Hi Jordan and Austin,
I’ve had a problem for about 4 months now which doesn’t seem to want to go away. Whenever I stand for longer than 3 or 4 minutes, I feel a dull pain in or near my left calf. Then within another minute or two of standing still, I feel numbness in the left side of my left foot. These symptoms go away within less than a minute if I sit, and within 2 or 3 minutes of walking. I could walk for an hour and have no problems, by the way. The pain is also never severe enough to be more than an annoyance.
I’m 34, I’ve been training for three years with a 4-month lapse occurring last year. I’ve always struggled with squat depth and have always had pain in my left knee when pushing the limits of knee flexion. After my lapse in training, I came back really strong on the squat and improved my depth dramatically. This leg pain and numbness emerged with that progress, and the severity of the symptoms correlate closely with how heavy and how recently I’ve squatted.
I realise that some of the symptoms fit with a herniated disc or spinal stenosis so I’ll go ahead and disclose that I have had a few back tweaks here and there, but have been pain free for the last 5 months or so. I have seen no medical professional about this and frankly I don’t know who to go to first. I have dramatically reduced my intensity for squat and switched to pause front squats since the weight to difficulty ratio is lower. None of my sets for the last two weeks have been over a 5 RPE and the symptoms linger though are less severe.
I’ve looked all over the Internet and can find nothing that really fits here, so any help would be much appreciated!