An Athlete’s Guide to Chronic Knee Pain: Theories and Solutions for Patellar Tendonitis, Jumpers Knee, and Patellar Tracking Problems.

You can’t run. You can’t jump. You can’t squat. Even standing up from the toilet it a chore. Your knees are in shambles. And there you are, laying in bed, waiting for the physiology gnomes to tap your knee with a magical star wand and make everything “all better.” That’s your first mistake. Find out why laying around like a slug while your intestines stop churning isn’t the answer to chronic knee pain (and learn about two more mistakes you’re making.).

They bother you at all hours of the day. Getting in and out of the car. Standing up from chairs. Cutting a rug on the dance floor. And let’s not even talk about how they feel when you try to exercise or play any sports.

Conventional wisdom says to rest. Lay in bed. Slug out. Wait a little while before you go back to squatting, running, or jumping.

What do you do if your car breaks down? Do you leave it in the garage and hope it fixes itself? Knee pain isn’t natural. Something is wrong. It’s always going be wrong unless you fix it.

The traditional theories of chronic knee pain rehabilitation are based on an arbitrary concept of being damaged one day, resting for a little bit, and then all-of-the-sudden being healed the next day. There’s no transition. No regard for what caused the injury. No preventative measures. It’s sad to say, but popular rehabilitation teaches long term failure and continual re-injury. There’s a new way. A better way. A proactive way.

Waiting around for your chronic knee pain to heal is stupid. Unless (and this is a big unless) you have some sort of short term inflammation or problem (which, by definition isn’t chronic—for more on this make sure you check out my omissions as a part of my No Ass-to-Risk Guarantee).

If it’s still fuzzy I got one more analogy for you: Say you have a friend named Kong. Kong likes touching hot things. Don’t ask me why. That’s just Kong.

You’re a good friend of Kong so you get rid of anything hot he has access to. It’s a good short term solution. But is this fixing anything? Is Kong really “healed?”

Just because you’re avoiding pain doesn’t mean you’re fixing the problem. And what do you do if you have a problem? You gotta’ fix it with some easy to follow directions. (More on this later.)

Take a look at the pictures below. They are random YouTubers doing standing vertical jumps. The guy on the left claims a 30? vertical jump. The guy on the right, 50?. (Which is very high, so let’s just say 40? to account for internet inflation.)

Aside from the raw numbers, there’s a difference between the two: I consider one a knee pain candidate, and the other a…

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