A common problem amongst mainly big-gear cyclists is painful VMO’s -medial Quadriceps. The VMO is the small bulky muscle on the inside of your leg, just above the knee.

When riding bigger gears, you use mainly the big bulky Quadricep muscle on the outside of the thigh. This muscle responds by shortening, which causes lengthening of the much weaker VMO muscle on the inside of the knee. As soon as a muscle has to contract whilst stuck in a lengthened position, it can only do that with muscle spasm. This will cause triggerpoints and any contraction of the muscle becomes painful.

You will experience this problem particularly after riding harder or further than usual or after riding hills. Once the muscle spasms up, the only way to get rid of the pain is to get off the bike and apply ice or massage, which can become quite a serious problem if this starts happening in racing season.

So how do you prevent or fix this problem?

With all imbalances it is important to first release the tightness in the muscle that has caused the problem, which in this case is the big lateral Quadriceps.

On this picture we show the neutral length of the Quadriceps. If you can not get into this position, the Quad has shortened and you need to have the fascia released to lengthen the muscle. Stretching could do the trick but will take a lot longer. Best is to find a therapist who is familiar with myofascial work which will release it quickly and effectively.

The second step will be to strengthen the VMO and the best way to do this is to use the following 2 Bunkie exercises as a warm-up before cycling, holding the position 6×6 seconds on each leg.

Finally I can never stress enough the importance of riding with smaller gears and higher cadence. The incidence of injuries are just so much lower and your riding will be much more balanced and efficient.

Tags: Bunkie Test, cramping when cycling, cycling knee pain, Lyno Method, Vastus Medialis pain, VMO pain

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 31st, 2010 at 09:48 and is filed under Cycling, Lyno Blog, Triathlon, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.