Knee Rehab Clarification

[Jeff Dausch]

Good morning Coach,

I’ve been combing the archives looking for insight on rehabbing my knees. I’ve had some sort of tendinopathy bilaterally for 3-4 years now (stopped squatting until a few weeks ago). Poor squat form (knee slide, pulling knees back during concentric), spiral firehouse stairs and climbing up and down in the fire engine 50x/shift all contributed.

My form is better now, which is helping. I’ll be going to 5x3 in Baltimore to dial it in once I work on a few more things on my own.

You posted (back on page 500 something) the following after being asked about anterior knee pain:

I had a much worse case of the same thing, due to a knee injury not related to squatting. Mine was bad enough that I had lots of trouble squatting. I followed Kelly Starrett's advice and fixed it with some very diligent stretching of the quads over a period of several months.

My wife has Kelly’s Supple Leopard book. Did you pull your rehab out of there or did you work with him directly? If it’s the latter, can you expand upon what he had you do? I’m convinced my issues are also related to a flexibly/mobility issue in my quads, hips and possibly calves (hips especially).

Stats - 45 years old, 220lbs, former competitive powerlifter on NLP now.

Current lifts since starting back on LP:
SQ 255 3x5 (started very low due to knees)
BP 245 3x5
DL 435 1x5
PR 145 3x5

Thanks.

[Mark Rippetoe]

It's been a very long time since I posted on page 500, and I don't remember the details. Kelly's book was not in print at the time, and it's largely gibberish, so it didn't come out of that. It's been my experience that quadriceps tendonitis has to be trained through, and that the eccentric loading in a correctly-performed rep probably contributes to this. Tendonitis never heals with a layoff, so keep this in mind. This will be one of the topics discussed at StrengthCon II. Maybe you should attend.

StrengthCon II | The Aasgaard Company

[Will Morris]

Tendonitis never heals with a layoff. Tendonitis treated with a layoff becomes tendinopathy.

[Jeff Dausch]

Thanks Mark. I was going to audit the Westminster, MD event. But I think StrengthCon would be a better bet given my current situation.

I got a couple vids of my squats today. I’ll post them up after I take a look and edit them.

Thanks again for your time.

[Jeff Dausch]

Tendonitis never heals with a layoff. Tendonitis treated with a layoff becomes tendinopathy.

I made that mistake for sure which is why I'm in the latter phase now. I took the advice about 6 weeks ago that I can't let them heal, I have to make them heal. They are SLOWLY getting better, they feel great when I'm squatting (after the empty bar sets anyway). It's the other 23.5 hours in the day that they suck.

I'll keep at it, there are 2 wounded military personnel at my gym with prosthetic legs still training. In the great scheme of things, I'm doing pretty damn good.

Thanks for the reply Will.