 Today I want to talk about knee pain when squatting, so to first talk about knee pain We need to know what positions we're looking for and there are two major positions. Let's start front to back So front to back I need to make sure that my weight is going as evenly through my knee as I can, right? And so if I am shifting my weight forward, I put more stress on the front of the joint I can compress the patella on the rest of the joint and that can That can be unbearable for some people So make sure this way that I'm sitting back and it feels like my heels stay down And it feels like I drive through my heels the entire time, okay? So front to back make sure the heel is down now if I'm looking at your head on or even from behind I Want to make sure I'm going to turn this way I want to make sure that the knee is staying in line with the hip and the foot or the ankle more specifically The hip and the ankle make a straight line through the knee Okay, if I'm coming out like this, I'm torquing the knee I'm elongating the outside of the knee and usually that's where you feel pressure and if I'm collapsing inward That gets me prone to like a knee triad meniscus MCL ACL kind of injury so Again front to back make sure my heels stay down from the front So side view right and then front view make sure my knee stays in line with my ankle and my hip One last one to look at your hips shifting. So I I generally think this is easier to see from behind and If I squat down and I shift my weight over onto one side I'm definitely going to overload that side because I'm shifting my body weight over there I'm shifting my center of mass over there. So that's one last thing for you to evaluate. So one from a side view Make sure that my heels are staying down From the front of the knee make sure my knee is in line with the rest of my hip and my ankle and Then from behind make sure I'm not shifting too far one way or the other Okay, so all of that will That's those are kind of like the the major rules that I'm looking for when I'm Positioning some climb now. I could do a narrow squat that way. I could do a wide squat that way I could do a back squat. I could do a front squat. This sounds like a dr. Seuss novel But any of anything any variation of squatting works as long as I'm using those general cues now There are sometimes I might use exceptions But learn the rules before you can break them So knee pain last thing don't shift forward Don't let your knee position wobble and then Don't shift side to side Last thing I said that was the last thing, but this is actually the last thing So if I'm squatting and I let my knee bend sometimes I can maintain a good position and it can still hurt Pain is constructed in the brain, right? So we can't always control what's going on there We might just need to progress really gradually And even if you have really good positions when squatting sometimes squatting still hurts I have a guy who can't really load his squat at all But he can load a pretty heavy like 35 pounds for 15 reps on his lunges at 35 pounds in each hand too So, you know keep an eye out. Don't force the squatting if it's not feeling that well It's okay to just do it even if it's light just to kind of get used to it, right? And then just add five percent of your weight or two reps every week that you do it Now if I'm squatting and I take more of a low bar bent over hip dominant squat That's gonna shift my knees back like this And so generally general principle is this position when my knee bends more puts more sheer forces on the knee Sometimes that doesn't matter sometimes the knee is really good at dealing with those But I can limit them if it's not dealing with those well I can limit them by bending over and making the knee bend a little bit less making the tibia a little bit more vertical Some people with knee replacements have been told to keep their knee up that way as well Just for you know keeping the fake knee in a better quality for a longer period of time So we talked about how to fix it don't shift forward Don't let your knee collapse or fall out and don't shift your body weight side to side And then we talked about changing into a hip dominant Versus a knee dominant type of squat One last thing to say you don't need to load your bilateral squats just like my client, right? We can get him a lower-body training effect with a single leg variation Instead of trying to force him into a painful two leg variation So consider those things Tinker around find out what you like find out what you don't like and if you have any other suggestions Let's just leave them in the comments below