improving squats and deads 5x5 hitting wall

One of the physios I saw put some sort of muscle strength monitoring device on my quads and my left was markedly weaker tensed than my right, despite being left footed. He felt the issues with the knee were caused by the surrounding muscles, but the knee swells with fluid after exercising it quite a lot, but no longer causes pain. 2 physio and a gp all couldn't find any structural issues.

I did try a compression sleeve on it which helped with the pain but limited my ROM.

I'll try some of the above advice and see how it progresses. Thanks all for the suggestions.

I thought people tended to be stronger on their non-preferred leg.. As someone who has a bias toward kicking with my right foot I know I'm definitely stronger at lunging with my left leg.

When jumping off one leg I would tend to jump off my left... Left leg jumping preference seems to be common in basketball, footy, long jump, high jump etc...
So perhaps it's normal that your right leg is stronger, considering you are "left footed"?

There was a experiment done in the 80's to effectivly measure the strength of the the quad muscle.

the machine used was a leg extension, the seat angled back and hip secured to ensure no other muscles were involved in the movement, tested each leg indivdually, isometrically at varying angles of the knee joint, the machine was connect to a PC measuring force output.

What was obvious was peak force was measured at full contraction, what was a suprise was that most subjects tested where found that the dominant leg was fractionally weaker.

the tester contibuted this to the dominant leg recieving too much work over time, he came to the conclusion that, in strength, "less is more"

Fred Hatfield was one of the ones tested, along with many others.

your knee is not a muscle so it can't actually be weak.

If the knee doesn't hurt, then continue training. If you insist on doing 5x5 that's up to you, but what Oni said about doing 3 reps for many sets using a little more weight is good advice.

Just ice your knees when you're done to reduce the swelling..

This is me twice a week.

they look happy

They're supposed to.

yep, if no pain but slight swelling then ice post workout is the go.

Varying rep range has been suggested. Either lower (with more sets) or higher (with fewer sets) (or a combination of)

Either way, slightly more volume (provided the knee doesn't mind) is what I'd be doing.

I've found over the last several weeks that varying weight,reps and sets has helped me build more strength in my squat and doing 3second pause squats has helped too. After one of my squat sessions I will do 60-70% and do 10-12 reps depending on how I feel for 1-3 sets. I also use knee sleeves for support. Just walking up and down stairs you can hear them. My knees that is not the stairs....