I have a friend who is keen on training, however he has quite bad patellar tendinitis which flares up when he squats (also when running or doing almost any other sport now). This has understandably put him off squatting and he is focusing more on deadlifts.
Is there a way to work around the injury and get squats into the programme without hurting?
His technique was fairly poor (high bar, not wearing appropriate footwear, various other issues) so I lent him “the book” but I don’t think he got around to digesting it unfortunately. I had thought a low bar, proper knees out squat to depth might be OK if he can get the discipline right. Ive never worn knee sleeves so no idea if they would be beneficial. All that said I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this if it’s a lost cause, particularly as he had the book to read for a while.
Would you be able to let me know if this is something you have come across and if so how you have managed to work with it?
Yes, this can certainly improve … if he’s interested in improving it, which I’m not sure of based on your description.
I’d listen to our last two podcasts on pain and injury. I would also get him performing a proper low bar squat, wearing proper footwear and with knee sleeves. If doing that with an empty bar bothers him, I would see if there’s a part of the ROM we can use with, for example, pin squats, that doesn’t bother him that can be trained for a while. An alternative here would be something like a tempo leg press.
FWIW, the guys over at Clinical Athlete recently put out a sample program for rehabilitating this issue, if I remember correctly.
Thanks for the response. Knowing this can be improved is helpful and will keep us motivated.
I’m by no means a coach, but should be able to get the squat form improved to a reasonable standard if I get buy in (mentally and for the shoes/sleeves). He’s worked between 135lbs and 220lbs before it flared up previously so hopefully we can start with full ROM.
Thanks for the pointers to other resources as well - I’ve found a couple of articles that are relevant as a result, if not the full programme you mention. I’ll keep digging around though.