 Your knees are achy and they're creaky and they make lots of noises, especially on the warm-up set. All right, so today I'm gonna talk about knee sleeves and really we're gonna bring out three of the more popular types of knee sleeves. Knee sleeves, I've got a Harbinger pair here. I've got the ones I typically wear when I train, which is the Ray-Ban pair, and then I have a pair of SBDs. We'll talk about the difference between all three of these. I'll actually put them on my knees so that you can see. And so let's talk about the main reason we use knee sleeves. The main reason we use these is just to keep our knees warm, especially as we get into the cold months for those of you that train in your garage, in the wintertime and it's cold. Your knees are achy and they're creaky and they make lots of noises, especially on the warm-up sets. And so we wanna put these on before we ever start our warm-up sets. I put these on, I put my squat shoes on, and I start squatting even with the empty bar, body weight, start going up, because I want to keep my knees warm. It provides some basic compression and warmth to the knees. In general, it should not help the lift. It shouldn't give you poundages on your lift. And we're gonna talk about that here in a minute. So, most good knee sleeves are gonna be made out of some version of neoprene, right? So neoprene works. And all three of these are, but they come in different thicknesses, right? And so one of the ones you'll see, so this is Harbinger, bought at just a basic sporting goods store here in town. Mueller is the other brand. And I don't have relationships with any of these brands. I want to just give you a really clean review. So this Harbinger is a five millimeter thick. You will sometimes find kind of a cloth version that's three millimeters thick. They're really worthless or they don't do much at all. They don't even keep your knees very warm. And so this neoprene knee sleeve, this is Harbinger's five millimeters thick. You can see the Ray-Ban knee sleeve is seven millimeters thick. You can see it's a little thicker. And the SBDs are also seven millimeters, but look at how much bigger it is to the Ray-Ban, right? This is a big, thick, this is a competitive lifting knee sleeve. And I'll talk about why this isn't my favorite, at least for most general audiences. Okay, so let's go to the Harbinger. So Harbinger, Mueller, et cetera. So what I do, you just put them on. A lot of times I'll put some lintiment on. And so you're just gonna start to slide it up. You just stick your thumbs underneath the knee sleeves and you're gonna pull them up into position so that your knee is smack in the middle of the knee sleeve. And I can already tell with this knee sleeve, you can see how easy it went on. It's pretty thin. And this is the problem that I have with these cheaper Sporting Good Store knee sleeves. They don't last very long. You've heard the term, buy once, cry once. When you see the price tag of the other two, you're gonna understand what I mean. A knee sleeve like this is gonna cost about 30 bucks, but here's the problem. It's not just about how long it lasts. It's about even in the middle of the workout, this knee sleeve is gonna work its way down a little bit and I'm gonna have to keep grabbing it and pulling it up. And it's really frustrating. I want a knee sleeve that's gonna stick in place. I don't put chalk on this. I don't put anything sticky. I need a good knee sleeve that's gonna provide the warmth that I need, make my knees feel good and isn't going to move. And my experience with these cheaper brands is that they don't do that very well. And then second, they just wear out faster. I think just wear out. And so, not a huge fan of these cheaper ones. Look, if you're on a budget, just know you're gonna buy a new set of these once a year, once every six to eight months. That's how often you're gonna buy it. And there's about 30, 35 bucks for a pair. Next, my favorite knee sleeve. These are the Ray Vans. Let me tell you why they're my favorite knee sleeve. First off, they're seven millimeters thick. I got the blue ones. These are the originals. I think they come in other colors now. Some of the other colors are smaller. They're like the five millimeter. The seven is what you want. You'll notice they're not super long, right? This is my second pair of Ray Band knee sleeves. The first pair I bought in 2001, and they lasted until 2018. They lasted me 17 years. 17 years later, they still work just as well as they did on day one. They were just brown and smelled like a homeless guy's socks. And that's the problem with knee sleeves. They don't smell very good after all. These aren't that bad. Got a little tiger balm on it. A little whiff of that. So it's not bad for a little aperitivo. But they do all of the stuff that I want, which is it can pull up relatively smooth. You can see how easy that comes onto my knee. Covers my knee well. I can already feel significantly more compression on these knee sleeves than I did with the Harbingers or with the cheaper Mueller brand. And the best thing about them is once they go in place, they don't move. They don't cut off my blood circulation. I don't feel like I need to get them off as quickly as possible. They feel great through the whole workout, right? So I wear these every time I squat, and I typically wear them if I'm gonna press heavy. The reason I wear them when I press heavy is not because I'm gonna have a lot of knee bend, it's the opposite. I sort of want something for appropriate set of feedback that tells me not to bend my knees on a press. Now, I don't like them on the deadlift. I tend to not like them on the deadlift because if you deadlift correctly, and you've watched our videos in the past, the bar should drag up your shin. And if it does drag up your shin, it's actually gonna catch a lot of times on this little, the bottom of the knee sleeve. So I don't like that. So a lot of times what I'll do is if I have my squat shoes on, I've completed my squat workout. I still have my squat shoes on, I'm going to deadlift. I'll just take these, flip them inside out and slide them down. And I'll just put them right here and I'll wear them on top of my shoes. Of course I don't have my shoes on right now. I'll have them on top of my shoes. And then I can set the bar here and drag up and still have my shins and my knees and my thighs to drag the bar up. So it works perfectly fine on the deadlift. I don't have to take my shoes off, take the knee sleeves off and whatnot. So I really do love the Ray-Bans. Again, they last forever. They'll smell terrible after a while. Certainly there are detergents out there now that you can wash things with. Over time they're gonna smell bad because they're neoprene. Over time they're gonna turn colors, but they're gonna last forever. As a matter of fact, the old pair I had, I give to an old training partner. He still wears them. So they're 25 years old and going strong. Those are the Ray-Bans. All right, much more popular over the last few years are the SBDs. And these are extremely rigid, extremely rigid. This is, there's actually a right and a left. This is the right one. I had never put these on until a few weeks ago because I love the Ray-Bans so much. Now here's the deal. I'm gonna show you what it looks like to put these on. It's gonna be comical. These for sure provide some amount of support. I mean, already just look at how long this is. So we know that the quads wrap around my knee and attach mostly at the tibial tuberosity right there. There's no reason for this to be lower than that, not much lower. So if they're up in here, they're actually grabbing all of that quad muscle. And you'll be surprised if you put all three of these on, go into the bottom of the squat. There's way more compression with this. It's not as much compression as a knee wrap that power lifters use, but it's close. The first time I put this on, I would say I legitimately got 30 or 40 pounds out of these. Now, my guess is, is that they're gonna stretch out over time. If I were gonna lift in a federation that allows knee sleeves, and it still counts as raw lifting, I'd probably buy a brand new pair of these for every single competitive meet that I had. So what I might actually do is wear these for training, and then when I get ready to do a meet, I might put these on because it's a lot more help. But it's not very fun to put on. So here we go. I'm gonna do the best I can, I'm not gonna fake it. Here we go, same thing. So I'll put my thumbs underneath, I'm gonna kind of turn it over, grab and pull, and you can see it just kind of hits a point where it just won't go anymore. And again, I can barely bend my knee. I mean, it's not even close to the same amount of compression. It's five or six X more compression than the Ray-Ban is gonna give or certainly the Harbinger cheaper Mueller set. So as you can see, the SPDs are really thick, really compressive as I pull my foot back. The amount of compression on this knee sleeve compared to the other two is four X, five X, I mean, significantly more. So the other thing is it's not very comfortable. I mean, again, it's very, very tight at the thigh. It's very tight at the calf. I can't hardly get it up anymore. So this is actually probably really good for competitive lifting. This is not gonna be my everyday knee sleeve. I just don't like it that much. Some people do, some people learn how to wear them. I'm sure they stretch out a little bit over time. To me, again, I wanna wear knee sleeves for the reason they were invented, which is just to keep the knee warm and loose and feeling good. When I squatted with this, I mean, I can really feel that it bunches up behind your knee, almost like a pair of knee wraps will for powerlifting knee wraps. And you can tell there's a significant amount of rebound that's gonna be in this. So again, if you wanna set PRs, wearing the heaviest knee sleeves you can, this is probably the way to go. If you wanna just keep your knees warm because it's winter time and you wanna feel better, this is probably the way to go. So again, great for competition, probably not an everyday knee sleeve. This one is my pick for everyday knee sleeve. Again, it's gonna last forever. Again, mine lasted almost two decades. These will probably last about the same, but these are gonna be a lot more comfortable. And I'd stay away with the cheaper Harbinger or Mueller type knee sleeves. Now again, on the price, these Harbingers, Mueller's, they're gonna be somewhere in that $30 range. When you start to look up the price for SBDs and Ray-Bans, you're gonna see a price $40, $45, $50. It's often for one. And so sometimes people accidentally just buy one, thinking, yeah, $50, $55 for a pair of knee sleeves seems about right, it's not. And so again, remember what you're buying. You've got one pair for 30 bucks, but you're gonna have to replace every six to 12 months. You got another pair that you can buy. It's gonna last a decade or more. And the same thing for this. And so it just depends on what your goals are. If you wanna be an everyday lifter, everyday squatter, have your knees nice and warm, this is the way to go. Competition, this is probably the way to go. So now you know everything you need to know about knee sleeves. For other great videos about accessory equipment, like wrist straps, wrist wraps, how to use them, everybody puts those on wrong, check the playlist right up here. And so that's it for today's video. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.