In this informal "walk and talk" video, fitness coach Eric Roberts addresses knee pain during training. He debunks the myth that squats and lunges are inherently harmful, explaining that improper form—especially allowing the knee to travel far forward or using excessive depth—creates excess joint stress. Roberts outlines practical modifications: keep the shin vertical in lunges, use box squats or parallel‑depth squats, and favor reverse over forward lunges. He stresses that adjusting range of motion is acceptable and that progressive overload will eventually allow deeper, pain‑free movement. The core of his prescription is to prioritize posterior‑chain dominant exercises (hip thrusts, deadlifts, RDLs, glute bridges, good mornings, and their variations) to strengthen the glutes and hamstrings, which support the knee. He emphasizes a pain‑free approach—correct form first, avoid pushing through pain, and use modifications to stay consistent. A client case study (Karen) illustrates how starting with box squats and vertical‑shin lunges, combined with progressive overload, led to full‑depth, pain‑free squats and lunges over time. Roberts concludes with a call to action to check linked articles for deeper detail and invites viewer questions.
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What is going on, guys? Welcome back to another Walk and Talk with E. I hope you're doing amazing. In this Walk and Talk, we are going to be talking about how to fix your knees, why your knees hurt doing workouts, what workouts can you do with bad knees. I think the 2 biggest things are— the 2 biggest injuries I see just coaching people are lower back injuries and knee injuries. So in this one, we're going to talk about knee injuries and, you know, how to modify workouts with knee pain and so on and so forth. I might do a lower back one too. If you want me to talk about a lower back one, I mean, shit, I can tell you I've dealt with lower back pain for years. So I can do a lower back pain— I can do a lower back one as well. But either way, I'm gonna— a few things I want to cover here in this walk and talk. First and foremost, we have to remember that I get a lot of times people telling me, Eric, I can't do lunges, and Eric, I can't do squats, they hurt. And All these things. Oh, this is dead bird. I don't know if you want to see that, but dead bird either way. And I get it. Like, listen, if you have some knee issues, like there are definitely things that you are going to want to modify and/or avoid and/or something along those lines. But I will say, number one, if, if you're somebody who says lunges hurt my knees, I have an entire video here on YouTube. I'll link it somewhere here above that talks about what to do and shows you what to do if lunges hurt your knees. So go check that out. But the overall concept is, it's normally not that like squats are bad for your knees or lunges are bad for your knees and so on and so forth. It's more so your form is probably just not appropriate, right? Like for example, when you're doing a lunge, and again, if you go check this video out, it'll show you this if you're more of a visual learner. But if you're doing a lunge, if your knee is traveling very far forward on a lunge, That is going to put extra pressure on your knee, as opposed to someone like myself. For example, if I don't have knee pain, I can probably do that lunge and be totally fine. But if you do have knee pain, that certain type of lunge is going to be not beneficial for you because it's going to hurt, right? As opposed to— sorry for the wind— as opposed to if you kept your shin vertical to the ground where like your knee is not traveling far forward. It is going to put so much less pressure on your knee, so you'll have much less pain with your knees. So in that aspect, lunges aren't bad, and you can still do lunges. You might just have to modify the way— the, the form in which you're doing lunges. And for example, again, let's say, you know, with a lunge, you want to try to get your back knee close to the ground, right? If you can't get your back knee all the way to the ground, man, guess what? That's totally fine. Doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. You're still getting the benefits of the movement. It just might be a modified, you know, modified form or modified range of motion, like a squat, for example. You might not be able to— and join the club— you might not be able to squat ass to grass on the ground with a squat. Guess what? That's okay. You can do a box squat. You can do a squat to parallel. You can do a front squat. Like, there's so many things, modifications you can do. In order to still allow yourself to get a squat variation or a lunge variation, so on and so forth, if you have knee pain. And one of the things that comes to mind is one of my clients and good friends, her name is Karen. Karen started with me— shit, it's almost like 2 and a half years ago, somewhere on those lines. Um, very bad knee pain. Like, and again, she couldn't like do regular lunges, she couldn't do regular squats, so on and so forth. But she started with box squats, and she started with lunges that were modified. She made sure her shin was vertical to the ground. And over time, and over time, and over time, her knees got better and better and better and stronger and stronger and stronger. Because, you know, there's this thing called progressive overload. When you do something and you get better at it over time, you're going to increase form, increase strength, so on and so forth, right? So she did all these things, and now Her squats look awesome. She's squatting very low. She's lunging perfectly, you know, doing reverse lunges perfectly, all these things, right? So, which, side note, reverse lunges versus forward lunges. Forward lunges put much more pressure on your knee. So normally you want to stay away from those, and normally you want to do reverse lunges. But either way, Karen got herself to a point where it's taken a while and she's worked very hard. But she got to a point where now, you can ask her, but I'm pretty sure her knees don't hurt anymore. She can get full range of motion. She can do lunges without pain. And so you got to remember that as well. Just because you can't start squatting ass to grass or going all the way down with your lunges, over time you will be able to get there. You will be able to do that because you're going to get stronger. That's the whole point of working out, man. That's why— I think I spit on my phone. That's why you're working out, is to get stronger, right? So remember those 2 things in and of itself. Now, and again, just one last time, if you have to modify the range of motion, that's okay. It doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. Like, if you can't squat and you have to do a box squat, perfect. Do a goblet box squat. Do a dumbbell front rack where you hold the dumbbells up here. Do a box squat there. Hold the dumbbells down by your side. Do a squat, a box squat there. There's different variations you can do. Just modify the range of motion to what you can currently do and work through that. Just because it's not like what the program says, like, you know, whether it's my clients or my Clubhouse members or whatever, like, I tell them all the time, listen, if you have to modify something slightly to where it's a box squat instead of a regular squat, like, totally fine. You can do that, right? So that's what I would say. Number 2, when it comes to workouts that are the best for your knees, Um, again, like I kind of just said, I still believe you can do things like lunges and squats and so on and so forth and just modify the current range of motion to fit what you need, right? Beyond that, there are certain things where I'd say, hey, you know, if you are experiencing knee pain, I would probably prioritize some movements over the others. Like, for example, The movements that come to mind for me that are— they're not knee dominant, and they're normally gonna be more like posterior chain dominant, which is like the backside of your body. So like your glutes and your hamstrings and so on and so forth. These cicadas are so loud, dude. Oh my God, I gotta find a new place to walk. Do you hear this? Crazy. Um, so the movements that come to mind are hip thrusts, Deadlift, glute bridges, single leg hip thrust, single leg glute bridges. Those are the, those are the 3 movements/variations of those movements. So again, you can do a barbell RDL, you can do a dumbbell RDL, you can do a conventional deadlift, you can do a sumo deadlift, you can do a single leg RDL, you can do a barbell hip thrust, you can do a dumbbell hip thrust. You can do a single leg hip thrust. You can do a kickstand hip thrust. You can do a floor glute bridge. You can do a feet elevated glute bridge. You can do a single leg glute bridge. You can do a good morning, right? Where you put the, put the barbell on your back and you bend over, come back up. That's a good morning. There's so many variations you can do. Um, and actually I wrote an entire article on this. I'll link it here in the description. Of this video. There's so many variations you can do, but these movements are posterior chain dominant, which is going to put way less pressure on your knees when you're working out. But you're still going to get the benefits of strength training, resistance training, strengthening the muscles around your knees. Like, for example, one of the biggest reasons why a lot of people have knee pain is their posterior chain— the back side of your body, glutes, hamstrings, It's not strong, right? So what you need to do is strengthen them, which, i.e., deadlifts, hip thrusts, glute bridges, cable pull-throughs, stuff like that. That will be able to, in combination with what you're doing with the squats and lunges, where modify range of motion, so on and so forth, over time, that's where someone like Karen was able to get to a point where she can do full depth squats, full depth lunges. Not feel any pain, get strong with them. But you want to strengthen your glutes, excuse me, and the backside of your body, your hamstrings. So those movements, and again, I wrote an article on this, I'll link it here in the description, but focusing a lot on those movements first, right? Okay, cool. You can't, you can't do majority squats or majority lunges because they mess with your knees. That's Fine. That doesn't mean don't work out altogether. It just means find something that you can do that is going to be pain-free. I'm not telling you to sit here and push through pain. I'm not really telling you that. Maybe to a slight extent, but not really, because if there's pain, you don't want to keep doing it. But again, like for example, the pain might not be because you're doing a lunge. Your lunge form might just be shit. So you just got to correct your lunge form and there'd be no pain, right? So that being said, don't push through pain. Find pain-free movements that you can work through and work around, which is going to allow you to continue to, you know, keep working out, keep getting stronger. And over time, again, like I said, you'll be able to work up to a point where you can do these movements, get up and off the ground, do squats, do lunges. Again, you know, A lunge or a squat, like it's a pretty fundamental movement pattern. You have to squat down every single day to get on the toilet. You have to lunge down to pick something up off the ground. You got to squat down to pick something up off the ground. Like you probably want to be able to have the strength to do these things, and being able to number one know that you can modify the current range of motion you're doing. To make it to where you can tolerate it. And then number 2, work on strengthening your posterior chain, which is going to allow yourself— again, posterior chain, hamstrings, glutes— strengthen those 2 things. That will allow yourself to build the strength up and continue to exercise and resistance train and strength train to build up strength to get to where you want to be. So that is the, uh, kind of quick fix on the quick fix, quick lowdown on Bad knees, how you can fix them. Again, I wrote an entire article on this, so if you want to go check it out, please feel free to go check it out. Any questions, any concerns, please feel free to drop below. I'd love to answer them. If you have shitty knees, again, ask questions, ask concerns. I'll be here to help, and we'll talk soon. Okay, thanks for walking with me.
