Low back pain squats, press template

Pain & Rehab Forum [Moderated]
1

Hey guys

I’m running the press temple 2.0, and most lifts are going great, but I keep having some issues with my squats.

It seems whenever the weight gets somewhat challenging for me the pressure on my lower back becomes too much and the muscles get quite aggravated. So I end up with 1-2 weeks of pain in my lower back which is annoying when I have deadlifts as well.

I don’t really want to do high bar for an extended time since I’ve previously had knee pain and I feel like squats that put more pressure on my knees could bring the problem back.
As a side note my knees got way better when I switched to flat shoes and a wider stance, but could this be what lead to my back receiving more of the load?

I’ve previously squatted 140kg for 5s until I got knee trouble and had to scale back for a long time. Once knees got better I started building back up slowly till I could do 90kg 5x5, at which point I jumped back into the press program, except I skipped the squat day after the main DL day, as 2 days seemed like enough stress to start of.
Now it seems like every time I try working up to 1@8, even sometimes before reaching 8, I can expect it to hurt quite a bit at the bottom of my squat.

So what I’m asking is, do you have any thoughts/experience with a similar problem that might help?
I’m not sure if this is a simple form problem, if I should consider squat shoes again, or what else I can do to progressively overload. I feel I’ve been very patient with my squat and that I should be able to tolerate to squat 110kg when my 1@8 on DL is usually in the 180-185kg for the past month.

I’m not great at making these kinds of posts so please tell me if something is unclear

2

This sounds like a common loading-based issue we deal with frequently.

Start by reading this: Pain in Training: What To Do?

I would recommend increased variation with your squatting movements, especially if you are doing low bar squats every session. There is nothing wrong with high bar squatting when loaded appropriately – the “stress on your knees” is necessary for adaptation, but the dose (i.e., intensity and volume) matters. If you remain strongly opposed to high bar squatting, I’d sub some of your other low bar slots for other variations you’re willing to do that can alter the overall loading.