How To Actually Fix Knee Pain From Jiu Jitsu

The three best things you can do for a sore knee at BJJ. So, here's the thing. You do jiu-jitsu, you love it, but your knees ache after training. And you might have experienced this before, Joe, where you're not necessarily, you haven't necessarily torn a ligament, but the knees are maybe a little bit swollen, walking up and down stairs is painful, maybe you might even have to do the awkward side shuffle down the stairs. And you're like, what can I do about this? Like I don't need knee surgery, but my knees are fucked. What do I do? Yeah. And so I wanted to just very quickly, succinctly give you some actionable stuff you can do, which is going to unfuck your knees, and just get you feeling a bit better so you can live life, do what you want. Yeah. Uh, so you you more recently, Joe, you'd Yeah, my knee flared up. My knee flared up just before Christmas. Which, you know, the one that I've had surgery on. Yes. Uh, and Yeah, and I think I probably just tore the meniscus a little bit. Oh, yeah? I think so. Not not to any great degree, but just enough that caused a bit of swelling, right? Nasty. Yeah, and and I was fine. I'd get into, you know, the warm-up, it'd be a bit sore, but then it would feel good after a couple of minutes, and then train, and then after training, I'm like, oh, it's a bit more swollen than it was earlier, you know. So then I took a bit of a break over Christmas, and it subsided, and I'm now back at it, and it's a little bit swollen again. Ah. But I am actually doing some of the things that we're going to tell you guys to do, and I do just find that when I'm not doing that shit, yes, it gets worse. As soon as I start doing that stuff, it usually sort of resolves itself. Sells down, yeah. Yeah. I've had a just on that, the idea of because often when we when we get sore knees or sore anything, we tend to avoid using it, right? Like that's like a natural response. But actually that can be worse. Yeah. Uh, I had a bit of a hamstring tweak, uh, a couple of weeks back, and I just reintroduced, um, some hamstring curls, which is not in my program right now. Sorted. Like just I didn't I didn't stretch more, I didn't anything more. I just added in a couple of sets of hamstring curls, and the blood's going in there and it it's feeling nourished and it's good. Imagine. And it it it's this avoidance that we want to, uh, we want to avoid the avoidance. As, uh, strange as that sounds. So, first thing, my friends, I want to share this with you because, uh, when I tore most of the ligaments in my left knee, this was the first thing I could do, and I believe one of the safest things you can do is spin bike. Now, you know me, Joe, I hate me some cardio. I hate treadmills, I hate bikes, but I'm not talking about the electronic beep, boop, boop type thing. I'm talking spin class spin bike. What's the difference? Well, the resistance knob, it's continual. So you you turn it on and it's it doesn't matter how fast you cycle or how slow you cycle, like the resistance is continuous. Right, yeah. And so for those of you out there who who, um, play around with the Peloton game, it's that. It's not it's not the, oh, I'm climbing up a mountain now and it's it's electronically displayed in front of me and it's a little bit harder. It's, you know, because with a lot of those machines, you spin your legs as fast as you can and the magnetic resistance within the electronic machine, it just gets overcome, and then it's not really applied. What is great about a spin bike for the knee is you have continuous resistance. Also, you're getting more or less full extension, depending on how you've got your seat set up, but you're also getting the clawing, the gripping through the calf and the hamstring, which is fantastic for getting blood into the knee. And that's the thing for most people. When you've got swollen joints, getting the blood flow is key, and it's that continuous push and pull that really stimulates that. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I've actually found I use the, um, when my knee is feeling like when I've been in a more acute rehab phase, I just use the regular bikes at the gym. Oh, yeah. And I just put it on like the custom mode or whatever, where you just bump up the resistance to where it feels good. And then just sit on that, and I find like fucking night and day. Do that I use I used to do maybe 5 to 10 minutes at the start of the workout, and honestly, like I'd walk in with like, oh, my knee's a bit stiff. 5, 10 minutes, I'm like, knee feels fucking good. Yeah. And it's exactly that. It gets a whole bunch of blood flow into the into the leg and the joint. But it also just it you're also hitting in range. If you get the seat at the right height, Yeah. Yeah, you can really push your extension, or you can bias towards your flexion if you want to go seat lower. Bit shorter, yeah. And, um, yeah, it's a wonderful like low impact, high repetition like drill for some sore knees. Yeah, it's it's fantastic. It's safe. It is so safe, friends. That's why I recommend it. If you if you're feeling tender and you're like, dang, I'm struggling to to walk, that will be something that you can play with because when I had literally fully ruptured PCL, almost completely gone LCL, partly torn meniscus, partly torn calf muscle, I could actually do that, and it was very nourishing for the joint. When I, um, when I came back when I had just had my ACL reconstruction, the my knee, my guy, Justin Lane, exercise physiologist who was guiding my rehab was like, get yourself a bike, get on it every day, because when you come out of the surgery, your knee's all swollen, it's very it's very hard to express range of motion because it's so swollen. He's like, get on the spin bike, put the seat as low as you can handle. Yeah. Yeah, and and because it will put it forces you into flexion on every up. Yeah. Like on every up pedal, right? You're pulling it in. And you know, I'd go too much and it would be like, ah, like I would, you know. So then I'd adjust the seat a little bit, but I'd find that point, and over the the weeks, I'd be able to drop the seat a little bit more, little bit more. But the bike actually restored my knee flexion. Nice. Yeah, which was really fucking sick because I don't know, I can't imagine how I would have done because you think about you sit on a bike for 5 minutes, you get a few hundred repetitions of hitting that flexion, right? Maybe maybe a thousand, depending on how, you know, how you're going with it. Yeah, like it's a really great tool for that. And it's closed chain. Here's the thing, like when you're running and jogging, like walking, you're there's pressure, there's not pressure, there's pressure, there's not pressure. And so there's impact, and there's value to that, but not it's not as good for you if you've you've got like a really blown up knee. The the constant push and pull is what really it it it really doesn't jar the joint while getting the blood in there. That's that's what's so great. That that continuous tension is great. I bought a second-hand fucking, you know, pretty cheap exercise bike for like I think it was 110 bucks. Wow. That's cheap as. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, people are getting rid of that shit, right? Yeah. Facebook marketplace or whatever. And then I sold it. I used it for, you know, I had it for 6 months. Sold it for $5,000. This is the exercise bike of Joe Worthington. He sweated on it and didn't clean it once. Amazing. Buy it. Marketplace is a gem for that shit. Yeah, 100%. Got bad knees, get yourself a bike. My my preference is the spin bike. But yeah, any I mean, any any bike is going to work for you, right? The two elements that you need to guarantee your success in the gym are guidance and accountability. The big mistake that we see people making when training for BJJ is doing random workouts. That's why we made the Bulletproof for BJJ app. We have our online community that can give you feedback and help you out, and then we also have our structured programs that will get you fitter, stronger, and more flexible for BJJ. We got a 14-day free trial, get in there, try it out, and if you decide that it's not for you, we have a 100% money-back guarantee. So, go to the Play Store, go to the App Store, download the app, and we'll see you on the inside. Number two, and this might sound a bit strange because I am usually Mr. Free Weights, machine hypertrophy work for the knees is money. Absolute money. We're talking very basic, leg extension, hamstring curl, calf raise machine, three sets, pump it out, high volume. This is absolutely amazing for just supporting the knee. Because if we if we think this, right, like the muscles get all the blood flow, greedy muscles. They got all the veins and capillaries, right? But joints themselves, the reason why joint injuries take so long to heal, joints don't get a lot of blood flow necessarily, unless you're super active. But when you are fully extending and fully contracting as far as you can, under load, you're forcing blood in there. And it's really good feedback because if you can't fully straighten your leg, you're like, God, my knee my knee is fucked. What's going on here? And and gradually over time, you you're like, oh, actually, this week it's a bit better, or this week it's a bit worse. It's a really nice feedback mechanism on how how you're doing. You know, because if you if you can't do jiu-jitsu because your knees are are pretty swollen or sore, um, doing it in this controlled way, you can move the plates up and down, it's very incremental. You know, it's not like a 60 kilo back squat to a 80 kilo. It's just like, oh, I've gone up 5 kilos. My knee's a stronger, you know. And adding the calf the calf raise machine is really good for getting blood into the back of the knee. So if you're someone who's had hamstring issues or you've got pain and swelling at the back of the knee, adding the calf raise in there helps pump lymph up through the chain there. So, that I mean, I remember actually when you came back with your rehab, Joe, you were doing a bunch of um, but banded stuff, right? You were doing leg extensions, hamstring curls. Yeah, just because that was it. That was what was available. My gym, we don't have the machine yet, but like the pin-loaded machine is the best. It's so easy. Oh, and it's just the constant tension. You know, so you can keep it loaded through the whole movement. Yeah. Like I and I'm I'm I've gotten back on it and so I've gotten back into the gym in the last week, and I've done two sessions of three to four sets, leg extensions and hamstring curls, single leg. Nice. And it just feels fucking great. I walk out of there and I'm like, man, my my my knees feel good. Yeah. A great great tip on that, like the the single leg. Yeah. I I think is great because you don't have to put a ton of load. Like people got big strong quads can sometimes like, you know, do a leg extension with the whole stack. But if you're doing a single leg, it also gives you feedback about uh, you know, maybe the left is Yeah, like, oh, shit, I don't have end range on that one. Yeah. Or I'm severely weaker on that one. Yeah, and it can show you very obviously the percentage difference, you know, if you can do 50 kilos with your right leg, but then only 30 kilos with your left, you're like, wow, that's like a that's like a 40% difference. That's that's huge. And you got you got the double leg, um, eccentric drop set as well. Oh, yeah. So like if you max it out on one side, two legs up. And then you're like, two legs up, one leg down for three or four reps, it just like fucks you up. It's an amazing overload technique, that one. I that's that's that's nice. Um, so yeah, machines with the hypertrophy. Yeah. It it actually it's surprising, but that is going to really help reduce the swelling around the knee. And and just like I was never a machines guy either, and you said you weren't. And you know, here's the thing, like we're big fans of the compound movements, squats, deadlifts, all that stuff. But the reality is, like squats will will build strong knees and they will help rehab your knees and stuff. But a squat doesn't doesn't target the load through the knee through the whole movement. It's just certain moments where the knee's working, right? Like the knee is moving, but it's not the thing that's loaded the whole time. Yeah, it changes as as you move through the range. Yeah. Yeah, and so the beauty of like the beauty of this machine isolation work is that you can just it's like shining a spotlight directly on an area that you want to develop. Um, and you can just focus all your attention to it, and that's kind of where the benefit is. And you can control it, right? Like it's it's it's more incremental. So in that way, you've got more like juice to squeeze. Yeah. In that. Or reps, like 8 to 15 kind of vibe. Yeah, high volume. And this is the thing because we're we're we're biasing for blood flow. Like, you know, this isn't about turning you into a bodybuilder, it's about getting blood in there to to, you know, deliver oxygen and protein and help the whole thing heal, to get rid of this swelling, so you don't have like old person knees, you've got young athletic knees. Which is what we all want. Now, this last this third thing, which will surprise you. Um, I know that, uh, Mr. Knees Over Toes is a big fan of backward sled walking, right? And it is a great thing, but not everybody has a sled, not everybody has room for a fucking sled, all of that, right? So I the thing I'm going to give you, which I think is actually very simple and very effective, is literally walking up and down a hill. And let me explain why that's good. You can find a hill anywhere. Doesn't matter if it's a road, grass, whatever the deal. And it doesn't have to be super steep. But the great thing about walking up a hill is it forces you to dorsiflex, so you're getting a calf stretch and your leg to lock out. And also when you walk down the hill, you've got to point your toe and you're eccentrically loading through the kind of patellofemoral tendon and the quad and and the thing that I've found when I've had knee injuries is walking downstairs has been terrible. Like I could barely do it. Like I my knee would buckle or I'd get sharp stabbing pain in my knee. But the cool thing about walking down an incline, however intense or gradual, is because your toe's pointed and your quads engaged more or less the whole time, it's more manageable. Yeah. Then just having a squat straight down, essentially single leg squats going downstairs. So just walking up and down a hill a couple of times is going to do a lot to help restore function and strengthen the knee. It's a it's a surprising one. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm a big fan of that too. Um, actually a drill that I used, uh, which is kind of kind of mimics that in the gym without the use of a sled. Was the banded walk back? Well, you just you just you band up the knee. So you go back you you fix the band to a pole at knee height. Around the knee. Put your leg through it, so it's at the back of the knee. You take a couple of steps back, so you've got tension on it, and then all you do is just unlock the knee, straighten it. Unlock straighten it. Terminal knee extension is amazing movement. Yeah. And and I would do that, and then I would turn the other direction. Face forward, and then work the other way. So you just you just you're pushing it into flexion and then pulling it back into extension. And yeah, that was huge. And I do like two sets of 30 reps or something. Um, and that was really good. And particularly at that point, when the knee was really swollen and also didn't like didn't have a lot of range of motion, I could use that to also rebuild the extension range. Yeah. And and I think the thing is here, um, the fault mode, you get a swollen knee, the first thing we think is like, oh, I'll take an anti-inflammatory. Yeah, or rest it. There's a pill or do nothing, right? But what they've actually shown, like I'll have to, uh, find the research around this, that specifically therapies where you take action are significantly more effective than passive therapies. Doesn't matter if it's drugs, someone else massaging you or anything like that. They've shown that you doing an activity, consciously doing an activity towards healing the issue, regardless of what it is, is far more beneficial than you passively experiencing some kind of external thing to help you get better. So, mate, very simple, very easy, pretty cheap, like very inexpensive. Yeah. You don't have to get a gym membership. If you've got blown up knees, you could just get a bunch of casual visits and just go in there and use them up until you're you're kind of good. Or you could get a gym membership and then maybe this is this dipping your toe in the water to start your your move towards maybe being a bit fitter, a bit stronger and pump on, see yourself in the mirror. Oh, shit. Fucking who am I now? I'm a gym bro. Just call me James Sulek. So there it is, guys. Spin bike, bit of bit of machine weights, walking up and down hills, your knees will thank you. Try it out.