I wanted to post my experience with pain behind the knee as an encouragement to people if you having this naggling issue, here’s the deal:
Been lifting seriously for about 9-10 months now, and I think I’ve made okay progress.
Pulling 355 for reps in conventional deads.
Front squatting 275 for a max and 245 for reps.
Back squatting 315 (to a box) for reps and 225 for a 20 rep widowmaker set.
Flat benching 285 for a max and 255 for reps.
Those numbers of course aren’t truly worth mentioning I just want to paint a picture of how this all came about.
During a pretty serious bout of front squats, i.e. heavy training ever squat day, I began to get this ache behind my left knee the day after. Never any pain DURING, nothing traumatic. Eventually, it started to grow in intensity, causing a pain anytime I’d drop down into a full rock bottom squat (unweighted).
I tend to chalk most aches and pains up to pushing myself very hard, and assume the root of most things is muscular in nature. I have had some pretty crazy experiences with soft-tissue pain in my arms earlier in life, so I know the kind of trouble that shit can cause. Usually with enough digging around and soft-tissue massage, I can fix most aches I have.
This one stuck around though. One day, I had really narrowed things down to the peroneals… the small muscles behind and blow the knee cap near the top of your calf muscles. I dug around in them and found some exquisitely painful shit… so I massaged that out.
I squatted down… BOOM… the pain was gone! I was ecstatic because this pain was really starting to take the confidence out of my squats and everyone here knows that fucking SUCKS.
But… unfortunately, after the next squat workout, it was back worse than ever. At this point I was worried I had messed up some cartilage or a miniscus… despite how it was not a traumatic injury… so I got myself an appointment with a local Sports Orthopedic doctor for an MRI.
After getting checked out, my MRI resulted completely clean: no arthritic damage, no cartilage or joint damage or tracking problems based on the physical examination. The doctor then coincidentally suggested it might be a strained peroneal muscle which simply hasn’t had enough time to heal.
The prescription was for simple NSAID Naproxen 1000mg a day for a couple weeks without doing any squatting movements (or anything that directly irritated it) and then quickly ease back into the squats.
I am still on the naproxen, but only took a week off and did light front squats last night. I also iced my knee afterward simply as an insurance policy. I have perhaps only 10% or less irritation in the knee today.
At the very least it’s reassuring to know that a persistent, pretty intensely painful pain can be 100% soft tissue related. Alas, if something sticks around, get that shit checked out and it’ll take a lot of worry off you!
Hopefully on the way to recovery quickly.