How to Squat with Patellar Tendonitis (NO MORE PAIN!)

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Doing squats with patellar tendonitis can be downright brutal. In this video, I show you how to squat with a chronic or acute case of patellar tendonitis that is giving you stabbing, sharp pain in your knees every time you bend them to perform another rep.

The issue that is going on here is that your tendons in your knees are reluctant to allow the muscles in the legs (mostly the glutes, hamstrings and then the quads) from handling the load of the squat. Most often this is due to a lack of confidence in the strength of these muscles to handle the load that you have on the bar (particularly in the bottom half of the squat).

This can also be aggravated even more by a chronic reliance on the tendons to support the weight rather than letting the muscles lift the weight. This is particularly true when you tend to squat by bending the knees first rather than hinging at the hips. You teach your body faulty biomechanics that cause the knees to become too reliant on their tendons to handle the weights.

The first step in breaking this cycle is to relearn the squat from the ground up, and as seen here, perform a variation of the squat that allows you to achieve better form with minimal effort. Enter the box squat. The key difference between the box squat and the regular squat (regardless of whether it is a high bar or low bar squat we are talking about) is that the box provides a safety net for your legs which allows you to delegate the load from the tendons to the muscles that should be handling this in the first place.

The other benefit of the box is that it provides you with a bottom point for determining parallel without having to guess on each and every rep. Most of the time, those that squat without a box or bench are going to cut short the depth with each subsequent rep (especially as fatigue sets in). Not on the box squat. Here you have the tactile cue of the bench to ensure that you are getting low enough to establish a brief contact of your butt to the bench.

The depth you are looking for is one that allows your butt to reach fully parallel. While there is some disagreement as to where this position is. The easiest way to think about it is when the crease in your upper thigh and hip is on the same level as your kneecap. When this happens, you have squatted to parallel and do not need to go any further to see gains.

Training hard is required if you want to see muscle gains in your legs or anywhere else for that matter. That said, if you are trying to do this while combatting the pain that is present in your knees, hips, and other joints it is going to be that much more difficult to load up the bar. If you are looking for a program that puts the science back in strength and helps you to build muscle without compromising the joints in your body and your overall joint health, then head to https//athleanx.com and get your ATHLEAN-X Training System.

For more videos on how to squat as well as how deep to squat, be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube at    / jdcav24