I’m going to talk more in detail with the issue I’ve been having with my left hip. I’ve had pinching sensations with my left hip when squatting for years (about 5 years IIRC) and I’ve had several people work on me to fix this issue. It literally feels like bone on bone in the front part of the hip at the bottom of a squat. It was always a 2 out of 10 on the pain scale so I always ignored it and trained through it. There was a summer where I worked with a Physiotherapist and she was able to reduce the pain to nothing by improving my internal rotation. When I started training seriously for the sport of Olympic weightlifting (1.5 years ago), it gradually started to pinch a little harder each time. It was 7-8 months ago when it really started hurting me and my performance as a lifter. I had just completed the smolov base cycle (tons of volume) and it wasn’t the same. I started noticing that it would pinch even during an RDL and couldn’t even snatch 94kgs during this time. It also hurt to even do lunges or single leg work. It was December (6 months ago) when I told myself I wasn’t going to train through this pain anymore. I then saw several chiros that did ART, etc. and never saw too much relief. I maybe had one massage session during this time which was a huge mistake come to find out later. None of these treatments did a whole lot of good so it was time for me to seek out medical help.
Here’s where it gets ugly… I had seen a sports orthopaedist about two years ago for this issue and he initially sent me to PT after seeing nothing wrong on the images (xray/ct scan) and made great improvement. They originally thought that I had femoral acetabular impingement syndrome (FAI) but I went to see him again in December and this time he finally decided to do an MRI and told me it was unnecessary to see the PT again. I get the MRI results on a T1 (which is kind of lower quality imaging) and he diagnoses me with Avascular Necrosis disease, the same disease that ended Bo Jackson’s career. It’s where the bone cells start dying due to a lack or blood supply. He starts telling me that I need to stop all activity so we can give it a chance to heal and if it doesn’t heal, he’s going to have to drill a whole into my femur or eventually perform a hip replacement. I was scared out of my mind at this point.
Over the past 4-5 months since that MRI, I’ve come to find out that the MRI report diagnosis wasn’t even 100% sure if I had this disease or not. I have also gotten a second opinion on this issue and was told that the MRI that was ordered wasn’t even a high enough resolution to detect this issue confidently. My hip still felt very badly during this time, so I had no choice but to believe the Orthopaedist. My training during this time was just bike work, core work, and upperbody.
It wasn’t until about a couple weeks ago when I started seeing the same chiros again, getting ART regularly, and deep tissue when I finally started seeing results. I can now do a full narrow stance squat with no pinching in my left hip. It still pinches a little bit with the wider stance but this tells me that my issue is purely muscular to where it’s causing my bone pinching symptoms.
I realize that this is a very complicated issue and it’s mostly my fault for not getting consistent massage and taking care of myself as well I should have. I won’t make this mistake again and will continue to carry out the plan for increasing my flexbility in the squat to where I won’t having any pinching symptoms anymore. I’m going to take the suggestion from T-Slow to start doing a microstretching routine 2x daily to achieve my goals. So far I’ve done two sessions and can already notice some good benefits.
If there’s anybody who’s going to train ridiculously hard and consistent reading this, I’d highly encourage them not to train through pain and pay whatever amount necessary to get consistent massage work. I’m told by many weightlifters that they don’t need therapy because they get a good enough stretch being the in the bottom of a squat all day to where they have no issues. It’s only a matter of time before they make the same mistake that I did.
