Knee Issues

[Anthony D]

A little background information: I?m 6?3, 210 lbs. I have always had knee issues growing up but most of them were due to just playing sports in general, especially basketball. It was my left knee specifically, and occasionally it would get to a point where I know I needed to crack it so I would do a butt kick and it would make a small click noise (best word to describe it). The pain was not really localized and it wasn?t really anything that bothered me. The doctor said, it is overused, take these pills. When I was growing up I was slightly pigeon toed, to this day my left one still is a little bit.

Squatting never hurt the knee. In fact my knee always felt better after a good squatting session. Power cleans always aggravated the problem, deadlifts sometimes did but no where near the power clean. What helped ease the pain was having a very close stance during the power clean. This lead me to believe I had a problem keeping my knees in line with my toes. I am going to video tape my next workout if I do them soon.


Last squat session, I squatted 275x5x5. On the very first set both of my knees game a nice pop sound (note: it was a pop rather than a click) when I started my first work set. For some odd reason my left knee did this about 2 workouts prior with squats as well when the weight got around the 300 range. I continued the workout despite these squats feeling very heavy (I squatted 325 for 3 sets of 5 about a week prior to this without tremendous strain). I woke up the next day and my knees both felt really awkward. My right knee I?m not as worried about because it just feels a little strained.

My left knee on the other hand just hurts in the patellar tendon/just to the right of it during most situations of use. My next workout I squatted light and my knee felt really weird and hurt during the warm up, but gradually got better as I continued to warm up. Something that surprised me was that the power cleans did not aggravate me at all. I?ve noiced I can now pop my knee if I do a valgus motion (not all of the time). This lends me to believe my knees caved in on me during my squat (I don?t want to believe it because I?m pretty good at shoving them out). Additionally, I cannot click my knee anymore to relieve the pain, it just doesn?t click.

Yesterday I decided to take a very light day. My knee hurt on my first sets but then gradually faded and felt really good afterwards, but once my body cooled down it was back to normal.

If I had to describe the pain it is to the right of the patellar tendon in the groove between the femur and tibia. So I suppose the medial meniscus would be a good candidate for some type of injury. Thoughts?

Sorry for the lengthy post I just wanted to be as detailed as possible.

[Mark Rippetoe]

All this sounds to me like a meniscus issue, as you guessed. maybe a little tear or two, which is common to most humans. I think it was slightly displaced and you replaced it with the workout where your perception of it changed. As long as a chunk is not floating around causing mechanical problems, these are usually not much trouble, and certainly are not a surgical repair situation, but with a long history of problems it might make sense to get an MRI to see if that's all that's wrong.