tapes). The second was more similar to gaffers tape, a cream colored cloth tape.
The first layer went on in one piece. The second layer went on in two pieces(with one piece being about 2 inches longer than the other). He would take the two pieces and start them in about the same place around the side of the knee and then connect them towards the front of the knee leaving a ‘tail’ of tape. When connecting the pieces of tape they would be pulled slightly to start a squeeze on the front of the knee. Next we would pinch the front of the knee and crank the ‘tail’ over to lock it down.
This gave me enough stability to do one leg squats down to 90 deg. where before the taping I was good till about 15 deg…
I used one after experiencing some pretty severe knee pain. The short story, I was able to run and compete with it.
The long story - it did not seem to aid in the healing. In fact, used while also taking ibuprofen, it masked the pain allowing me to go much harder than I should considering the problem. I paid the price with intensified discomfort later (much ice required).
Eventually I bit the bullet and started aquajogging and doing knee strengthening exercises. End result - no pain, no strap, no pills and no speed lost.
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