3 Exercises to Fix Knee Pain When Squatting

Getting knee pain from squatting of any variation (barbell, split squat, leg press etc) can likely be attributed to having a movement deficit in either your hip, knee or ankle, although it could be someones foot or pelvis as well. For this video we did three different exercises that place emphasis on the hardest portion of the squat, the bottom. One was done for each joint involved in the compound movement: hip, knee and ankle. Each exercise focuses on contracting specific tissue to ensure optimal engagement and priming of the nervous system in an effort to improve the movement patterns and get more bang for our buck from our workouts. We started with a hip flexion isometric hold, or an EQI, an eccentric quasi-isometric, to fully shorten/contract the tissue on the front side of our hip. All we’re doing is holding the end range of hip flexion (knee to chest), while going through flexion/abduction until your legs begins to involuntarily fall (the isometric becomes an eccentric, you should be fighting for your life). The set should be 2+ mins and the load used should use that as a consideration. We then went to knees and did axial rotations to prime tissue associated with rotation of the tibia. Promoting better function for how our knee rotates, allows for our knees to flex/bend better which is usually where people run into issues when squatting, not knee extension. It’s really simple but can be hard for a lot of people to “find” so take the time to understand how to articulate movement in this way because theres often a learning curve. If you have a hard time with this, queuing yourself to push your heel down and/or back can help engage your hamstring. If you feel your ankle too much, don’t exaggerate your dorsiflexion so much (don’t pull your toes as high). Learn to relax your foot and rotate from the knee separately. To finish we applied the same concept to our ankles and did anterior tibia raises to fully shorten/contract dorsiflexors, which is what limits most people in the bottom position of a squat. We can do an isometric hold at the top with these until it eccentrically fails like we did with the hips, we can do repetitions or a combination of both. If you still have pain after doing drills like this, don’t be discouraged. Internal, tissue specific exercises like this often are necessary for an extended period of time to develop adaptations that are noticeable over time. Also your issue may not be exactly what we did here. There are dozens of factors that contribute to issues from squatting and these were just three. If you don’t get pain, then exercises like this are probably a good idea to still do because it’ll help strengthen these areas in an effort for you to build a hedge against injury in the future.