Name: How to Squat with Patellar Tendonitis (NO MORE PAIN!)
Uploaded: 2018-01-07T17:57:05.000Z
Duration: 7 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you've got stabbing knee pain, knee tendonitis has been bothering you for a long period of

time, or short period of time, but it is crushing your ability to do squats; today I'm going

to show you what you want to start doing that's going to enable you to keep squatting.

You see, I am very familiar with that stabbing pain that goes right through my knee caps,

right into the inside of my knees, and makes pretty much any type of bending feel impossible.

If you do a box squat though, you're going to eliminate pretty much all of your source

I'm going to go inside and explain why this is.

So, with the bar itself – or without using the bar just to demonstrate – the fact of

the matter is, if your knees are enflamed, if you have chronic patellar tendonitis, or

if you have an acute patellar tendinitis, the issue is that your body is relying too

much on the tendons to handle the load of a squat that the quads and hamstrings and

So it never wants to hand off the load that you're lifting from the patellar tendons

themselves to those muscles because it either A) doesn't have the consistency and the

strength in those muscles to handle that, or it's just becoming too reliant on the

fact of always trying to protect your knee joints.

That is not the function of the patellar tendon.

So what you want to do is, you want to teach it to start letting go and start delegating

to the muscles that are supposed to start doing the work for you during the squat.

You'd want to use a box that's about 17” or even a little bit lower.

I'm just using a bench that most of you are going to have access to, as opposed to

maybe a small box, plyometric box, or something like that.

So now when you go to squat, when we come down here, if I don't have a band underneath

me, or a box underneath me for security, what I do is I start bending the knees first because

they don't want to let the quads take over.

Again, maybe we don't have the strength in our quads, or at least our body isn't

convinced of the strength of the quads, and more importantly our glutes.

And you're basically holding on and stretching the patellar tendons and developing a lot

They can handle tremendous amounts of tension there, but they're not doing any good because

that amount of tension is overloading them and causing them to become enflamed over time.

Over use, for a job they're not built for.

Then we come down, down, down, and I don't want to let it break into the quads for the

very reason that I talked about because if I did, the minute that it handed over the

job to the quads and hamstrings and glutes, if I didn't have the ability to handle that

Because I've cheated it so much from here, to here, to here, to here, and then I finally

give in and let the quads take over, it could be so much that I could just go down.

Now, luckily if I'm at a squat rack I don't have to have that fear.

I've at least got something to catch the bar.

So you should always squat with either a partner, or a squat rack that can catch the bar with

But when we box squat that fear is now eliminated.

What you want to do – and I'll show you from the front here, too – is you put the

bench between your legs so you're straddling the bench.

The first thing that this does is allows us to automatically get a wider stance.

The wider stance is going to instantly activate the hips a little bit more.

It's going to turn your toes out a little bit more, which is what you want.

It's going to allow us, when we go down, to let our hips lead the way.

When our legs are in this more natural position here, I'm actually able to let the hips lead

You've already gotten in trouble with doing that.

You want to lead with the hips by dropping them back.

You're going to lead back, lead back, lead back, and then we go down.

When we're down, the bench gives us that instant security knowing that we can't get in trouble

If I had worst case scenario, I'm stuck down here, and I could always dump the bar.

But it's not going to give me the sense of fear that I won't be able to hand the job

from the patellar tendons to the quads and hamstrings and glutes.

Instantly, when I'm down here, now I can actually power out of this position.

I don't rest here, I just touch momentarily, and then when I come out of that position

I've actually loaded up the hamstrings a lot more by doing what I've said in the beginning

So I'm able to actually use the hamstrings to blast myself out of the hole, get the glutes

involved, and we've actually targeted all the muscles we wanted to.

We've gotten the quads much more effectively because we've gotten down into that parallel

position, which I'm not quite there here because the bench is not as low as I would like it

A little bit lower and I could get these quads nice and parallel.

By the way, parallel would refer to the hip crease right here that you could put your

The hip crease being level with the knee – the height of the knee.

So if I'm down here, my hip crease is here, my knees just a little bit down from where

the hip crease is so I'm not quite at parallel.

But even if this is all you had, it's going to be a lot more beneficial for you.

Most importantly, it's going to help you to ease the knee pain that you're feeling and

it'll actually allow you to start squatting again.

By the way, this is not just something that is going to make you look like a sissy, or

something that Jeff Cavaliere, the physical therapist is telling you to do.

This is a long held belief of even some guys – the Westside guys – that feel that this

variation of the squat is the best variation of the squat and the only one you should train

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to Squat with Patellar Tendonitis (NO MORE PAIN!)

chronic

scenario

prioritize

eliminate