My knees have really been hurting me since I have started on the ‘quad dominant’ focus. I do 5 sets or so of heavy front squats, meaning less than 7 reps. Other movements I do are Poliquin style lunges, hack squats, leg presses, and smith machine squats, and on all of these machine movements, I put my legs like behind me, to really hit the quads. I do 8-12 reps for these things. What can be causing me knee pain, and how do i eliminate it? I also do cardio for 5 min, and King stretching before I work out
Unless you’re only doing 1 or 2 sets of each of these exercises, my guess is overtraining is the likely problem.
My guess is it’s your technique of “putting your legs behind” to emphasize the quads. When you do this, your knees will tend to bend excessively and be put under much more strain than when you use a conventional stance. If your knees go in front of your toes in any leg press/squat/hack or lunge movement, sooner or later you’re going to hurt your knees. Adjust your foot position and see if it makes a difference. Good Luck.
Since you are putting your legs behind you, you are definitely
emphasizing your quads; but at what cost?! This position does
not allow your hip joints to function properly. NOW, Princess,
the first action on the descent of a lunge or on ANY squat should
be the dropping of your butt or what is commonly known as the
SITTING BACK. Now what is forced to happen is that your knees, of
necessity, BUCKLE FORWARD in order to enable your descent. OUCH!
To reiterate: watch your form in the mirror, especially during lunges.
Now, see if your knee is BUCKLING FORWARD. If it is, then you need to
teach yourself to sit back into the move. This should take most of the
stress off your knees. (Legs are my speciality) Treat your body kindly;
you need to get another 60 plus years out of it ! Joey Z. ::::----::::
Since you are already doing front squats, I wonder why you feel the need to do smith machine squats. They are notorious for causing knee problems with some trainees. I recommend using less machines more free weight exercises. Try it, maybe it helps…
Are you squatting properly? by that I mean are you initiating the movement from the knees or the hips? should be the hips. regarding the hack squat and smith machine, when you are on the machines you are forced to push back against the machine; this practice eliminates the natural function of the hamstrings and biomechanically they function almost as an extensor in this situation. the end result is that the hams do not offer support to the knee, which creates a more unstable environment and opens up the knee to more shearing forces, etc. eliminate regular use of hack and smith squats.
What’s causing knee pain? Easy. Smith machine, lunges, hack squats. Dump all 3. Keep front squat. Leg press if you must. The smith machine and hack squat machine are notorious for destroying knees, ESPECIALLY if you put feet far back (to hit quads) like you say.
Greg
I suspected that the smith machine, and lunges, were causing my problem. But, doing Charles Poliquin style lunges, isn’t the knee supposed to go over the foot? It just seems to me that any exercise which causes a decent amount of quad isolation, will lead to knee pain. If I return to a normal foot position, for things such as lunges and hacks, won’t I hit my hamstrings and glutes, and hit the quads less? Reading the Dave Tate article about squatting has really made me paranoid about the role of my ‘posterior chain’ on leg exercises, as opposed to my quads. As a side not, ever since my knees started to hurt, my quads look great!
another option you have is to do some pre-exhaust work to increase the workload on your quads. If you are not worried about functionality etc., you can get some pretty good results from using the leg extension (don’t flame me guys) in advance of lunges, presses, squats etc. Simply doing 4 hard sets of leg extensions (light and slow) compounded with leg presses/squats should have your quads screaming, and as long as you’re judicious about using the technique, you should get great results.
what do you mean when you say that you put your legs behind you. how many excercises do you do per quad workout and how often? you might be overtraining. 4 sets of heavy squats followwed by 3 sets extensions is enough if done properly. do your knees hurt on any particular movement? do your knees hurt when you deadlift or do hamstring curls. maybe you have a muscle imbalance and it is pulling on one side of the knee. laters pk