Adarq.org

I have had it for about a year now..

Ive been doing TKE 3x a week. Seems to be helping but the pain is still there. I wear the knee straps when i play and that does help.

Anybody battle this before? Eliminate the problem ? My verts gone down about 8-9 inches...

pce

I struggled with it for several years. I finally had to make myself take an extended break. That seemed to do the absolute best. I kept working out with TKEs (lightly) and took about 2 months off from playing. And then when I started playing again I started lightly, only 1-2x a week. I'm still in that phase right now, but some times I play 3x a week. But I never play on back to back days now. So far, my knees have been fantasically pain free. I'm enjoying basketball once again. If my knees start feeling strong enough again, I plan on starting to try to squat again (extremely lightly). But we'll see.

Also, just daily stuff. Icing, stretching, warming up properly and warming up enough. Also, I was given some stuff from my doctor called Voltaren gel (spelling may be off a bit). Basically, it's a gel form of aspirin (in a nutshell, obviously not the exact same). But you rub it in directly on your knee (I put it on my knee caps and surrounding area since that's where my pain was). And that does AMAZINGLY. I think you can just buy it over the counter now. I thought I saw it in the grocery store drug section the other day. It works very well.

I have had it for about a year now..

Ive been doing TKE 3x a week. Seems to be helping but the pain is still there. I wear the knee straps when i play and that does help.

Anybody battle this before? Eliminate the problem ? My verts gone down about 8-9 inches...

pce

Hi Michael

I had jumpers knee about 2 years ago and I basically had to take 10 months of all the leg training (jumping and weights were all out) and I quit basketball for that period as well.I liked .

I did a bunch of things during my time off including a lot of glute work, stretching of the hip flexors and quads, foam rolling the IT band and daily icing (which i still do). I also monitored my diet a lot more closely and found out which foods where more likely to cause inflammation than others and tried to actively reduce my intake of them. There is a book called the Anti-Inflammation diet that I found useful. it is pretty extreme in its recommendations and I don't follow them all but certainly making a few changes can't hurt.

I also had autologous blood injections which seem to do didn't do much. What really worked well in terms of boosting the recovery time was a prescription of Ibuprofen and Dioxycycline. These are prescription only here in Australia (luckily my sister-in law is a doctor, and my in-laws are pharmacists. I am also good friends with a number of the sports doctors at the AFL level here in Melbourne too so I was kind well connected for this).

I am however not a doctor and can;t say if this is appropriate for you. I can say it worked well for me and if your knees are bothering you badly it is worth seeing sports doctor to discuss this with him.

Good luck in getting the knees healthy again. I lost nearly all of my vertical gains when I had to sit out and it was one of the suckiest things ever.

I currently have jumper's knee right now. I've stopped playing basketball for like 3 months, and squat lightly only once  a week to maintain the strength.

My squat got up to 405x4 but I never deadlifted, so I think part of the reason I got it was through muscle imbalances.

Here's what I'm doing to help myself:

VMO Activation - I'd rather have my VMO fire before the rest of the quad because it stabilizes the patella. This would be safer. If you look at my thread here, I noticed that in my left knee where I have jumper's knee, the VMO doesn't fire clearly before the rest of the quad, where as in my right leg it does: http://www.adarq.org/forum/strength-power-reactivity-speed-discussion/vmo-firing-patterns-%28video%29/

Glute Activation - My quads were very overractive since I never deadlifted. Perhaps my quads are taking over in movements that should be glute-driven, which is putting more strain on my patellar tendon.

Quad Foam Rolling - This will help with the tightness in my quads and help them "relax" more.

Rectus Femoris Stretching - This is the single most effective stretch I've done that helps alleviate the pain in my knee: http://davidlasnier.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/sports-training-rectus-femoris-stretch.jpg
^^ Yes, the back leg must be up like that. Otherwise you're just stretching the hip flexors. It will also help combat the overactivity of my quads.

Strengthen Hamstrings - I really have to strengthen the antagonist muscle to my quads to help inhibit the overractiveness of my quads. My hamstrings are VERY weak compared to my quads, and that can't be healthy.

How much do you leg curl vs leg extend?

if your talking to me i do neither.. learned the hard way leg curls just equal hamstring pulls.. ive just been rotating exercises from defrancos indestrutiable hamstring article..

doing 10-15 min of jump rope daily ive found along with tke and squatting, bss-step ups has taken down the pain.. am starting to get vert back but still have pain every now and then. i ice lots and that voltaren stuff works magic.