While playing indoor soccer around 6 months ago I landed ‘funny’ with my knee in full extension and felt an immediate “jamming” sensation of my right hip and knee. It wasn’t terrible, but did put me on the bench for 10 or so minutes. I finished playing and then began having symptoms of my knee feeling “thick” later that night. I was running the strength template at the time and was able to continue squatting. There was no pain with squatting, just a feeling of thickness in the right knee during the movement although when unracking or reracking I felt knee instability to the side.
I continued to play soccer once a week for the next 4 weeks as I wasn’t in a lot of pain, and continued the strength template. I ended up developing some bruising along the inside and above my right knee, though still not a lot of pain. The symptoms of the knee feeling thick and the instability eventually subsided 5-6 weeks after the initial injury.
I just started the hypertrophy template and chose split squats as a variation. Not only was I able to perform this movement with significantly less weight on my right leg (the injured leg, and I am right-handed), but I experienced symptoms of “thickness” and some slight instability/pain the evening and day after (today) performing this exercise.
I’m fine with using RPE and loading weights appropriately to not overly fatigue my knee if that is the right route to go, but wanted to check and see if doing the split squats or bulgarian split squats are even a good idea with this history.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
EDIT I had pretty much forgotten about the knee injury, so I was not focusing on “this is going to be hard on my knee” or something like that prior to the symptoms reoccurring