Knee joint crunching and glenohumeral joint pain.

Hi there.
I am a 23 year old male and have issues in both knees and my left shoulder. My knees crunch when I do exercises with them. Typically any movement that requires force production of the quads (squats, climbing stairs, even just tensing the quads while flexing and extending the knee joint in the air creates the crunching). However, flexing and extending the knee joint during an unweighted, open chain movement creates no crunch. It is not painful, just noisy and worrying. I do get pain when i crouch down and rest on my ankles at maximum knee flexion, when i am working with something on the ground. The pain from this comes when standing up again and it feels like my knees might give out for 10 seconds or so sometimes. I have stopped doing squats because of the crunching. The problem has been there for about 3 months now and has not improved since ceasing exercise 3 months ago.


My left shoulder also starts crunching at about 90 degrees of abduction. The main problem I have with my shoulder though is a painful/weak sensation when trying to do exercises. I am unable to benchpress now because of the shoulder pain. I wont be able to feel anything till about the 5th repetition, and by the 10-12th rep, it is unbearable. It becomes extremely painful and feels weak like I cannot get any power behind my shoulder. My right shoulder is fine, and I could definetly do more weight on the exercise with that side, but it is being held back by my problem left shoulder. Even just attemping to mimic the action of exercises like a benchpress or shoulder lateral raises causes my shoulder to feel weak and becomes painful. The pain can sometimes be felt when doing pulldown/pullup movements, althought I do this after bench press so it could just be becaue of that. Both shoulders also crunch at full shoulder extension as in the bottom of a bench press movement.


I have been doing resistance training on and off for a few years. A year and a half ago I started getting into it a bit more and was sticking to working out regularly for over 6 months. I was quite happy with what I was achieving, I was the strongest I had been. However, I lost about 10 kilos (mostly lean tissue) over christmas as I had strenuous work commitments (working long nights, 3 hours sleep, low food intake) and ceased working out once again. Took a break over the summer (Australian summer) because I was lazy. When I started to get back into it at the start of 2014 I started experiencing these problems. I will try going to the gym just to do upper body (because of the crunching knees) and will give up after about 2 weeks as the shoulder pain stops any sort of progress.

Today I started doing some internal and external rotations, but really I have no idea what i should be doing or what the problem is. But neither of my problems seem to be fixing themselves from the break from exercise I have been taking.