Do you have knee pain with squats?

If you suffer with knee pain during squats you may wonder if you can ever get stronger legs!

The answer is “Yes, you can!” because there are many ways to train your legs that won’t cause knee pain and will build up leg strength.

The first thing I always look at is to see if a client is doing a squat properly and often times this clears up the problem immediately.

For instance, women who have pain while squatting often lead the motion with their knees when the first motion is a hinging pattern. This hips have to translate back first, then the knees bend.

The next thing I might do with a client is to get them doing squats with assistance (holding on to something) so she can go through a full range of motion. We’ll work on full range of motion body weight squats without adding any external load.

Other things to do are single leg variations. You might think that this is harder and would hurt more, but depending on how the single leg version is done, it will actually improve leg strength because there is more freedom of motion through the hips/back and ankle/foot and this allows the leg to do the work rather than compensating from another part of the body.

Still, there is more! Getting a client to engage or active the muscles of the core, hips and low back is another critical technique to get women squatting without having pain. These methods are often surprising to clients because they are often adding external load (weight) and they think “if I can’t squat pain-free without weights, how am I going to add weight and do this without hurting?” but it works!

If you have knee pain during squats, don’t count yourself out yet. The body is amazing at getting stronger and adapting, we just have to give it the proper environment and tools to help it do its job.

If you are a beginner/new to lifting weights or you have knee pain and don’t think you can lift weights and want to know more about my up-coming Beginner’s Class, reply back to see if it’s a good fit. I’m happy to schedule a call with you (no pressure!) and find out if we are a match for each other.