When knees hurt in Kung Fu, the first suspect is always the same: low stances. The reasoning looks sound - you stand low, the knees are loaded, the knees hurt. Often the culprit is elsewhere, and if you reason wrongly you give up precisely the thing that would help you long term.
First, a distinction that matters more than anything else here.
Which pain is which
Muscle pain is diffuse. It sits in the thigh or around the knee as a burning, dull sensation, appears during training or a day or two after, and eases with movement. This is expected. A low stance is an isometric load on the quadriceps, and the first week will genuinely burn.
Joint pain is precise - you can point to it with a finger. It is sharp, often on the inner or front side of the knee, sometimes arriving with a click or a sense of something sliding. It does not ease with movement; it builds. This pain is not part of training and is never something to push through.
If you cannot tell which is which, a simple rule applies: if you could point to it with a fingertip, stop and ask the teacher.
Three mistakes that actually cause damage
A low stance does not harm the knee by itself. Three things that accompany it do.
Knee in front of the foot. In a low stance the knee must be above the ankle or behind it, never past the toes. Once it slides forward, the load moves from the thigh muscle to the joint itself. This is the commonest beginner error and also the easiest to correct.
Knee collapsing inward. When you tire, the knee drifts toward the midline while the foot stays put. That rotation is what irritates the inner joint over time. The fix is not in the knee but in the hip - the hip has to actively hold the knee in line with the toes.
Too low, too soon. A student sees the person beside them standing deep and follows. Any stance you drop into by holding your breath with your thighs shaking is too much. The right depth is the one where you can breathe normally and could hold another thirty seconds.
Why low stances are often the answer for knees
This is the part that surprises people. Plenty arrive with a knee that hurts going downstairs or after long sitting, and six months later find it is better.
The reason is simple. The knee is a joint protected almost entirely by the strength and control of what sits above and below it - the thigh muscles, the glutes and the foot. A low stance done correctly trains exactly that, and it does so without impact loading of the kind running or jumping brings.
The essential point is that the load is static and controlled. Thirty seconds in a stance is far kinder to a knee than one unexpected twist on a football pitch.
How we adapt it in the hall
Every stance here has four depths. None of them is “the easy version for people who can’t” - they are different loads on the same thing, and the same person can be at the second one day and the third the next.
If you arrive with an old injury, a repaired meniscus or a knee you know well, say so in the first class. You work higher, sometimes narrower, sometimes with more support. In a group of fifteen nobody notices, because everyone is working at their own depth.
When it is a doctor, not a teacher
If the knee swells, locks, or gives way underneath you, that is not a question for a teacher. The same applies if pain lasts more than two weeks despite adjustments, or if it arrived from a single event - a twist, a fall, a pop.
In all of those, stop training and get it looked at. Kung Fu will still be here in three weeks. A meniscus you loaded for three weeks despite swelling is a much longer story.
