The best type of ability is availability. We often don’t think about this until it is too late. When it comes to knee health this couldn’t be more true.
The amount of high school athletes I see wearing weight belts and doing quarter squats makes me sick. It is not their fault. Trust me I have been there. Back in the day though, strength & conditioning was not very common and there were a limited number of accessible coaches that possessed a thorough understanding of how to properly develop an athlete. Fortunately now, there is almost too much information and the coaches who have their athletes training this way simply have a lack of understanding of the complexity of the nervous system, anatomy, or have put their ego before the athletes health.
When training to reduce risk of injury to the knee we must place an emphasis on two areas. Area number one is training the vastus medials oblique. This is also known as the tear drop muscle on the inner portion of the knee. This muscle is often very weak in comparison to the vastus LATERALIS (this is one of the quadriceps muscles located on the outside portion of the knee). When the strength ratio’s of these two muscles is thrown significantly out of balance you can bet that knee pain is going to an issue.
There are many ways to address this, but the most important proactive method is simply training properly (easier said than done) and following a well designed training program. My personal favorites exercises for knee health are squatting through a full range of motion, pin squats, split stance lunges, and backward sled drags. Within these exercises there are many variations as well.
In addition to strengthening the VMO, we want to ensure that our athlete can probably absorb force. In order to do this we add in a number of different jumps which emphasize proper landing mechanics. We are more concerned with our athletes ability to absorb force than hit a ridiculous box jump height with terrible form. These jumps are done in a progressive manner starting with low jumps onto a box (increasing height as tolerated), jumps over an object such as a hurdle (increasing height s tolerated), and repetitive jumps which improve ankle stiffness. We also utilize different hop variations (single leg) to teach our athlete to control their body in space and land properly. If an athlete is training four times per week we focus on a different hop/jump emphasis each day (vertical, linear, lateral, and rotational). This provides exposure in different planes of motion and is going to play a big role in reducing risk of injury over the course of a long season or high school career.
Want to see a quick clip of what this looks like in action? Click the video below!
