For the past couple of years, off and on I've had problems with my right knee giving out whenever I used it to push all my bodyweight on it. It would most consistently happen going up stairs; I would step on my right foot, and feel this pain behind my kneecap and my knee would just... not support my weight. When it's happened in the past it would flare up for a day or so, and then I wouldn't have problems for weeks, even months. I've never had an all-out injury because of it, thank God, but I did have a scare once when it happened in the middle of a feis, between dances. I was totally freaking out about my last dance rounds, but it seemed to go away, or somehow just wasn't triggered dancing.

Lately however, the knee issue has flared up again very consistently. I've begun trying to walk daily (treadmill right now while it's so cold), and do some plyometrics, and while I thought doing squats, 1-leg squats, and lunges would help strengthen the knee joint, it only seems to have gotten worse. Even now, sitting on the couch after my workout, my knee hurts whenever I extend my leg straight and then bend the leg back down.

I can feel the place from where the pain originates - behind the kneecap towards the top of the knee.

Can anyone help me get some idea as to what's going on here? Has anyone else had a similar issue? What exercises should/shouldn't I be doing to help it? Should I just wear a black knee sleeve for a while?

Thanks for any help/suggestions!

(As an aside, I know lots of people will want to wisely say "Go see your doctor", but unfortunately we honestly CANNOT afford to go right now. We're not even making rent this month, our credit cards are maxed, we are broke. So while I appreciate that advice, right now it's sadly something I really can't follow.)

OK, so with all the usual disclaimers that I cannot diagnose you, etc etc, I had similar pain myself and it was patella femoral syndrome -- which is a general term for your kneecap not tracking properly, and inflammation happening in the area as a result. It's sometimes called "runner's knee" because it happens to runners a lot, and also dancers. It happened to me because I kinda briefly threw my knee out landing on it weird, and then it started tracking improperly.

Muscle imbalance is often a major cause of knee problems. You need all the muscles along your leg to be strong. With me, I had strong calves and hamstrings from dance, but weak quad muscles. Weak quads are a common problem, actually. My PT prescribed a lot of squats and lunges to strengthen that area. You can probably figure out if you have a muscle imbalance by the kinds of activities and exercises you do -- is there a part of the leg that gets neglected?

You can also tape your kneecap so that it tracks properly, but it's recommended that a PT show you how to do it first. To get an idea, though, here's a video that uses Kinesiotape.
www.youtube.com . . .

Your best bet, until you can see a doctor, is to rest & ice the knee when possible, avoid activities that irritate it, and perhaps figure out if you've got a muscle imbalance you can begin to correct.

Thank you for the great reply, Seanetta! Karma to you! I will likely start icing now to play it safe, whenever it gets really sore during a workout.

Yeah, I did Irish dance for a long time, so could it be that now I'm feeling the muscle imbalance more because I'm taking a financially-imposed break from dance and working on my squats/lunges/stairs?

Since I'm overweight, I'm not surprised that my dancing would have caused such an imbalance; if I have to build up the calf and hamstring muscles to get more of myself off the floor with dance, then it would potentially cause an ever greater imbalance than when I weighed less. So now that I'm trying to work those neglected muscles back up, my knee finally gets to yell "I told you so!". (NOT an 'I'm so fat' comment, merely an observation).

Well, it sounds like I'm on the right track then with the workout regime I've been doing! It'll be a good idea then for me to keep it going when I can get back to dance class again. Thanks again for the reply!

I have a patella tracking problem as well, and when I work out I use a knee band that I got at my local sportswear store. You can find them in the accessories section. It's a narrow band with a hard core that you wrap right underneath your kneecap, and it puts pressure on your tendons in such a way that it helps the kneecap track correctly. I use it every time I work out and it definitely helps. I actually just got a new brace, and it covers all of my knee with a hole in the middle for my patella, and has buttresses that you can remove and put in different places for different kinds of support.

Ice and ibuprofen also help to keep down the swelling.

If you can find a Pilates instructor who has reformer certification near you I would recommend that you go and try that out. If your patella is not tracking properly you've built up an imbalance between the medial and lateral vasti.

They should also be able to give you a postural analysis to see if there's anything else causing the vasti to be misaligned, a lot of knee problems are just a symptom of other problems.

While runners knee and patellofemoral maltracking my cause pain, they technically don't cause instability or locking, which is what you seem to be describing.

May I suggest that you might have damaged your meniscus or another ligament, on top of this? Another thing I don't understand is why physios keep prescribing squats and lunges, when they know full well that this will only help wear out your knees a little faster.

I do agree that squats are about the best exercises to build up quadriceps, but would you like to try straight leg lifts (while lying flat or sitting in a chair with ankle weights if free leg lifts are too simple.
Also doing them turned out or lying sideways. For example, facing left, propped up your head with your left hand and lift your legs 'sideways' and turned out too.

This builds your quads without killing your knees too much.

Anyway, I've had about every combination of knee problem and I do know what's wrong with mine, just hope you can save your knees for as long as you can!