Is it possible to just be extremely intolerant of squat volume?

[CommanderFun]

Okay, I gave 285x5x5 a go last week. I pulled it off, form held together, no aches or pains, left feeling like I had a really good workout. One week later, 290x5x5. Form was falling apart, I felt like I had tremendous strain on my knees, my one knee even had its chronic pain issue flare up bad. I couldn't finish set 4 because the knee pain kept getting more intense every time I went down to squat again. Right now I can't even do the basic unweighted squat position that the teaching progression starts with. Sleep the night after was extremely bad and interrupted to the point I had about an hour and a half to two hours of just being stuck awake in the middle.

Now, the only thing I really did different this week from last was that I didn't take a handful of ibuprofen before my workout. Might explain the aches and pains, but not the weakness. If I saw someone else with this kind of a situation, I'd say recovery was off. But I don't think eating more food or sleeping more is going to fix this. It hasn't up to this point. Could stretching the training week from 7 days to 10, running the 4 day split on something like a m/w/f/m schedule be what I need here?

[Mark Rippetoe]

Did you video the set?

[CommanderFun]

Did you video the set?

No, my camera crew has been out with an injury. I can tell you the knee pain was causing me to favor one leg over the other. Looking at logs, this is a common thing. Ill have a really good squat workout that i managed to cultivate somehow, and then the next step up is suddenly much more difficult than a 5 pound jump would be expected to be. I think i might stand to benefit from more recovery time.

[Justin Smale]

For what it’s worth, I’ve had very similar issues when I’ve completed by NLPs and moved onto intermediate programming. My knees always start to flare up when I get my work sets up around 330 (I’m 40 and after 3-5 NLPs I know this is usually where I end up when I start failing). It got so bad in one that I had doctors telling me I had torn meniscus, though MRIs found nothing. I started to get the same problem in the other knee I looked into it more with a different doctor and physio. They thought it was tight IT bands and when I started doing stretches for the muscles that control the IT band my issues IMMEDIATELY resolved. Not saying it’s definitely the same thing you’re experiencing, but it could be worth stretching those muscles out once or twice a week on off days to see if that helps.

[CommanderFun]

Thanks, but I don't think this is really an issue caused by tightness anywhere. My joints are generally the opposite, fairly loose and prone to shifting around a bit, often even audibly. It's not confined to that knee, either. It's just a frequent problem spot. I walk around with aches in all sorts of places, sometimes it feels like it's deep in the bones themselves, or in various tendons, or inside joints. The quadriceps and the achilles tendons are both frequent problems.