21 yr old, year long persistent injury to adductors and hamstring

[Tajg92]

Brief injury history
- Fragment of bone broke off right knee when playing on hands and knees (on carpet, bizarrely) aged 12. Arthroscopy key-hole surgery to remove it.
- Right knee dislocation playing football aged 18. Recovery slow. Was not good at doing physio. Eventually seemed to resolve itself but no contact sports from then on.
- Got very into running and cycling aged 19. Never warmed up/down or foam rolled though. Right Achilles tendonitis developed Sept 2012.
- Jan 2012 tried running again. Right knee felt creaky and often painful as it had since dislocation but left knee felt drastically unstable, like there was a pebble under knee cap. I kept trying to run but one day thought I felt a twinge in the left Achilles and stopped. Have not run since.
- Got very into cycling instead. One day at gym whilst on the pull-in on the rowing machine I felt like I pulled that prominent tendon anterior medial side of right leg, kind of behind knee (not great descrip sorry, but the obviously prominent one). I still continued to cycle to exhaustion daily for 1-1.5 hours for 6 weeks on an exercise bike though, and violently overstretched (I think, in retrospect).
- One day I just totally stopped, aware that something was very off in that right leg and that I needed to eventually. I stopped stretching too, and also entered an exam period and thus was sedentary for prolonged periods and generally very inactive - a big change.

That was almost a year ago now and I am still injured. The injury has changed a good deal in that time. It started specifically in the right leg, mainly in that prominent tendon. When I sat down I could often feel a kind of slackness in that area which felt very strange. At first I sort of ignored it and continued to walk around as quickly as I liked even though it felt strained. I have slowed right down since then, and remain slow at walking today.

I got proactive about trying to get rid of the injury in Sept 2013 after it forced me to come back early from travelling having got dramatically worse so that I could barely walk at any speed (this was after camping (hard surface etc) so I guess that must have triggered it?). Whilst travelling it spread to left leg as well. It was principally the innermost hamstrings in both legs. They were always really tight relative to everything else. They felt stringy, and I would get by turns needling, itchy, shooting pains in them. I should say that the pain itself has never been debilitating. I am debilitated by my efforts not to aggravate them. When I walk fast and overdo it, they get worse. I can always feel the disproportionate tightness, which occasionally gives way to those other sensations. Sept 2013 was also when I started to get specific relatively very tight and prominent tendons in my underarms too. I had taken to swimming and free weights to get some exercise since I could no longer run or cycle and this could be an overuse injury. Months down the line I still have it, although admittedly I kept on doing some more gentle free weights for a few months longer because I did not want to give up my last avenue of exercise. I do not know if the underarms and the legs are related, although it is certainly tempting for me to think they are.

I had MRI scans and X-rays from lumbar spine down. They found some inflammation in the pelvic girdle and osteitis pubis was mentioned but no one seems keen to settle on something. Apparently I also have hyper mobile shoulders (to some extent), hips and knees. I got given a physio program which I will attach. I did everything it said, perhaps a little too much actually in my desperation to make some progress.

More recently (as of Dec 2013) my adductors have become the focus. After 3 months on the physio program I went to physio again and we found my adductors were really weak. I started to do some simple, gentle adductor exercises too at this time. I then had a bizarre weeklong period of enormous progress. I have struggled to figure out what went right here. I used one of those Geko devices that increase circulation. I began taking daily baths. I began cycling on the exercises bike for 15 mins a day with almost no resistance. I started those adductor exercises. I was about to enter the late phase of my rehab program. Anyway, it did not last as one day something felt off so I decided to lay off for a day or two and things got worse again from there.

It has been a couple of months since then and I have plateaued. I cannot get a handle on my exercises again at all, I have actually done much less physio these last months as I had sequential minor surgeries to remove moles which required stitches and ruled me out. My adductors and innermost hamstrings remain very tight. I also have get tingling across my calves sometimes now. But if I take hot baths, stretch, foam roll and go on gradual walks I can actually almost get to feeling normal but this would be a full-time job. I need to sit down for prolonged periods, I need to work, I cannot spend hour after hour every day taking precautions and doing physio if there is not a goal in sight (i.e. a time when I would not need to take so many precautions and could, dare I say it, do a bit of exercise again).

I am desperate now, and feel pretty hopeless about the whole thing. I know it is difficult because my symptoms have moved and changed in nature over the course of the year and even though I try to make notes, the feelings I get change even just throughout the day. Things as mundane as what I am sitting on almost seem to make a big difference too sometimes. I appreciate that I no doubt managed to injury myself through a combination of vulnerability (due to prior injuries and lack of proper rehab, as well as things like hyper mobility) and overuse, but I just do not understand why this has not resolved itself after this year, in particular after the last 6 months of taking every effort to help it.

I would be very interested to hear anything you have to say, and thanks. Please ask away if you have any questions, I tried to keep it short-ish and it is hard to recall a year all at once (particularly the early stages when I thought little of it).

Tom

Similar Threads:

• Long Thoracic Nerve injury...will it heal?
• Long Thoracic Nerve injury and burning pain in shoulder...
• Hamstring injury
• shallow intertubercular groove and persistent long head of biceps subluxation.

[toddchaney]

A doctor and a physiotherapist will be able to guide appropriate stretching. Occasionally, crutches may be recommended for the first 24 to 72 hours, if the strain is severe.