Tips for a better lunge for those who have knee pain

In today's post, we're gonna talk about how to perform lunge correctly for those who have knee pain. Have you experienced knee pain when doing lunges? Or if you are looking for a pain free way to do your lunges without flaring up your knee. Here is how you can make a simple changes in your technique.

You've probably seen on social media that there are a ton of ways to execute a lunge. Which is more effective? Well, the truth is, it depends on what you are trying to achieve. While there are many ways to execute it, we have to find the right way to do it for someone that has knee pain.

Let us assume we are doing a static lunge (on the spot lunge), neither forward lunge nor backward lunge.

There are 2 common scenarios of knee pain location

1) Knee pain at the front leg

2) Knee pain at the back leg

In this case we are referring to the picture below, front leg (1) which is the left side and back leg is the right side (2).

Knee Pain At the Front Leg

Let's talk about the first one. If you are someone that experience knee pain in the front leg when doing lunge or if you are someone who has knee conditions, what we can do is to modify the way we do our lunges. Let's understand that lunge or split squat is a unilateral movement (I.e. single leg movement), which means front leg should be working at least 90% most of the time. Think of it as a squat but doing it on 1 leg, the back leg is there to prevent yourself from falling on your back.

Ideally, for someone who has knee pain at the front leg, we should try to minimize getting your front knee excessively passing over your toes. In doing so, it will create less compressive force on the knee joint. On top of that, we should avoid creating a forward motion as we are descending ourselves to the bottom of the lunge. Instead, we should be moving only on the upward and downward motion from our side view. I would suggest using a mirror when you are performing lunges, this can serve as feedback if you are doing it correctly. Try to think of doing a squat, we wouldn't want to move forward as we lower ourselves from a squat position.

For someone who has knee conditions, most of the time it can be a sign of weakness in the glute medius. This weakness will often times cause knee pain due to inability to provide a stable femur position during movement as a result the knee would cave inwards when performing lunge or squat. This will create additional torque on the knee joint. A quick fix for this would be to have a slight forward trunk lean, approximately 45 to 50 degree. Shin angle should be fairly close to vertical, but not entirely vertical. By doing this, the pressure will be directed towards the hip/glutes as there is a greater degree of hip flexion, this helps to strengthen the glute muscles. Having said that, we are addressing the instability issue and also muscle weakness. Hooray for that.

Figure 1: The image above is static lunge. Noticed on the trunk and shin angle. Slight forward lean on the trunk, ideally 45 to 50 degree. Shin angle should be fairly close to vertical, but not entirely vertical. Keeping the front knees behind the toes.

Figure 2: The image above is another variation of lunge known as rear foot elevated split squat. The body angle should be relatively the same as the shin. Keeping the front knees behind the toes.

Knee Pain At the Back Leg

This could be technique error. As we have discussed earlier, lunge or split squat is about single leg movement. We should be focusing on the front leg as suppose to the back leg. Putting too much force on the back leg for someone who has knee pain at the back leg could result in a direct pressure on the knee cap, whereby the patella tendon is pressing on the knee cap as we are descending through the bottom of the lunge. To avoid this, simply apply the technique as mentioned above, simply to shift that weight towards the front leg and redirect the force to the mid-foot of your front leg as though you are doing a single leg squat and keeping the back leg as light as possible as though you are stepping on a very thin fragile glass floor.

Question

What if all of that still does not help?

Try the following;

1) Reduce your weights.

2) Reduce your range of motion (avoid going too low on your lunge).

3) Focus on eccentric (going down slower on your lunge - approximately 4 second)

That is all for today's topic. I hope this post will bring you tremendous benefit. If this helps, do share your experience with me. Do share it to your friends if you find this useful. Thank you for investing your time to read this.

Cheers.