Do you get a weird, kind of electrical pain just below your knee when you do the SI dowel exercise?
The sacroiliac exercise with a dowel or pole was prescribed to me by a physical therapist as part of a group of rehab exercises to reverse my iliopsoas tendonitis.
He determined that there was an imbalance in my SI joint.
After about six weeks of doing the SI joint dowel exercise, I began feeling this odd, almost kind of an electrical type of pain, just below my knee.
But it was the leg opposite the one with the iliopsoas tendonitis (also known as snapping hip syndrome).
I asked the physical therapist about this. He didn’t have a clue.
I wondered, what the devil about the SI joint exercise could be causing this peculiar pain below my knee?
It was a pain, but I had never felt this kind of pain before. It seemed like a nerve type of discomfort.
The best way to describe how it felt is to use a term that refers to a type of sound: squeaky.
Yes, it was a “squeaky” kind of pain. I don’t mean that it made a squeaking noise. But if felt squeaky, if that makes any sense.
Another way to describe it was that the skin was being really, really stretched in different directions.
It was unpleasant. But I kept doing the SI joint exercise, soon believing that something else had caused this problem near my knee, and that the SI movement was simply aggravating it.
But then I decided to stop doing it, realizing that the aggravation would make the problem worse.
Now, about a few weeks prior to the first time that the sacroiliac joint exercise began triggering this electrical squeaky sensation below my knee, I had discovered, in that same spot, numbness to the finger touch.
I intuitively knew that there was a connection between that numbness and this new weird pain.
But I had NO idea what about the SI joint exercise could be causing any kind of pain. How utterly bizarre.
Eventually, I was diagnosed with patellar tendonitis that evolved due to overuse of my knee joint via vigorous workouts.
During the visit with the sports medicine physician, I had forgotten to ask him just how the SI joint exercise could aggravate patellar tendonitis.
So I sent him an email via the health plan’s online system. He said he didn’t know!
Lorra Garrick has been covering medical, fitness and cybersecurity topics for many years, having written thousands of articles for print magazines and websites, including as a ghostwriter. She’s also a former ACE-certified personal trainer.
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