Knee pain when doing squats is a common problem for exercisers. It’s important to understand the causes in order to find the best solution for your situation. Here are the three main causes of knee pain when doing squats:
Poor Technique
Having correct form when performing any physical activity is essential. This is especially true when it comes to squats, as the incorrect technique can cause strain and injury. Some common mistakes include letting the knees collapse inward, not engaging the core, and leaning forward too much during descent. Taking extra time to perfect your technique can go a long way in avoiding pain while completing your workouts.
Weak Muscles
Your muscles may be weak or unbalanced, leading to difficulty controlling your body during a squat movement. This can result in excessive strain being placed on your joints and ligaments, causing knee pain. Strengthening your glutes, hamstrings, quadriceps and calves with exercises specifically targeting these muscle groups can help bring back balance and reduce stress on your thighs and knees.
Too Much Weight
If you’re squatting with weights that are too heavy for you at this point in time, it can put excessive strain on your joints which may lead to pain in your knees. Start light and gradually increase weight over time as you become stronger. Additionally, make sure that you’re warming up properly before doing any type of exercise with weights – dynamic stretching is great for increasing blood flow to muscles before exercise!
The squat is arguably the best exercise a human being can do. Being able to squat is fantastic for your leg strength, hip flexibility, back pain, and much more. Most people see it as a leg exercise, but it’s really a full-body functional movement. If you can squat properly, you can squat down and pick up heavy loads without doing your back in. Likewise, you should be able to walk around without getting tired as quickly.
There are so many health benefits of squats, but one common problem stops people from doing them. That’s right, you keep getting a bit of knee pain when squatting. You’ve been to the doctor and they haven’t found anything wrong with your knee – and it only hurts when you squat. So, what can you do to minimize the pain you feel? Here are three ideas:
Wear knee support
You can wear two different types of knee support to ease the pain while squatting. Your options include kinesiology tape and knee compression sleeves. The taping of the knee with KT tape is designed to slightly lift the skin up and increase blood flow to the area. This should help with any stiffness while allowing more fluid to move around the joint. The tape itself also adds more protection and support to the knee, which can prevent the sensation of pain.
Knee compression sleeves do the same thing by compressing the area and encouraging more blood to flow there. They also add a bit more support around your knee, preventing stiffness and pain.
Place plates under your heels
Sometimes, knee pain from squatting is down to too much pressure coming through your toes. This means the weight is moving forwards as you squat, which causes the knees to take on a lot of force. Instead, you want to focus on pushing up through your heels.
One way to help is by placing weight plates under your heels. It alleviates a lot of pressure in your knees and encourages a better squat. Try it, and you’ll see it instantly stops knee pain.
Warm up properly
Last but not least, ensure you warm up properly before squatting. In particular, work on stretching and loosening up your hips and ankles. Stiff ankles and hips can contribute to knee pain when squatting, so get a good warm-up that tackles these joints.
In fact, you can find a good warm-up routine right here that should get the blood flowing through your lower body:
Now that you’ve warmed up, you should be able to squat with less pain than before. Ideally, the pain should be gone as all your muscles and joints are primed and ready.
Squatting is one of the best things you can do when exercising, so it’s important to find fixes for knee pain. Remember, this is for knee pain that only comes around when you squat. If you have knee pain all the time, you probably have a chronic pain condition that should be looked at by a medical professional. Always seek medical advice when you experience any pain when exercising to double-check that you don’t have a lingering issue.
