Hey y’all, I was reading Charles Staley’s article about training for your body type in issue 157. He said that people with long femurs, such as I, often drastically recruit a lot more of the glutes in the squat than other people. I’m fine with this, but at the end of the paragraph he said athletes with longer limbs are more likely to need knee surgery. Is this something I should take into consideration? Thanks everyone - PJ
Bump.
Heck yeah you should take it into consideration. Injuries suck, and you sure can hurt yourself squatting. Squatting’s not for everybody. It’s alot safer for short guys with short legs…
I’m tall and skinny. My knee pain vanished after taking my stance out and maintaining a verticle foreleg throughout the movement. It takes a while to get used to, but it works. The only problem is that it gets your hams and ass big and strong, but leaves you lacking in the quad department. So if you’re bodybuilding, it might not be a good idea. Also, the hips ache a little after training.
It is not something I would be overly concerned with if you are just talking about weightlifting. While it is true that athletes with longer legs have significantly more surgeries than their counterparts, this difference is predominantly observed in the athletic realm. Athletes with longer limbs invariably have longer limbs. The majority of knee injuries are caused by tourque expirienced by a limb which exeeds the structural strength of the knee joint. If you view the knee as a system of vectors and levers, and know a little about physics, when a force or tourque is applied to a longer lever, the resulting force on the fulcrum (knee joint) is greater than that expirienced by a shorter lever. So the same amount of force applied to the longer lower leg results in a greater amount of tourque expirienced by the knee joint.