Regarding the subject line, I’ve been going through some non-specific pain around the groin area for the past two months, and have been attempting to rehab it since. The pain is most notable when I bring my right knee ‘in’, and will show up at a heavy enough weight on both concentric and eccentric portions of the squat (without the knee coming in). That said, I am able to squat up to a certain weight with minimal pain, and have noticed that the pain seems to subside the more reps I do. As such, I’ve replaced both squatting slots on the hypertrophy template with sets of 3-0-3 tempo squats, using the following week-to-week pattern (Sets X Reps):
Some days will be better than others, in that I’ll feel a bit better the morning after my squat session, while others will be less than desirable. I’ve been pretty positive about the entire situation, knowing that I will get better, and that there is nothing seriously wrong with me. My question is whether or not this rehab approach seems reasonable given the mixed results I’ve been seeing over time? I also did some targeted loading around the area with some bulgarian split squats last night, so I was wondering if this is reasonable as well.
Apologies for the long post, but many thanks to the entire BM medicine team for their guidance. If it weren’t for y’all, I would’ve stopped all sorts of lifting and spent my nights rolling on a lacrosse ball like a jackass.
Hey, sorry to hear about your groin pain. Sometimes we may be better trying to work around the issue initially than through it. Tempo squats are fine, but often with groin symptoms we’ll recommend starting the Copenhagen Adductor Protocol as well.
My normal principles for giving exercises are 1) How is easy is the exercise to perform, 2) How scalable is it, 3) How stupid does the individual looking doing it. The Copenhagen exercise walks the line of point three, but it is very effective for targeting that tissue and has some decent exercise behind it. I typically have my athletes perform this twice a well for 3 sets of 6-8. Fair warning, it is much harder than it looks.
Bulgarian’s are fine, but sometimes in the same regard I will have athletes work on a lateral lunge as well to make sure we are targeting the groin a little more. 3 sets of 8 at RPE 8 nice and slow tends to work quite well here.
I do want to caveat all of this though and make sure you rule out not having a hernia. If you do see a pocket of tissue popping out, this protocol is likely not the way to go and you should follow up with a physician.