For a couple months I’ve been experiencing pain right at the bottom of my knee cap, nothing extremely severe, but it has been enough for me to be in discomfort at times, or whenever I have my knee bent for long periods of time (traveling) or kneeling/climbing during work. Then outside of work, while I’m training, I notice it mostly with squats. I’ve been wearing some knee sleeves, and they help during my squat with the pain, but afterwards I notice the area is usually pretty tender.
I finally decided to see a sports medicine doctor to have to looked at. The doctor said it was patellar tendinosis and his suggestion was for me to do some prescribed stretches, and in regards to training, that i try to avoid going super heavy with squats or whatever movements aggravated my knee.
For this type of pain/injury, would you have any specific suggestions? I did see the sticky thread that mentioned the knee rehab template, and I was wondering if that is something you would refer me to for this as well, or if there was another approach.
The last thing I would want to do is stop training, so I’ve been doing everything I can to work around it, I just thought it was time to seek some help since it hasn’t improved.
We would strongly disagree with the physician’s recommendations regarding stretching and avoiding all painful movements. We would also certainly not stop training; tendon-related symptoms like this are load-based issues and we need to provide an appropriate dose of loading stimulus to build that tissue capacity back up. It is important to point out that this is a process that will take time.
Our specific recommendations for this issue would include:
If you are looking for more specific sample programming than is included in the above free resources, the knee rehab template was designed for this sort of issue.
Finally, if you would prefer individualized consultation and rehab coaching over a template, our rehab clinicians would be happy to consult with you: Contact Us | Barbell Medicine
Thank you so much for this information Austin! Yesterday I actually went back and found that podcast on tendiopathy and listened to that. So now I’ll check out that article and continue from there with your above recommendations.
I can’t express how grateful I am for the resources everyone at BBM provides. After I started experiencing this knee pain and it continued I began to feel like my training was come to a point where I wasn’t going to be able to further progress & I would be stuck. So it’s reassuring to know that with the proper process, that won’t be the case.
I am currently also running the Powerbuilding 1 template. With the rehab process, would you suggest taking a break from the Powerbuilding template while doing the rehab process, or continue with my program but maybe substitute the squats or leg exercise with the ones suggested in the free resources you provided?
It would be fine to continue running the template for upper body lifts, and if you have no symptoms with deadlifting, continuing that as well, while replacing the squat training for rehab purposes. If you have symptoms with deadlifting, we’d modify those as well.
Thank you Austin. I’m going go with your recommendations and start with the above resources you provided.
I also had a question about if there’s a point where someone has waited too long to rehab something like a tendon before it gets to the point where rehab doesn’t work? I saw an article that seemed silly regarding this, but I don’t know anything about this so I wanted to ask BBM about this. It stated that if this issue had been going on for months to years, that you are in a “degenerative” state and would need medical attention because a simple rehab exercise wouldn’t work. Seems bizarre to me, but again, I don’t know anything about this.
