Hawaiian squat knee pain

Hi there! 

Has anyone experienced pain in lateral part of the knee during Hawaiian squat?

I've been doing them for 3 weeks in November and during last session I felt light pain in my left knee. I stopped doing them immediately and returned to SLS/PE3 and PE4. Now, after 2 months, when I attempt Hawaiian squat again, the pain comes back.

Any suggestions for knee re- and prehabilitation? Especially for strengthening the knee against lateral movement?

Thanks,

O.

The strengthening part should already be covered by mastering the previous IM's. What I've found very useful in my case is to stretch the gluteal region. It's hard to pinpoint which muscle exactly is the culprit, because it's a big complex.

If the glute/hip is tight it will not let the foot and knee of the free leg to move unhindered during the squat. The knee can take some twisting, but when it becomes too much, well, you get pain. Feed some slack to the knee by working the glutes and hip rotators and see if it helps.

Ondra said:

Especially for strengthening the knee against lateral movement?

Inside squats are excellent for this kind of conditioning. What kind of ROM did you achieve with them? With mastery you should be getting your ankle on the ground.

Thanks for replies!

The glute/hip region is indeed my limiting factor in this exercise.

I was surprised how stiff my hips/glutes are because I mastered previous progressions with ease. Therefore I started with week 1. When I realized the stiffness I began to stretch and foam-roll hip external rotators. The problem is that almost all stretches use the ankle-on-knee position, which causes my pain.

I've got full ROM in inside squat (like in the instructional video).

Maybe it's a technique issue. Perhaps you are leaning too much forward and letting the knee go too far forward.

I don't buy "the whole you should never let your knees travel beyond your toes", however I find that focusing on sitting back and keeping the knee more stationary helped me with some knee pain back when I was doing single leg squats before F1.

If it is like my issue with the speed skater squats, it might be a muscle imbalance. My issue was pretty much the same thing, pain in the lateral knee. I video taped my squat and noticed my right foot arch collapsed, first driving my knee inwards, and to then to compensate I overly forced my knee out wards to track with my toes causing even more instability in the joint. I'm currently working on bettering my ankle mobility and strengthening some weaker elements in that region as well as making sure my IT-band, and TLF aren't overcompensating for what the medial glutes should be doing.

I'm still learning too, but of this is incorrect, I'd like to get some feedback as well.

Ondra said:

The problem is that almost all stretches use the ankle-on-knee position, which causes my pain.

Check out this one:

thecolin said:

Inside squats are excellent for this kind of conditioning. What kind of ROM did you achieve with them? With mastery you should be getting your ankle on the ground.

Inside squats would actually help in "strengthening" the MCL, and it seems that he is having pain in the LCL, so twisting squats would be the best iM for the job.

thecolin said:

Check out this one:

Thanks for the video! It works great and causes no pain! I'll stretch the hip/glutes for some time and combine it with twisting squats. Hope it will help.   

Ondra said:

Thanks for the video! It works great and causes no pain! I'll stretch the hip/glutes for some time and combine it with twisting squats. Hope it will help. 

Great to hear. If you check out his channel he has some more advanced variations for piriformis you can try later once this one gets too easy.