Physical Therapy for Runners in San Diego County: Common Injuries and Fixes

Your knee pain is probably coming from your hip

Somewhere between 50% and 65% of runners get injured in a given year. That's a coin flip. And San Diego County makes it worse in a sneaky way, because our weather lets you run year-round with no natural offseason, so local runners rack up more annual mileage than most of the country. More miles, more of the same handful of injuries.

Good news: they're predictable. Predictable means fixable!

Runner's knee (patellofemoral pain, if you want the chart version) is the most common complaint we see, and it's usually not a knee problem. Most cases trace back to your glutes failing to control how much your knee caves inward on each stride. You take somewhere around 1,500 strides per mile. A small amount of collapse, multiplied by that, is why your knee is angry. Strengthening the knee itself helps less than strengthening the hip that's supposed to be steering it.

IT band syndrome follows the exact same logic. That outside-of-knee pain is usually the same hip weakness wearing a different costume. Foam rolling feels fantastic and does approximately nothing for the cause. Roll it if you like! Just don't expect it to fix anything.

Plantar fasciitis and Achilles trouble are usually a load problem. Mileage jumped, terrain changed, or you switched to a shoe with a different drop and your calf complex never got a vote.

The fix is the same shape every time. Find the actual mechanical or load-based cause, strengthen whatever's genuinely weak, and adjust your training volume on purpose instead of resting until it stops hurting and then running straight back into the same wall six weeks later.

Training for something? Come in before it becomes a problem. That's a much shorter conversation.