Leg pain

Pain & Rehab Forum [Moderated]
1

Hey Guys,

I’ve been having aches in my left leg for the last few weeks.
Some history, I’m a 20 year old female and had two years lifting experience from age 16-18 then I took two years off and have been back at it for the last 6 months. I ran LP, the bridge and now I’m on week 7 of Powerbuilding 1. All lifts are going really well and am stronger than I ever have been.

About 4 weeks ago I started to notice a dull pain in my left hamstring. I would describe it as a tight and dry feeling in the muscle where the hamstring connects to the knee. It doesn’t affect my training apart from being able to feel it when doing RDLS but I can still add weight to the bar with no issue or much discomfort. The pain is barely there at the gym but then a few hours later I can feel it and now there are acute aches on the left side of my shin all down the leg and in my knee. It especially hurts when driving and it’s not unbareable but it is bothering me a bit.

I do have some history of knee pain as I think I injured it when I was 18. I stopped training then for a few different mental health reasons and also because I couldn’t squat without knee pain. The cause of the pain then was because I whacked it very hard off of a door. The pain then was different to this one though as I remember I’d have shooting pain in the knee while doing deadlifts too.( I don’t know if any of that is relevant)

Anyway, my question is what should I do now? Since it’s not effecting my training much I’m reluctant to stop PB1 now because I’m PRing in everything. But if that’s what I should do for longevity then I will. Thanks for any help anyone can give me!

2

Hi, sorry you’re experiencing this issue, but thanks for the question, hopefully we can help out!

My first initial advice is to definitely keep training. With a delayed onset of symptoms, you may want to experiment with modifying some of the loads on some of the lifts to see how you respond to that. If the RDL is the one lift you seem to feel it on the most, despite not having a performance reduction, I would maybe try taking off 10-20% of your usual load and adding a slower tempo to it, that way your effort remains high despite the load drop. You can give that a try for a few sessions and work back up to your typical training loads and then see how you feel afterwards. Beyond that, you will likely adapt to the overall training and these symptoms should resolve with time.

Question, do you drive a manual transmission car?