Day: June 20, 2020

My victory over valgus knees

Yes, this is what was happening to me when I did deadlifts near my maximum weight.

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Does your knee cave in on the pull of your deadlift? Aishlen wrote to me of her recent frustrations with the deadlift that came out with heavy lifts (shown here with 140kg/308lbs – 2.5 kg off her personal best).❌ . Knee cave on the pull is often a result of lacking stability at the hips or ankles. Your lateral hip muscle, the glute medius, has a job of maintaining external rotation torque. If it is unable to maintain sufficient contraction, the knee caves in. The foot on the other hand, is the foundation from which we move (like the base to a house of cards). If the foot caves over into excessive pronation (like you can see here) the foundation collapses and the knee is pulled in with it.❌ . Here’s the exercise I gave her to help. First: shoes off and place a resistance band loop just above the knees. I’m going to demo with a clean deadlift technique but the same applies to a conventional powerlifting technique. Grab the ground with your foot, big toe jammed down and drive the knees out to the side against the band resistance. This will set your foot in a good position and pre-tension the hips ever before the bar is moved from the ground. With an equal pull and push into the ground, pull the bar to the knees (pausing and checking for your positioning) before pulling to the hip, on the way back down do the same pause at the knee.✅ . After a few weeks of trying this you can see good progress in her technique (shown here with 85% or 120kg for a triple).🙌🏼 . Shout out to @aishlentaylor for taking a step back to fix this problem, it will no doubt pay off soon! Also thank you to @3d4medical with the Complete Anatomy app for the visuals of the body.🙏🏼 ___________________________________________

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And yes, that caused a knee ache in my oft-repaired right knee. So, I aimed to fix that by doing lots of lower weight, high repetition sets.

Today: 10 x 134, 10 x 184, 10 x 217, and 1 x 250 (best low-handle trap bar lift this year) Low handles, of course.

Now on the 217 set, I may have bounced one rep and I did stop after 7 reps for a quick grip adjustment and got right back on it.
But back and knee felt fine.

Then a 7.05 mile walk in 1:48 (15:25 mpm); fast enough, given the deadlifts before hand, and no glute pain. Yes, I did a lot of glute warm up.

It appears that my glute pain is brought on my squatting too deeply or doing deficit deadlifts.

So, the low-handle might be low enough for me.