What We Treat

Hip & knee pain in Seattle.

Do daily activities like walking the dog or grocery shopping leave your knees achy? Do you struggle to get comfortable at night due to hip stiffness? We pinpoint what’s driving your hip and knee pain, then build a plan to fix it.

Hip bursitis Knee arthritis Runner’s knee (opens in new tab)Talk to a Specialist

Sound Familiar?

Does this sound like you?

  • Sharp pain on the outside of your hip that wakes you up when you lie on that side
  • Hip flexors that feel locked up every time you climb out of the car after a long drive
  • Pain that starts in the hip and travels down toward the knee
  • Grinding or aching in the knee that gets worse walking down stairs
  • A sharp pinch on the outside of your knee about a mile into a run
  • Knees that ache after everyday errands like walking the dog or grocery shopping

Two or more? Keep reading.

Why It Happens

Hip and knee pain is a symptom. Something causes it.

Your hip and knee take repetitive stress from every direction, every day: walking, bending, rotating, even sitting. Over the years that adds up, and it usually comes down to three culprits. Abnormal mechanics: a short, tight hip flexor or weak glutes shift weight across the pelvis and into the knees, stressing the structures that stabilize them (even a 1 cm leg length difference changes joint loads). Repetitive impact: running and jumping send multiples of your body weight through cartilage and ligaments with every stride. And arthritic changes that build after years of training or heavy lifting.

Because the hip and knee are linked by shared muscles and nerves, pain in one often comes from the other. It takes a thorough evaluation to isolate exactly what’s driving yours. Find the real cause, and the fix gets obvious.

Physical therapist assessing a patient's hip and knee mobility

The Honest Truth

Waiting on a hip or knee doesn’t make it wait on you.

If you keep waiting

  • The other joints in the chain start picking up the slack, and start hurting too
  • Flare-ups stop being an occasional thing and start being a weekly one
  • You move less to avoid the pain, which weakens the exact muscles supposed to stabilize your hip and knee

If you start this week

  • You know the actual cause by the end of visit one
  • Hands-on relief starts before you leave the building
  • You get a plan with an endpoint: a real one, not an open tab of visits

You’re the one who keeps everyone else moving, at work, at home, on the trail. That’s exactly why you’ve been pushing through hip and knee pain instead of dealing with it. Nobody regrets starting early. Every week, someone in our clinic wishes they had.

How We Fix It

The same four phases. Built for your hip and knee.

Every plan has an endpoint. Here’s what the four phases look like for a hip or knee.

Weeks 1–2

Pain

Calm the pain down.

Hands-on techniques calm the irritated joint, bursa, or tendon and take the edge off inflammation, starting your very first visit.

Weeks 2–6

Prime

Get your motion back.

Targeted mobility work loosens tight hip flexors and restores motion in the hip and knee that have been guarding the injury.

Weeks 6–10

Perform

Make it strong enough to trust.

Progressive glute and hip strengthening corrects the muscle imbalance around the pelvis that overloads the knee.

Weeks 10+

Prevent

Return better than before.

Walking and running mechanics get tested under real load before you’re cleared to go all-in: that’s the endpoint, not just another appointment.

I recommend Dr. Dan Benson as wholeheartedly as possible for athletes looking to fix any type of injury. They've helped me through serious hip injury and surgery recovery, along with many other injuries and pains I've had over the last 5 years.

Alexander N. · Google review

Before: a hip bursitis flare-up that made every step an ache

After: back on a running ramp-up plan

Hip & knee pain A few months

Related Conditions

Pain rarely stays in one place.

Compensation patterns often show up nearby. Here’s what else we treat.

1

Low Back Pain

The stiffness when you stand up from the couch that never fully goes away.

Learn More 2

Running Injuries

Shin splints and Achilles pain that show up right on schedule at mile three.

Learn More 3

Foot & Ankle Pain

That first-step pain in your heel every morning that eases off, then comes right back.

Learn More

Questions, Answered

Hip & knee pain questions, answered.

The hip and knee share muscular connections and nerve pathways. Chronic hip stiffness, or changes after surgery, can lead you to compensate and move asymmetrically, which puts extra load on the knee and wears it down over time. That’s why we evaluate the whole chain, not just the joint that hurts.

The sciatic nerve runs from the lower spine and pelvis down the back of the leg. When it’s compressed by muscle spasm or spinal joint dysfunction, you can feel pain along that path, into the thigh and toward the knee. Precise manual therapy helps relieve that irritation.

Any fall that leads to swelling, bruising, or a real loss of movement should be evaluated to rule out a fracture. Pain that lingers for months, even with rest, also deserves a proper assessment before it turns into a longer-term problem.

Start with a thorough evaluation to find the alignment issue or inflammatory cause behind it. From there, your plan combines gentle mobilization to restore joint motion, targeted strengthening to rebuild stability, and guidance on warm-ups, activity pacing, and recovery so the results last.

Book Your Visit

Ready when you are.

Request a time and a real person calls you back, usually within two business hours. No phone tree. No ‘someone will reach out.’ Just a plan.

5.0 · 250+ Google reviews

Typical response: under 2 business hours

Step 1 of 5

So we know who to look for when you walk in.

Visit Us

Care this good, this close.

Forefront Physical Therapy

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