Leg Work for Injured Knee

Hi everyone haven’t posted on here much and for awhile. So to get to it I have been having this nagging knee pain when squatting since August and thought maybe I was pushing lower body to hard so I dialed it way back. I went from squatting 315 for a set of 5 to only doing 250 for a single, which is not impressive at all considering I weight about 250.

However the pain persisted and only got worse so I tried to work on my form because someone pointed out my knees were caving in when I squatted, but still the pain. So I decided to just box squat and dial the weight back again, but the pain was still there. Then Christmas hit and I started having pain with just sitting and standing up and going up and down stairs.

So I decided to let me knee rest completely and took 6 weeks off anything but work and walking my dogs. It has now gotten so bad that I went to my doctor fearing the worst, which luckily it isn’t, he tells me I have a pulled tendon and a patellar malformation and wants me to wear a brace and take nsaids. Now he said I could work out but nothing that incorporates bending the knee to much and especially no squatting or deadlifting! So does anybody know of a way to work my legs so I don’t lose much more of my strength that isn’t some variation of these 2 lifts? The only thing I could come up with is really heavy farmers walks.

Check out this log. ThePunisher had knee surgery and still maintained his ridiculous amount of strength.

Wow! Just gave this a little test run and man no pain! I can feel the burn in my thighs, hamstrings and glutes just from flexing so hard! You have restored hope for me I thought I would become a chicken legged bro!

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Glad you can get something from the log. It’s all about being creative during the healing process. Keep training the good leg, and flex as hard as you can with the healing one. I also found slowly pushing a prowler was helpful. Seated good mornings are another avenue available. You can go super heavy to keep your deadlift strong, or light to get blood flowing and muscles trained.

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Thank you, this a great community of supportive people with great ideas and I knew someone on the forum would be able to shed some light on it for me.

Just wanted to give an update for those who helped me and anyone who may have the same problem as me. The leg contraction with visualization is really working I have been pretty sore after each day I do them along with the single leg work for the other leg. I also found that wall sits (unweighted for right now) are very good and getting up from them using the wall isn’t bad. Been doing heavy rack pulls and Romanian deadlift for the posterior chain and feel good but not as good as a heavy deadlift. On another note my upper body has never been stronger! Hit a new real max on both bench and military, and a rep record of 12 reps for pull ups with a neutral grip.

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