I’ve had hip pain during and after the squat since my first week (I started 3 months ago). Most of the time, I feel it primarily where my femur meets the socket on the outside of my hip. It starts as soon as I’m coming out of the hole and subsides until right before I lock my hips out at the top. I feel it in the whole joint in the hole, but it moves to more front side hip flexor’ish territory right before lockout.
On days that I squat and deadlift heavy, burning pain will radiate through my hip (same hip) and its corresponding glute while sitting on the drive home. The nature of the pain is different after the squat than the pain I experience during. It tends to start burning when I walk/jog for longer than a few minutes too, though less severely.
The plan for the next squat session is to do tempo reps, add conservative amounts of weight for each warmup set, make sure I’m not going too low, and start working sets at a weight that produces a level of pain I can tune out. Is this more or less the right approach? I’d like very much to just ignore it in order to avoid taking weight off the bar, but its been getting worse the last couple weeks.
I’m 37 and I haven’t noticed the issue before lifting, but I was sedentary for a long time prior.
I’m starting my 13th week later today. I ran Starting Strength for 7 weeks before switching over to The Bridge 1.0, so I’ve been using RPE for the last 5 weeks. I haven’t failed a rep on any lift other than OHP since I started, but I know I’m failing to utilize RPE as the kind of autoregulator its designed as. I’m more or less using it as a way to estimate how likely I am to fail a rep on a top set if I add at least 5 lbs, so I’ve effectively turned The Bridge into SSNLP with variations. I know it’s stupid.
Its being a load management issue would make a lot of sense. My day 1 top set squat was 95 lbs x 5 and my week 12 top set was 265 x 5, which I did twice that week (once high bar and, since I want to switch to low bar, I did it again low bar on a day where pause squats were programmed). I’ve definitely felt run down the last couple weeks, but told myself I was fine since my progress was within what I understood to be normal ranges, but age is a thing and I started really, really out of shape.
I guess it’s not impossible this could be useful for someone down the line, so I’ll post an update.
So, I did end up taking a “deload” of sorts. I was on week 6 of Bridge 1.0 when the pain was the worst. Week 6 is moderate intensity, so I just ran week 1 which is low intensity. I picked up where I left off on week 6 after the deload and I feel so. much. better.
It’s impossible for me to say with any certainty how much any of this other stuff helped, if at all, but I did do some other things: I gave up on the textbook SS lowbar due to my particular brand of bad technique. I convinced myself that the combination of my tendency to squat too low, too quickly and the wider stance width was contributing to my pain, so I just found a squat setup I could do comfortably with minimal fixation on my hip. In my case, that was what I guess you could classify as a really low highbar; there’s a groove below my traps and above my rear delts that the bar fits in comfortably, so I just stick it in there. I also brought in my stance to as narrow as I feel stable, which is just inside shoulder width, give or take, and started pacing my descent at a 2 count - this is keeping me from bottoming out so hard and I can time the stretch reflex much more consistently.
Again, the technique changes may or may not have played a role, but it puts me in a place psychologically where I feel like it’s good for my hip, so I’m gonna roll with it for a bit. Thanks for the heads up on the load management.