Squats with knee pain

If your knee hurts when you squat this article is for you.

You probably hurt your knee squatting and now you’re worried about making it worse.

You don’t want to do long term damage that’s going to mean you have to stop lifting forever.

And you want to get rid of your pain so you can hit heavy numbers again and get new PRs.

If that’s you first we need to understand why you’ve got knee pain in the first place

Then we can talk about the two things you can do to get rid of it for good so it doesn’t ever come back again.

You get pain when you put more stress on the body, it can handle.

Imagine a circle.

Inside the circle represents everything your body is able to do.

And things like walking, going up and down stairs, running for the bus, squatting are all inside the circle because they’re all things your body is able to do.

Then we have things outside the circle that your body isn’t able to do because they place too much stress on your body.

If you’re not a mountain climber then climbing up Mount Everest wall would be outside of your circle, if you haven’t run for years then running a marathon would be outside your circle and there could be many more activities that you can’t currently do that will be outside of your circle because they would be too stressful.

Well all that happens when you get pain is you did something that was outside your circle.

And now your body is telling you that you did something that was too stressful.

So it’s giving you pain to tell you you need to do something different.

And sometimes when this happens your circle gets smaller than usual.

And the things you used to be able to do are now painful.

Like walking up the stairs, getting in and out of the car or squatting lighter weights.

And it’s worrying because you’re not sure if the pain is ever going to go away or if you’re going to do permanent damage.

But here’s the thing, there’s just 2 things you need to do to resolve the pain.

First you need to calm it down.

To calm it down you need to figure out what the triggers are.

If you imagine three buckets we can put all of the things you do into each bucket either it’s totally fine, sometimes sore or always sore.

For the things that are always sore, we need to do less of these things or adjust them so they’re not painful.

Otherwise if you keep doing the things that make you you’re going to keep getting pain.

To adjust them, we either need to do less of the thing or reduce how intense it is.

Let’s take squatting as an example, if you know that squatting more than 60 kilos gives you pain.

Then reduce the weight on the bar to 40-50 kilos.

If you know that doing 10 sets of 10 reps of squats gives you pain, then try doing less, for example doing 5 sets instead of 10.

By bringing the amount and intensity down you’re placing less stress on the body and it’s going to be able to heal.

Then once it’s calmed down we need to build it back up.

This is the key part that most rehab misses and it’s the reason why most people end up living with their pain for years.

They feel like they’ll never get back to doing the things they used to do.

And the reason is once they calmed things down they have never increased the amount of stress that the body part can handle.

Let’s go back to the circle, you got hurt and your circle got smaller and now things that would usually not hurt you are hurting you.

Like going up and down stairs/ getting in and out of the car.

So to get back to normal or even to get to a point where you can do more things than you used to you need to expand your circle.

To do this you need to do the thing that caused you the problem in the first place.

So if squatting caused the problem and you want to be able to squat again…

The cure is to squat.

You need to do it slowly and progressively over time, adding more weight, reps or sets.

So that the circle gets bigger.

If you don’t progress over time then your circle won’t get bigger.

And you’ll never be able to lift more weight.

I’ve helped over 70 people do exactly that with my unique method.

If you want to get rid of your knee pain by squatting click the link below to book a call with me now.