Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.

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

of discomfort pain, and here is why.

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

glutes should be handling.

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.

So we could do that with a box.

I'll show you right here.

The height here is about 17”.

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.

Ideally, even a little bit lower.

Maybe 14”.

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.

So it's like “I'll hold you.

I'll hold you.

I'll take care of it.

I'll take care of it.”

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

of tension.

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

load, I'm going down just like 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

the pins that's set at the right height.

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.

Right?

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

the way and drive back.

That's the key difference.

You don't want to lead with the knees.

You've already gotten in trouble with doing that.

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

Almost like a stiff-legged deadlift.

That way you've got the bar up here.

It's the same thing, okay?

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

at the bottom of this rep.

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.

So it allows me to do that.

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

here, the wider hip stance.

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

to be.

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

hands in.

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

with.

So you really can get some benefits from training this way.

So I get inside here.

Again, I lock my elbows down, back away, and once I'm here, again, I'm already wider than

the bench, as you can see here from the front, and I've got my toes pointed out, I've got

tension throughout my entire body, the core is tight, I'm going to lead with the hips,

lead with the hips, lead with the hips, now straight down.

A little pause at the bottom, feel everything loaded up, and explode out of there.

Hips, down, and up.

Now for someone that has knee pain like I do, chronically, I don't feel anything.

So there you have it.

Guys, knee pain, stabbing, killing you, you can't squat, you've bailed on squatting, you're

looking for skipping leg day as your only option; not anymore.

Just try to put the box down there.

If you're just a beginner it's okay if you're a little higher while you're trying to learn

the mechanics, and most of all you're trying to learn that all important skill of allowing

and delegating from the tendons to the muscles that should be doing the job in the first

place.

Guys, if you're looking for a way to put the science back in strength, put the biomechanics

to work for you so that you get more out of your workouts and not have to start avoiding

everything because pain from doing things wrong has sort of broken you down; head to

ATHLEANX.com and get our ATHLEANX training system.

As a physical therapist I prioritize, not just getting you strong, but being able to

keep you in the gym being strong for a long period of time.

That's at ATHLEANX.com.

In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful, leave your comments and thumbs up

below.

Let me know what you want to see and I'll do my best to cover it here.

I know there's a lot of things that are bothering us in the gym.

Shoulders, ankles, knees, hips; whatever it is, you leave it below and I'll try my best

to cover it in a future video.

All right, guys.

See you soon!