Hello,
I am looking for some advice or experience for the following condition.
Backstory:
I have this recurring issue of hip pain when reversing at the bottom of the squat. I’ve been dealing with this on and off for about 2.5 years now, and I think it has hindered my squat progress. It was bad enough 2 years ago that I didn’t squat often or only light for some months, but eventually it got somewhat better. But I only really got back to proper training when I started purposefully allowing a little pelvic tilt at the bottom, not trying to keep the lumbar fully neutral, leading me to believe the issue may be hip flexor- and pelvis stabilization-related. This movement pattern didn’t give me problems, but I do fear it ingrained a squat morning pattern in me, which I’ve been trying to get rid of for almost a year now.
Current State:
- The level of discomfort is variable across days and weeks. I also think it has moved between left and right hip throughout the years, but I’m not entirely sure and now its bilarteral. Some sessions are worse than others, but the pain is never fully absent during normal squats.
- I can even feel twinges of it on the leg press, but less severe
- The pain is not so bad that I couldn’t power through, but bad enough to distract me, increase RPE significantly, and reduce my confidence a lot.
- I don’t have pain in daily life due to this issue
- The pain appears to be related to the load unsurprisingly, and pain-free loads are probably below 70% of 1RM
- The pain is less or absent when doing paused or pin squats, it really seems to be the rapid reversal at the bottom of a normal squat that triggers it
- I can sometimes feel the discomfort throughout the day after the session. It doesn’t affect my daily life, but it can take hours or until the next day until it has fully dissipated
- The pain is not really reproducible any way other than squatting. I could sometimes trigger it with rear-foot elevated split squats, placing the hip under a loaded stretch, but last time I tried this, I was suddenly pain-free, but it still occurred during squats. Maybe the two are unrelated. What I’ve tried
- Incorporating movements to strengthen the hip flexors. Some form of leg raise in neutral and shortened hip position, split squats with one hip in a stretched position and actively pushing through that leg, I also no reverse nordics once a week.
- My training already includes pause and pin squats
- Not training at all for a week (not for this reason, but I can just say it has not changed anything)
- Cueing myself to keep knees out in the bottom of the squat more, as I sometimes felt this was easing the problem, but turned out to not be realiable. Also trained the abductors isometrically for a few weeks. The only thing I have not done, is just not attempting to do regular squats at all for a while, as I assume someone may suggest. Would avoiding this specific squat variation, or training it really only at loads that are completely pain-free be the best way forward? Just loading them to “tolerable” as I am currently doing does not seem to help.
Is it in any way useful trying to understand the exact cause of the problem, or should I just focus on getting the movement I want to do back to a pain-free state?
Does anyone have experience with this specific issue or could offer some more objective assessment of my situation?