Knee Pain

Dunno really. I've always been able to crack all my joints, including my knees if I knealt down and then sort of rolled forward onto them. I'm also double jointed here and there, and generally mutated - maybe your popping skills have always been there, dormant, waiting...

Perhaps you should just try a 3 or 4 week rest period and see what happens. I find deadlifts have more potential to stress my knees, or aggravate bike-related niggles, but maybe I'm just hyper-vigilant about form with squats. Are you bouncing out of the hole or creating otherwise unwanted shearing forces in your knees? Are you doing warm-up sets with just the bar, through to target weight? Have you changed the footwear you use? Are you stretching, particularly hip flexors, hamstrings, quads, and ITB? Have you upped the weight too quickly? Are you maintaining weight through your heel when lifting? So many questions...

Yeah i've laid off the squats for a month or so and the pulsing pain has gone away. I was bouncing out of the hole and really trying to push myself, and i'm sure my form suffered. Is it wrong to bounce out? I go all the way down (hamstrings to ankles). As I was coming up a few times my knees were wobbling left and right. I attribute my incorrect form to lack of core strength, I can't 'push' against enough as i'm rising out of it so I think it did something to my left knee, maybe tracked too far forward past the toes. I am generally quite fussy about warm ups and tend to go for plenty of reps with just the bar, and work up. Stretching i'm working on, my hammy flexibility was rubbish but I can place 4 fingers on the floor now so that's improved

I just did a few BW squats now and the crunching only happens when I go way past parallel, as far as I can go and sort of bounce a bit. Not sure what this means - it gets a lot louder with weight on it. I also take cod liver oil which seems to do some good with a niggling shoulder issue I have.

I find deadlifts a lot easier on the knees joints in general, for me there seems to be more leeway if form isn't quite right than with a squat. I was thinking of incorporating front squats, do you find it easier on your body, particularly the knees? I've not done them because my quads are already fairly developed from cycling, it was my hammies that were lagging behind, there was some catch-up needed!