Watch This If Your Knees Hurt When You Jump But Not When You Lift

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]What's up, guys? I am one of the highest jumpers in the world. This is John. He's coached me and the current world record holder for the vertical jump to jump higher. Most of the athletes that sign up for our coaching come in with knee pain. One of the hardest parts about knee pain is when you're in that tweener spot where you can train, you can lift hard, maybe you can do pio, Olympic lifts, you only feel a little bit of knee pain, but the jump sessions, you can't quite get to that max intensity or your knees start bugging you. Maybe you can low rim or something like that. You can handle drops, but not doing the thing, the max effort jumps. And here at THP, we have created a new training system. We've combined load management principles with long conjugate sequence systems to allow athletes to jump higher and get rid of knee pain at the exact same time. So, I say that half jokingly.

[00:00:56]Um, John's been implementing this for me and Dominic Gonzalez, another pro dunker, 48 inch vert, I think 47 official, 48 unofficial. Um, and we're both heading into the competitive season.

[00:01:10]>> Uh, knees are a little bit banged up. We We are the archetype that I just described at the beginning. And John's doing something that's working pretty well. So, John, would you like to explain?

[00:01:23]>> Should I do it in Russian accent? I've been uh studying Burk Oansky all day.

[00:01:27]No, I'm not going to do that to you guys today. So, this is something that I've tested over the years. And like as I mentioned, it serves to meet the needs of a specific demographic, and that's a demographic that is coming off of a load management setup. Their knees are reasonably healthy, but they're trying to push performance up while also being able to maintain normal dunk sessions.

[00:01:52]That's really who this is for. So the beauty of the long conjugate sequence system is you're able to have very intense focuses on one uh physical attribute or biomot capacity and then when you work on that biome capacity you're able to unload you know kind of potentiate the next thing you want to work on and and use the residual training from the previous cycle and continue to build on it. So that's the beauty of the long conjugate sequence system. You guys should know that and you also maintain qualities the whole time in lesser degrees. The second thing is load management. You are getting the knee healthier and you do that through four specific ways. Energy storage, heavy slow resistance training, isometrics and then doing a progressive jump volume and intensity plan. Okay. So, you need to take these two concepts and combine them to get something where you're still able to develop the athletes biometric capacities, but you're also able to keep them healthy. That is the beauty of it.

[00:02:54]And it's something that I've done for Isaiah in the past on and off, maybe undefined. Maybe this is more so just defining what I've kind of always put in the programs. And if you've been on the training and you've read the descriptions on the squats, you've probably seen before, if your knee's above, you know, whatever, uh, specifically in the Evans cycles, I put this, if your knee's above a three, do squats 4x six. Add a weight you feel a two to a three out of 10.

[00:03:20]>> Clean pull instead of power clean.

[00:03:21]>> Clean pull instead of power clean is the other one. So, and and then the other thing is in the jump notes, you'll see or on the jump sessions, you'll see, hey, if your knee pain, if you have knee pain, do drops instead. And so, what you're doing is you're taking what is a base program, which pretty much always is going to have two to three days of squatting or lunging or some some form of heavy triple extension work. and you're modifying the velocity and the load so that it does not increase the load on the tendon. So you're dropping the load there. But then what you're doing is when you feel good, so let's say you come into a session like a Monday session like we had, you know, the session that I wrote was I want to have I want to induce a little bit of fatigue. So I want you to go paced. I want you to go pretty heavy. I want you to go about four reps, maybe five sets, maybe six. you're still able to build the the body's, you know, cross-sectional area, able to get a good neural stimulus, maybe there's a hormone response to going that heavy. So, it's not just going heavy and slow all the time or doing heavy slow resistance training. You're doing it as your body gives you feedback and you're retroactively responding to that instead of being proactive writing in pen and saying, "This is exactly what it's going to be.

[00:04:41]You have to respond to what the tenant is telling you. You can't you can't assume that you're going to feel a certain way. You won't know until you do it. And so writing in pencil and being able to go back and make these small adjustments is a major benefit. And so I often times put that in the notes. So how >> do I do want to butt in here. Um, something we talked about today was that when you do your pain score in the morning, so you choose if you have tendon pain, you should choose a test that's provocative. Do it in the morning and then see how you feel on a scale from 1 to 10 in terms of pain. Most common test is like a single leg half squat or a deep body weight squat or something like that. But the thing is is that's subjective and it might feel a a three out of 10 today might be different than a three out of 10 four weeks from now versus four weeks uh ago. So training is ultimately like the best way to determine like your readiness. And a mistake that I've made in the past is I'll wake up, there will be a certain pain score, and then I make that dictate what my workout looks like. And it's almost like concrete, like I have to do this. It's bad in terms of jump sessions where it says two out of 10 or one out of 10 and then I'm like, I can do a full jump session and then I won't listen to the signals in the session. Or it could mean like today is a perfect example. I was at a two out of 10, but then warming up I'm like perfect. Drops fine, skips and all that stuff fine. Squatting fine, clean pull, everything was like perfect.

[00:06:25]Like some of the best I felt. Uh but my my morning pain test didn't didn't say that. So that's very important point that John just brought up is like do the thing and you'll know how you feel and adjust based on that not just from your morning test.

[00:06:42]>> Yeah. Always pay attention to the load.

[00:06:45]Pay attention to what you feel under loading, you know, because at the end of the day that's going that's the thing you're that's the activity you're trying to get better at, right? So if you're looking at the activity you're trying to get better at and you're saying it doesn't hurt, >> then honestly I don't give a [ __ ] what your morning pain test says. Yeah. like you're probably going to your your functional state is high. There's reasons why you might have an elevated pain score in the morning and you could just be a hypochondric. It happens with all my guys. The closer they get to major competitions, the more texts I get. Hey, I'm feeling blah blah blah.

[00:07:13]It's it's like clockwork. Every single year, right before dunk camp, about four weeks out or two weeks out, guys will come to me and say, "Oh, my knee feels like garbage all of a sudden." I'm like, "No, it doesn't. you're just you're more sensitive to it because you're thinking about it more because you've got a major competition coming up and you don't want to feel anything going into that. You've been dealing with this all year.

[00:07:34]>> This too is is touching the tendon.

[00:07:37]>> Yeah.

[00:07:37]>> Where it's like >> most people most jumpers probably have painful tendons to the touch if you've had tendonopathy in the past.

[00:07:44]>> But that doesn't mean anything.

[00:07:46]>> Yeah. It's like not telling at all.

[00:07:48]>> Our event isn't touching the tendon.

[00:07:51]For today's session, we're going to be doing 100 second rubs by five sets at 70% pressure using two fingers and no lube. Um, no moisturizer. So, yeah, it is not that's not a good assessment of where you're at in terms of your readiness. You need to go by how the loading feels. That all said, the next thing you need to pay attention to is your next day pain scores as well. So you do also want to take that into account. But then see how you feel on your ISOs. You should be doing them every day. So that's going to be a better test than just waking up in the morning. I usually have two kind of metrics. And I used to put this in the training a lot. I'd say morning pain test, post ISO test, where you at?

[00:08:33]That's or maybe even during the ISO, where you at? That tends to be a better indicator than just I woke up out of bed and I feel this. That all said, what we did today was a master class in this specific setup. So Isaiah, yesterday we had a conversation. I was like, "This is kind of what I'm thinking about doing as we're coming into the competitive season. I want to maintain a little bit of fatigue till about 6 days out or so, and then I want to really back off hard." He's supposed to jump on Saturday. That means the last hard session is going to be on Sunday or Monday. Uh five to six days. also kind of in line with what you know I've been researching too. Burkoshansky never did depth jumps more than six days prior to a competition. So take all this information. We come in today. I say look your knees you're you're subjectively scoring higher. We want you to feel extra good. So we have two options for the cleans. We can do either clean pulls or we can do power cleans with a high catch for VO. Why would we pick those two? Because heavy power cleans the catch is going to load the tenant a lot. But if you catch high, the second pull typically doesn't cause any issues and his readiness, his preparedness, his load capacity is high enough that he can do a double knee bend fast at submaximal loads. The second thing with the clean pull is even when the bar is heavy, it's moving slow enough and the knee is not in a compromised position enough or leveraged up position like a deep squat where it's not going to bother him if he moves that weight heavy and there's no catch. So, you're lowering the load two different ways. And this works well for guys out of load management because you need to introduce loading, but it has to be the right amount of loading. So you want to be I always say you want to be on the coattails of pain when you're trying to get better. You want to load it, but you don't want to load it too much. So then it was like, okay, we know that we can do this one of these two. We ended up picking clean pools. Then I was like, okay, I want to get some neural loading in the session. I want to get some some something neurally priming. So I was like, okay, I want to go heavy triples on the hip thrust. And that came after the clean poles because it's a higher priority. It's more neurally demanding.

[00:10:34]You've got more absolute weight on the bar. You're using your hips, your hamstrings, and your quads to lift it.

[00:10:40]So, it's very taxing. Is it actually loaded? No. But it's still really heavy.

[00:10:44]Isaia ended up doing how much did you do today >> on the what the hip thrust?

[00:10:48]>> Yeah, for a triple like 630 or something.

[00:10:51]>> 25.

[00:10:52]>> Yeah, we were going to do 700, but we couldn't put enough weight on the on the bar. So, >> he he got scared. Yeah. And I was a little scared before. I didn't tell you this. I felt my hamstring on one rep >> on the previous set the five the 555.

[00:11:07]>> Didn't tell me that.

[00:11:08]>> Wasn't bad. Like, but I just felt it grab a little bit. And then it was rep one, rep two was fine, rep three was fine.

[00:11:14]>> And then then I wanted to go 700. And as more time went by, more part of my brain was like, you shouldn't do this. You felt your hamstring. And then and then and it was taking forever to try to figure out how to fit 2.5. And I was like, be smart.

[00:11:28]I kind of wanted to see it. I'm not going to lie selfishly. But, uh, I will say that when that it could be because of what's called active insufficiency at the hamstring. So, what happens when you shorten the hamstring at the hip and the knee, the muscle's basically all the way crossed. And so, sometimes it can go into like a cramp essentially versus like true, especially when your feet are close, you know? I mean, you could potentially pull it, but it's like hard to do. You'd have to be at pretty high velocities. That all said, we got through that. We got through that. I ended up doing 625 for a triple. So, we've got great neural loading from the clean pulls. We've got great neural loading from the hip thrust and we've done drops ahead of time. So, why we do the drops? Well, we didn't want to sprint because his hamstrings are sore.

[00:12:08]He's coming into a competition that's relatively less important in my experience. Sprinting is great, don't get me wrong, but closer to competition, it's higher risk and you don't want to end up pulling a hamstring because you decided to sprint too hard when you were sore. That's like I've pulled my hamstring several times doing that. So, we pull the sprints out. I tell them like, "Look, we're not going to sprint today." So, I would like to do some elastic storage because it's going to prep the tent a little bit more. We've taken the catches out of the cleans. So, this will this will give you a little bit more prep and you've got two days before the session. So, then we come after all of that work and I've supersetted the calf raises and the belt squat. Why we pick belt squat? Because he's already loaded his spine in the clean pulls and the depth jump depth drops or catches, whatever you want to call it. So, there's not really a need to do that. I want to unload his spine.

[00:12:55]And often times when he barbell back squats heavy, that can also be provocative for him. Tends to be a little bit more hip dominant on the belt, but we still get good quad loading. So we pick a slow tempo. So we're still able to get some metabolic stimulus in there as well as having the neural demands. As you start to fatigue, you're going to have higher inputs sending down. It's just you're fatigued.

[00:13:17]You can't have high intent anymore. So maybe there's some downside there, but you still get work done. And then you also still have potentially desensitizing the tendon and also meeting the threshold for tenant adaptation if the isometrics didn't meet that threshold. There's some other stuff with geek bar that might contradict that. But in our experience, heavy slow squats, even after ISOs is going to make the tenant feel better. Over time, you're going to trend upwards. So, we put that in there. He gets up to 245, ends up doing six reps slow, and his legs are shaking like a leaf.

[00:13:46]>> And yeah, we got great great solid work in. So, how you would build this out into, you know, an annual plan is anytime you see that triple extension work, if you're having like a two or a three, you're not like up at a four or five, right? At that point, you probably should do some load management to to get the flare up down. But like after a flare up, you're trying to get back, you're in this weird spot where you're trying to get back into training. You're trying to get as healthy as possible.

[00:14:07]And that's where doing the tempo slow decreases the load on the tendon because the higher the velocity, the higher load on the tenant. more leveraged position you're in or I guess disadvantage you're in mechanical disadvantage you're in the further the knees move out in the front the more you bounce to the bottom you're now increasing the load by changing the leverage your knees are way out in front of you and then you're also adding velocity to it and you're adding compression so sometimes that can be really provocative and as you get closer to competition or you're coming out of a flare up that's what you want to avoid.

[00:14:36]So what you do is you'd say, "Look, I'm not going to necessarily periodize the squats in the way you might think. I'm periodizing them according to what the tenant is communicating to me." If you've overloaded and your tenant's pissed off, you have to decrease the load. You do that by changing the tempo, but you still get a good systemic biological stimulus to the body and then you're loading up the other aspects of the training that you can. So, we increase the loading on the posterior chain, increase the loading on the clean poles because they're not going to be provocative, and we're able to get systemically a really, really good amount of of work done where he's feels heavier and it was productive the next day. And so, if you were to build this out across six months, you could hypothetically maybe month one, you're heavy slow squatting the whole time. By month two, maybe one day a week, you're not having to make that adjustment to this plan B slow squat session. By month three, you might be able to do the full week of training as written. By month and maybe you unload pretty hard with some squats. By week four, you might be able to max out in that fourth week and you're healthy. And the big the big thing is not having flare- ups obviously. Like that's really where stuff can go ary. You know, Isaiah's kind of like the reason his knee got pissed off is he's sim racing for I don't even know how long you were sim racing >> and short and short penultimate.

[00:15:51]>> Yeah. And short penultimate. So those two combined it was like, "Well, you want to get the jump session in?" I was like, "You should be careful with this.

[00:15:56]Probably just go off." And he's like, "I think I can do this. I don't want to test it." I was like, "Well, you feel all right." You're like, "Yeah." I was like, "This is going to piss your knees off." And you were like, "It feels fine." Next day wakes up a little pissed off. I was like, "Probably the case of a very stiff elastic depth jump ree depth jumps at max intensity basically. So that's going to cause some some irritation." And then we were able to to adjust. And now I mean how do you feel now after the sessions? You still feel really?

[00:16:24]>> You feel primed. You feel prime time.

[00:16:28]>> Prime time baby.

[00:16:29]>> Yeah.

[00:16:30]>> He's gonna like this like after a lift like Yeah.

[00:16:34]Feel really good.

[00:16:35]>> Yeah. I wanted to do >> because usually Wednesday's hard.

[00:16:40]>> Yeah. Wednesday's hard.

[00:16:41]>> Like this was the only time I do a slow lift like this is on the day after a jump session. But doing it coming in already feeling good is like like I've ascended.

[00:16:53]>> I mean you were already trending upwards. So it's like each you know and we we looked at the scores you're like well technically no. And I'm like dude I can tell you're trending upwards based on the sessions like >> Yeah.

[00:17:04]>> If I were to track your knee pain I you I've asked you several times. You're like yeah I'm good. And you haven't talked about it during sessions but like your morning pain test might change but it's like but I haven't heard about it and I would hear about it during sessions. Like if if you or Dom has knee pain on something, you be like, "Yo, this is pissing my knee off." And I'm like, "Okay, yeah, we're done. We're not doing this. We'll switch it up." So, I knew you were you've been feeling better. Your sessions are getting longer, you're jumping higher, your weight room numbers are good. I was like, "You're not I don't think you're training downwards at all." I think that uh >> yeah, pay attention to the session and that'll that'll tell you more. So, we do have a choice to make. I think it would be good we do it on the podcast because this we always have these conversations after, but I figured I would just ask you now. So, the other day I told you I wanted you to go slow squats on I wanted three slow squat sessions before before you jump on Saturday. My question to you, would you rather do four >> with similar type loading or do you want to get one more stem adaptive stem workload stem on Monday?

[00:18:06]>> Four would be so today was one, Saturday would be two, >> Saturday's two, Monday would be three, Wednesday would be four.

[00:18:15]>> But Wednesday is going to be light slow.

[00:18:17]It's not going to be heavy slow. like you'll be at like 185, right?

[00:18:20]>> You're asking if I want >> three instead of four. So instead of Monday being heavy slow, you would go >> full not full send, but probably like 5 4 3 2 1 up to 80%.

[00:18:34]>> Barer belt, >> not it would depend on how I pull out of the session.

[00:18:42]If I pull out like trending better, then I would want probably normal a normal lift on Monday.

[00:18:51]>> Well, you're only going 17 minutes tomorrow or Friday, I'm sorry. Do not jump tomorrow, folks. If tomorrow Isaiah wakes up and says, "I want to dunk."

[00:19:01]>> I I'm not I can't I can't I literally can't.

[00:19:04]>> Please do not do that to me.

[00:19:06]>> That's another reason I think we messed up last week. I think why I feel a little bit worse this week.

[00:19:13]>> I I I think you're fine. Like I don't think it's that big of a deal, but I can see why.

[00:19:18]>> Yeah, I think I think Yeah, I probably normal normal Monday because I should be feeling great.

[00:19:26]>> Yeah, 17 minutes sash. We're going to be solid. Anyways, hope you guys enjoyed this little pow-wow little chitchat about how to manage long conjugate sequence systems. So, if you're on our training and you're like, "A [ __ ] I want to finish the cycle, but my knees are bothering me." This is an easy way to do it. Just sub slow squats in for the triple extension work. That's pretty much it. If you guys aren't on the training, go to teachbstrength.com. I've pinned the comment every day. I'm really proud of myself. Actually, not every day. I did pin it yesterday and I'm really proud of myself. So, if you guys are interested in coaching, again, go there. You can sign up for the annual plan and it's 50% the price of the month coaching. So, you get six months free if you sign up for the annual plan. The other thing that you can do is a vertical jump deficit diagnosis call. A lot of words there, real tongue twister, but we go through essentially what your metrics are. Tell you, hey, look, your RSI's here, your spend time's here, your squat times here, your power client's here, your standing variable's here.

[00:20:17]This is the deficit based on that data.

[00:20:19]This is the program that's probably going to make you the best the fastest or better the fastest. And if you improve your vertical by two weeks or sorry, two inches in six weeks, we'll give you a refund on your deposit. So, great opportunity for you guys. We will see you guys tomorrow. Let's see if Isaiah decides to dunk.