The figure four hurts your shins SO bad.
As a kid we never knew that when you applied the figure four you had to put the opposing leg on TOP of the other one. We would grab the leg, do the spin around, stick the leg UNDER the knee of the other one, drop down and stomp our foot in the opponents balls. Instant submission. In all the wisdom of our youth, we promptly understood that :
1 - Wrestlers acted like it hurt the leg and knee because they didn't want anyone to see them holding their berries on tv, where the real pain was.
2 - Wrestlers who could withstand the Figure Four longer than 5 seconds obviously didn't have any berries left anyway.
It wasn't until I was watching lucha libra one time that I saw a Mex with one red pants leg and one black pants leg get caught in and realized that we had been doing it wrong all those years and yeah... it doesn't hurt the shin/knee.