Originally Posted by
Karelipoeg
My apologies for overlooking something as obvious as this.
As Jeff Brophy mentioned, male, 26 years, height 5'11", weight 78 kg. I have always been doing some sort of sports since I was a kid. Until the age of 20 it was mostly aerobic, such as soccer, floorball, running. After that it was mostly gym and running, on and off. I've run a few half-marathons while I was in my best running shape, but now I have not been running for 9 months. Gym has been on and off with about 3 months break every year, once a year. Until age of 24 I did random bodybuilding-kind-of workouts and after that more strength training, but mostly random 5x5 programs and such, inconsistently. In September 2018, after 3 months away from gym, I found Starting Strength and started LP. Bodyweight was 80kg, I started eating more to gain weight. It took me 8 weeks of LP to get my Squat to 3x5@120kg. At that point I was about the strongest I had been in my life until then. Never had any serious injuries until then. It was about then or maybe a week before that, when my knees started troubling me a little. I kept lifting, believing that they would adapt. When it got worse, I tried to do less squats. That didn't help. Then tried to decrease weight. Pain came back when weight increased. Smaller range of motion didn't help either. Then I started LP on Front Squats, which was good at first, but eventually knee pain came back. During April and May, 2019, I just stayed away from any kind of squatting. And June-July-August I was away from any workout whatsoever. Period from September till now is explained in first post. My uneducated diagnosis for quadriceps tendinopathy was considering the way the knee pain developed. An extended period of time of frequent heavy squatting above my tendon's load tolerance level, causing more stress than I was able to recover from. I might be wrong of course. The location of the pain under patella, and nature of the pain not feeling very 'sharp', and everything else I read back then about knee pains seemed to match quadriceps tendinopathy more than anything else. However, current knee problem feels different. The pain is more sharp. And it is there if I bend my knee without a load as well. And it is definitely not too much stress over time, because my squat LP hasn't made it far and I squat only twice a week. Low bar. trying to initiate hip drive and keep pressure off my knees.
If there is anything important I missed (or anything stupid I said), just let me know. Always willing to learn.
Advice appreciated. Thanks.