 All the way down. Woo, look at that boy. Woo. What's up guys? My name's Steve. I have friggin' two knees and they're friggin' bullet. I jumped on concrete during this quarantine off one foot. I got nothing as in no pain. How did I do it? About to find out, baby. I just gotta work the door because I'm half the forgettn off track. Woo! Hey, so I get this question all the time. I had knee pain for two years and I got rid of it and I tried everything. So I'm gonna tell you what I tried and what worked for me and also what it means to rehab it, how to rehab it, how to strengthen it and how to go beyond so that way you never have to worry about knee pain again. Subscribe if you want instant knee pain relief because that's how that button works. I actually have a commitment with YouTube about Nintendonitis. And thank you guys so much for your comments and leave a comment if you have any questions other than this because this one actually came from so many comments. I got this question so many times so I love providing the best content I can for you guys and so I really appreciate that. All right, so we're gonna start with what causes knee pain. The simple thing is that you have tendons, right? Tendons in your knee and those get overloaded, overused. What does that mean? That means you're squatting and you're causing tension or you're jumping too much, right? Not specifically squatting but loading weight. For me, that's what I was doing. I was loading a lot of weight trying to just get stronger and then I jumped on top of that so that overloading that too much use, that overuse was just too much for the tendon. And the reason that happens so many times in my experience and what I've learned with people that I work with is that tendons adapt slower than muscles. So a lot of times when you're squatting, for example, right? You squat and then next week your muscles get stronger and you can lift more. But your tendons haven't developed yet so you have to give them more time. So when it comes to jumping, jumping is so variable with how much force you're producing off the ground. A lot of people who jump so many times they don't really feel the tendons till the next day. So that's something I want you to remember that tendons take time, this journey takes time, jumping higher takes time and you can only do it if you have a healthy body. So this is why it's so important and that's one of the main keys is understanding that your tendons take time to develop and go super, super slow and gradual to strengthen them. But how do you get rid of pain? That should be the first question. Okay, so how do you get rid of pain? You've overloaded it, you've overused it. How do you get rid of that pain? Number one thing for sure is definitely stop the activity that hurts it. So if you were jumping and it hurts, you were squatting and it hurts, whatever hurt it. Most likely jumping if you're a dunker, if you're a basketball player, jumping is just so much force on your knees. Stop jumping, so stop jumping, cut that out and it might take two to three weeks. So for me it was about two to four weeks of no jumping and what we call isometric. So I'm sure you've heard this so many times. What is that? An isometric, a simple way is with your bicep is that when you work out your muscle, any muscle, there's always a lengthening of the muscle and a shortening of the muscle and movement, right? So you're contracting eccentrically, concentrically. So if you're not doing that, you're just holding tension, that is an isometric. So there's no movement, there's just muscle contraction and that's stimulating the muscles around the tendon, which is what's perfect for your knee. When you get started trying to reduce the pain, see what you can handle. So stop jumping for a couple of days and then for me what it was is like, how far can I go? It was only here. I couldn't even do a body squat without starting to feel pain, okay? So my goal was to go further than that, right? So I rested until I could go a little bit further. So as you make progress, you want less pain but you also want to increase the range of motion and then eventually the speed. All those things are tension. So when you do a squat, when you do a movement, when you do a jump, when you bend down, this is range of motion, right? But very slow. If I do the same range of motion, but more speed, that's gonna be more tension on the tendon. So remember those two things, the range of motion and speed, so that way you can work with your body to gradually, super slowly develop that tendon muscle. So there's very basic isometrics for your knee. One thing you can do is just go in the leg machine where you normally kick up and just hold some weight on it. The goal is just stimulate it, hold it. Like I said, no contraction, no movement. And what that does is that stimulates the muscles around the tendons and also helps strengthen the tendon itself. So do that for a couple weeks with no activity and gradually work up to that too. So if you do super lightweight, that might aggravate it, that might hurt it. So don't do that if it hurts. Again, go all the way back down to no pain. If you're having excruciating pain and you can't even do isometrics and you took off a few weeks, obviously you gotta consult a doctor, try to get it looked at. But normally in a couple of weeks, that pain will subside and you can start doing the isometrics. And for me, this is what I did. I did nothing for two weeks. I just stayed off. I'd even tried to avoid stairs and I didn't do anything. And after two weeks, I could start doing the lightest isometrics. So it was really tough for me. That's a big point of this journey is that I didn't take off jumping for more than four or five days before this. And then I didn't jump for almost four months. So it might be a long time, but if you look back at it, if you look from now, from right now and two years from now, if you took off four months now and now you're jumping higher than you ever have in two years, you obviously choose that. But in the moment, it's really hard to see that because you want to start jumping. You don't want to lose your balance. But if you look now two years in the future and you don't take these four months off, you're going to be exactly where you are with knee pain. It's, you definitely don't want that. So just remember about the longterm process for six months, even is not a longterm thing, especially if you want to jump your highest and be extremely strong in your foundation to build on it. All right, so this is what I did in my experience. So I did the isometrics. I started doing them consistently, almost every day, up the weight a little bit, started doing them, and then started doing a body weight squat. So when I started doing a body weight squat, maybe I can get to here now. Okay, great. So I would do some reps like this again, controlling my speed so I don't do it and still doing the isometrics. You keep doing the isometrics to get them strong because it's very safe. You're not doing any movement. It's like I said, it's hard to control that speed because you just don't know. Okay, but once I could do a full body weight squat, right, I would do that for a couple of weeks. Literally, isometrics for a few weeks, then half squats for a couple of weeks, then body weight squats for a couple of weeks, and just slowly, slowly, slowly add on because I much rather air on the side of I'm doing less and I'm taking more time. Then I go a little bit too fast, try to add weight, try to add speed, and I heard it again. So anytime you feel pain, dial it back a little bit, but you should only feel a very slight amount of pain, a little bit of discomfort, but you should really be able to make progress consistently. So now you did isometrics, and now your knee feels healed. It doesn't have pain. You're doing body weight squats with no pain. You feel great. So now strengthening it. Just like I said, with the speed and range of motion, what I would do is I started to add weight. So I started to add weight on my back, just the bar and the squat. Your boy's got strength in his legs. I could lift like two to 300 pounds easy, but I was just doing the bar because it's just a little bit of weight. So super slow control all the way down, things like that. Okay, so now I'm starting to build a little bit of strength. So at first you're coming from negative to zero. So the rest, the activity specific, I'm still not doing, but we added some isometrics to start recovering it. So now you're back to baseline, you have no pain. Maybe your jumping would cause pain, but you're not jumping yet. So you come back to zero with no pain on a full range of motion movement. And now we're going from zero to strengthen. So you start adding weight, you start adding speed. And for me, what I did, started adding range of motion and weight with the squats. Then I started adding weight. And once I got up to like, I think 135 pounds with the one plate on each side, this is just what works for me. So work with yourself is, I started doing little baby jumps and it was terrifying because I didn't want to aggravate my knee. But with no weight, I would just do this. Super, super baby jumps. And even without a baby jumps, you can do, this is too high, but you can step off a platform and just go like this. That's a little more controlled because you're stepping off the same height. When you go for a jump, it's really hard to control the amount of pounds of force that's going to be off by a little bit. But the point is, do a little bit of a jumping movement or a landing movement to slowly start strengthening that tendon. The landings are great because it's not pushing and landing, it's just landing. So even if it's just stepping off a six inch platform, we're starting to make a little bit progress towards our activity. And just a reminder, before you start doing the jumps, the baby jumps, the landings, the activity, just because there's no pain doesn't mean that tendon is healed. So it doesn't mean that you could just start jumping on it because there's no pain. Because I'm sure if you're at this point and you're doing these baby jumps, if you want to jump your heart, you'd feel pain. So remember that, and remember that the strengthening is still healing it and you're still getting stronger. So let that muscle develop, let that tendon strength develop so that way you can handle those active jumps, those really max effort jumps, those big lifts. All right, so a quick recap. You want to stop your activity. You want that pain to subside a little bit. You start the isometrics and then once you have no pain and your isometrics are going well, you start the concentric, eccentric, which means the movement. And then you slowly gradually do that. And after you do the movement, you start adding a little bit more speed and range of motion. So those are the two things you need, whether it's all the way down or if it's a little bit more speed. And you slowly, slowly work that up to baby jumps and then max jumping. But again, take your time. Be very, very patient with your tendons. They take longer than muscles. And I promise you, once you do that, you could do something like this, which is a sissy squat with no pain. And you keep your butt tucked. Go like this all the way down. Woo, look at that boy. Woo. And you can rep those out. So I started working on those as well. Those are very heavy on the tendons, on the patella tendons, I believe, but the knees and you go like this, right? You can go just to that range. Some people will cringe just watching this. But for me, I can even do one leg. But if I fall on this, it's a little hard. I could do it on a softer surface. But the point is I started doing these once I had no pain, really slowly. And I could even do them with weight. So there's levels to this stuff, is what I'm saying. So once you get healthy and you can max jump, keep pushing your knees. That's the next level. What you wanna do is do the sissy squats, do them controlled, do them with a little bit of weight. Add some reps. And then you can even do landings from a higher box, which I kept doing. After I was healthy, I kept pushing the limits a little bit, kept standing on higher boxes and landing from higher than I would even jump. So that way my muscles are still getting stronger because they can still get stronger. Your tendon can keep getting stronger. You don't need to just be strong enough to handle your jumps. You can get them stronger so you can handle more than your jump. So that way, when you jump a lot, when you play a lot, you're bulletproof. And that is how you get your knee pain from zero to 100 real quick. Dunk life. I know what you're thinking. Steve, do you live in that gym? How are you always there?