Knee pain

[Sebastian Ohanian]

Hi Coach,

I’ve had knee pain for about a month. It could have been from using an SSB, not pushing my knees out hard enough, or not breaking the hips on the squat descent.

I cleaned up the form and switched gyms to get on a transformer bar, and this alleviated the pain from my left knee completely, but I’ve still have pain in my right knee, specifically above the patella. The top of the patella is painful when touched. There is some pain when warming up squats, but most of the pain is from getting up and sitting down and stairs.

What’s the fix here? Pin firing box squats? My last squat session was 360x3x5 and I hit 425x5 on the SSB about 6 weeks ago.

Always appreciative of the advice.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Quad tendonitis is a bitch. Take away the stress by correcting your squat form, as you seem to be doing, and it will eventually heal.

[Will Morris]

Hi Coach,

I’ve had knee pain for about a month. It could have been from using an SSB, not pushing my knees out hard enough, or not breaking the hips on the squat descent.

I cleaned up the form and switched gyms to get on a transformer bar, and this alleviated the pain from my left knee completely, but I’ve still have pain in my right knee, specifically above the patella. The top of the patella is painful when touched. There is some pain when warming up squats, but most of the pain is from getting up and sitting down and stairs.

What’s the fix here? Pin firing box squats? My last squat session was 360x3x5 and I hit 425x5 on the SSB about 6 weeks ago.

Always appreciative of the advice.

You could also be suffering from Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome / Anterior Knee Pain Syndrome, most often caused by knee issues in the squat. Hard to ascertain your squat technique from here, but, conservatively, 99.999999748% of people don’t use a SSB correctly.

[Sebastian Ohanian]

Thank you both for your responses. Thinking about this more and trying to reproduce the pain, I think it's from poor technique dropping/at the bottom of the power snatch. I'm bending only my knees instead of also using the hips.

[Mark Rippetoe]

That will do it.