Coincidentally, I have had two almost identical issues pop up this week. One as an online question, and one in the clinic. In both cases, the pain is identified as cramping and pain in the quadriceps that came on for no apparent reason. In the first case, a world class runner, the other in a regular runner.

In the first case, the pain started in the quads after a deep sports massage. The injury was described as being caused by the elbow of the masseuse was painfully digging into the tissue between the quad and the adductors.

The pain manifested as a dead leg during a critical race. After the race, the athlete could not recover and found himself limping. This is disastrous to his training schedule because with a big race coming up, the NYC Marathon, every day lost to training reflects in the final time. In a competitive elite athlete this is of major concern.

To tackle the problem, we are treating him daily, using ultrasound, deep frictions, manual stretching, general stretching, sticking, ice and electrical stimulation, and the athlete is also running on a gravity unloader that is allowing him to run faster than normal, but with much less weight on his leg and no pain.

The second case,the one offered by an email question, had nos known onset. This reflects the possibility of a compensatory mechanism for potentially unbalanced musculature that requires at the minimum, a full movement assessment in order to figure out which tissues are restricted and which are too long.

In the first case, in spite of being a world class athlete, there are numerous muscle imbalances that if resolved will increase his performance dramatically. I suspect the same sort of issues in the second as well, but because I could not examine the athlete, I could only surmise.

In any event, I refer you back to the post I wrote in December of 2008 on the subject of Hip Flexor Tightness, because many of the issues with the quads will be resolved by addressing the hip flexors as well.