Knee pain with deep flexion.

Hi all,

So recently I’ve been having this aggravated/irritated pain with deep flexion (both going in and coming out of deep flexion) in my left knee, medial side. There was no pop or tear, no pain demarcated at any point in time. It crept up on me in the last 10 days or so. I do brazilian jiu jitsu about 4/5x per week and have been doing so for the past 9 years. I upped my walking from 7-8k to 10k steps in the last few days. and I also recently squatted 200lbs for 4 for an RPE of 8 which is a new PR.

I’m just curious what this could be. Degenerative? Maybe it’ll subside? Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Hey @daniel.hutcha ,

First off, congrats on the new squat PR! That’s awesome.

In regard to the knee issue, I think you’re best served by simply labeling this as ‘knee pain with deep flexion’ and moving on from focusing too much on a diagnosis as the management likely won’t change all that much. Based on what you’ve shared here, this sounds like an instance of doing more work than you were prepared for in a given time frame, which potentially led to the new onset of symptoms. Between maintaining your jiu jitsu frequency, increasing your step count, and hitting a new PR on squat, it’s likely that the workload exceeded your capacity.

We have an article on managing ‘meniscus injuries’ that provides a lot of practical recommendations for how to manage knee injuries in general. Again, try not to get caught up on ‘is this a meniscus injury?’ and focus instead on the steps provided for working back into normal activity.

Practically speaking, this might look like dialing back the volume/intensity on your squats, bringing step count back down to 7-8k, and temporarily avoiding provocative positions in jiu jitsu (as best you can) to give some time for the area to calm down. Our article on pain in training is a great resource that outlines our general process for programming modification for pain/rehab.

Lastly, we do offer remote consultations and rehab focused programming if you would like more hands-on guidance for your specific situation. Here is the intake form.

Hope that helps and wishing you a speedy recovery,

Charlie

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