Shooting Pain from Anterior Hip to Knee

I’ve looked though these forums for issues that would answer my questions, but wasn’t able to find anything that relates close enough.

I’ve been powerlifting for about 6 months now, for the past 5 years my focus was on hypertrophy. I think my stats as of right now are pretty decent:

Height: 5’5
Weight: 165 LBS

SQ: 365
BP: 225
DL: 405

For the past month (roughly), I’ve had slowly increasing pain when doing SQ/DL. I believe that squats may have a part in it because my squat style is low bar/wide stance. And my deadliest style is a hybrid of traditional and sumo. I only recently switched to the hybrid style (from originally being strictly traditional about 2 months ago, so I thought it was naturally stressing the hips more.

This is the best way I can explain the way the pain is coming in: When I’m deadlifting and lock out at the top and drop the weight, I feel like I have to keep my legs locked out when stepping away from the platform (think of a penguin). As soon as I break that theres a few seconds of pain that shoots from my anterior hips to knees.

I’ve started taking glucosamine to see if that helps with the knees. Any other advice, or anyone with similar experience?

And just a quick note: I REALLY don’t want to change my lifting style. I’ve progressed so much since I’ve started lifting wide.

Not to assume everyone is the same as me, but if it’s repeatable and is getting worse instead of better, and doesn’t seem to be in the muscles, that leave bones/joints/cartilage.

You should get a good hip ortho and have him do a Craig’s test, show him where the pain is, and get some X-rays. If he’s any good he’ll do all that just from you telling him about the pain.

Check out Fisch’s thread in this forum; several other people have had similar hip issues (to each other, hopefully not to you).

These things don’t go away on their own and if you do have an issue that has to be fixed with surgery, the surgery will only get more extensive the longer you wait to get it done. So you need to rule that out early. I’ve had a shoulder and two hips operated on and from discussing it with other people, you NEED to be a weenie about this. Some people wait until there’s nothing left in the joint and the bicep tears right off the humerus. I only had a partial tear in my labrum and a couple of bone spurs and my recovery was much faster and I’m now way ahead of them. So, go get looked at.

Well see, as of right now I’m inclined to say that I’ve done a LOT of wide stance deads and squats within a short period of time. When I first started to PL with some friends, I read a short dummies intro to the Westside method, and immediately started doing SQ/DL on both dynamic and max effort days, every week. Needless to say, as the pain began to slowly creep in I went out and got myself a copy of the westside book and realized I was doing the program COMPLETELY wrong, so i took a step back, eased back off the heavy lifting, and focused on recovering, however if that is the case then I’ll probably need to take an extended period of time completely off and then reboot.

It’s difficult to see how the problem would be in the bones/joints/cartilage as I have quite a few years of heavy lifting plus I spent 4 years in the infantry and during that time never had any joint problems.

For it to set in within such a short period of time leads me to believe that it is perhaps the way that I am training.

Well you said you changed your stance recently to wide. This puts your joints at different angles, and that change increased impingement in me, and it may have done so in you too.

So you could have years of lifting under your belt, but if you never impinged on your joints due to traveling through safe ROM’s, you wouldn’t have done any (or you’d have done less) damage.

Try modifying your stance to the way you used to do it to see if the pain changes.