Keep Your Knees Happy: Tips for Pain-Free Lunges and Squats
If your knees bother you during training, I’ve got good news – you can do something about it. In fact, over the past decade of coaching, I’ve helped countless women reduce or eliminate knee pain in their workouts by teaching them a few simple techniques.
Lunges and squats, along with their many variations, are staples in nearly all training programs, making them hard to avoid. However, the discomfort you’re feeling is often due to common mistakes that can easily be corrected. Today, I’ll walk you through key tips for making these movements feel better, based on both my experience with clients and my own personal history.
Before we get into it further, remember that if you’re experiencing chronic pain, it’s important to consult a specialist, like a skilled physical therapist. They can assess your situation properly and provide a tailored solution. But if you’re eager to keep training and just want to make your knees feel better during lunges and squats, these tips will be helpful.
The most important thing you need to know is how to perform lunges and squats in a way that reduces the pressure on your knees. This not only alleviates pain but also helps keep your knees healthier in the long run. Let’s break down how to adjust your lunges and squats to avoid pain, and then I’ll show you how to put it all into practice with some advance variations of these exercises.
Exercise Selection And Alignment
First, let’s consider the forward lunge. In a forward lunge, as you step forward and lower your body, the momentum and body weight shift onto the front leg. This forward movement can create a shear force on the front knee, increasing stress on the patella (kneecap) and the surrounding structures. This force can exacerbate knee pain.
Reverse lunges typically cause less knee pain.
As you step backward in a reverse lunge, you reduce the force on the front knee, making it a gentler option for the joint. The backward step allows for a more controlled descent, decreasing the impact and stress on the knee joint – particularly if you are doing them slow and smooth – which will also help reduce pain.
Reverse lunges allow for better alignment of the knee over the ankle. Now this is really important – one of the biggest mistakes causing you pain is that your knees move towards your toes when you lunge or squat. Instead you always want your knee over the ankle to reduce strain on the knee.
So watch your knees when you first start practicing this. If you see them pushing forward, it’s not wrong – but it could be better for your knees.
I sometimes describe this as keeping a 90 degree angle with your stable leg. If you watch my knee in the video you’ll see it doesn’t push forward at all – instead I think of lunges and squats, and split squats as sitting back, recruiting my glutes and always taking pressure off the knees. Using muscles like our glutes and hamstrings will also take pressure off the knees and most women want to target these areas when training so it’s a win/win.
This same idea applies with squats. When I’ve coached women in person, I noticed a very common mistake. When most ladies squat, they move their knees first so they end up bending at the knees and their knees push out towards and over the toes.
Instead, we want you to move your glutes first and push them back. This is best demonstrated with a box squat. If you watch the video closely you’ll see the first thing that moves are my hips/glutes pushing back. Placing a box or bench behind you will help you get this movement better because it gives you something to aim for and helps to create that 90 degree angle with your legs.
If you have knee problems, this variation of the squat is likely going to be best for you. I’ve had ladies with chronic knee pain tell me that this is the only squat they’ve ever been able to do pain free, or at least mostly pain free.
And remember not everyone will be able to lunge or squat to the full 90 degrees so only go as far as feels safe for your strength and body. Women who have a lot of pain, longer limbs or who are beginners, usually cannot lunge and squat as deep. It’s crucial not to push beyond where you feel safe.
Controlled Eccentric Movement To Stay Pain-Free
The other thing we need to talk about is making sure your movements are slow and controlled. When you bounce up and down, or move too quickly, you’ll feel more pain – because you aren’t recruiting muscles like your glutes and hamstrings to help take the load off the knee.
But you’ll also feel more pain because you are moving to fast to think about alignment and how your body actually feels. Often times when you notice a tiny bit of pain, you can shift your weight and find a path through the exercises where there is no pain. But this is only possible if you are moving slow and connecting with your body. If you are rushing you’ll be more likely to create a sudden jarring pain rather than having a chance to move out of it.
I talk about this in my videos all the time but that’s because it’s so important – I guarantee you that you need to slow down your movements because everyone rushes these exercises. You’ll also get much better results from your workouts because you’ll actually be working the right muscles.
And on the idea of finding a path where there is no pain, I haven’t talked much about knees collapsing in when lunging or squatting but obviously this would be an issue too so keep an eye on your knees. Moving slow helps you do that.
If you are a beginner or something with a lot of pain, It’s very helpful to hang onto something for balance so that you can practice finding the right position and moving slow.
Advanced Movements – Putting It Into Practice
It might seem like advanced moves like split squats are impossible for you right now. And for some, they may be. But with practice and increased strength, you may find that advanced exercises become doable over time. Or, maybe you can do advanced movements and just want to be sure you keep your knees healthy.
In the video you can see me applying the things we talked about while doing split squats. You can see how slowly I move and how smoothly I transition back up from the lowest part. When I lunge like this, it’s all glutes and hamstrings working. There is barely any pressure on my knee. You can see I’ve hit that 90 degree angle with my leg too.
What about the amount of weight you lift? You’ll find the heavier the weight, the more likely you’ll feel your knees in a bad way. In my experience, there’s a point when the weight is just too heavy and it’s all knees and joint pain rather than the right muscles working.
That’s why in my online training programs, we do a lot of body weight work or use light-medium weights. By moving slow, these movements can be much more effective than if you do them super heavy anyway because instead of using momentum and power to lift, you recruit all the right muscles and can target trouble areas much more effectively. In my programs, I also give “knee friendly” options in the notes of every workout just in case you can’t do the exercises.
Thanks for reading and watching! I hope you enjoy some pain-free training soon!
