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My name is Isaiah Rivera and I have the highest officially tested vertical on the planet at 50.5 inches and am the co-founder of THPstrength, a company that focuses on vertical jump training for athletes.
What makes me a little different from most athletes that jump high is that I started with a pretty low vertical and documented my entire journey on this channel. Here is my journey in a nutshell:
14: Started working out to jump higher for basketball
16: Hit my first dunk and shortly after found out about the world of pro dunking
17: Trained like a madman and hit my first between the legs dunk
18: Entered my first professional dunk contest
19: Knee pain almost made me quit dunking
20: Met my coach John Evans, who helped me get rid of knee pain
21: Won my first international dunk contest
22: Tested a 48 inch vertical and started coaching full time
24: Tested a world record 50.5 inch vertical
The reason I make so much free content about jumping higher now is because it’s a resource I wish I would’ve had when I was in high school that would’ve prevented a lot of unnecessary mistakes and injuries.
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0:00
What's good? It is day three of the hypertrophy cycle and tomorrow is a big dunk session
0:11
I'm dunking with Jordan Kilgannon. This is the introductory week to the hypertrophy cycle
0:17
So normally today would have been a general day doing upper body
0:21
But since I want to jump pretty well tomorrow, I am taking today off
0:26
but a rest day is never really a rest day when I train because I do isometrics, right
0:34
So I'm going to have a timer here, a timer here going and I'll just talk while I do this
0:41
These are what my isos look like, right? So if you don't know what an isometric is
0:48
an isometric is a muscle contraction where the muscle is neither shortening
0:54
nor lengthening. So you're applying force, and your muscles stay in the same length
1:00
And these happen to be really, really amazing if you have knee pain
1:06
I truly believe if I had known this, known about isometrics when I was in high school, I probably would have been playing college basketball somewhere
1:16
and not dunker. Or I would be an even better dunker than I am now
1:20
The reason being is I started getting knee pain when I was 14 years old
1:28
And I'm talking excruciating knee pain. So you guys see this bump right here
1:33
That's the tibial tuberosity. Really common place to have knee pain. Insertional tendinopathy, especially for teenagers and guys that are, anybody that's growing and does a lot of knee extension activity
1:47
They're really prone to having tendinopathy there. It's really commonly called Osgood-Slaughter's disease
1:53
So I started first getting knee pain there when I was 14. I remember I was doing, like, high jump
1:59
Like, my school had, like, this track and field competition. I did high jump, jumping off one leg
2:02
That's when I first felt it. And then just playing basketball. And then, of course, I started researching it
2:09
And I always was told that it would go away as soon as I was done growing
2:15
That was not the case. I turned 18. 19 the pain was even worse than when I was 14 And it was bad when I was 14 15 16 all throughout high school But it just kept getting worse and worse and worse and eventually the knee pain got to the point where i was seriously considering quitting
2:36
professional dunking um i started pro dunking when i was about 18 so around 16 years old started
2:45
posting my dunks on youtube got a lot of traction improved really quickly and i also do believe part
2:50
of the reason I started getting knee pain so severely is because I progressed so quickly
2:55
and I didn't know anything about load management like now I know a ton about load management
3:00
and at THP like I always tell people we're the best at uh at improving vertical jumps
3:08
I truly feel like we're even better at healing tendinopathy right knee pain Achilles pain
3:17
knee pain, if it's tendinopathy, I really feel like we are the best in the world at
3:23
dealing with those issues. The amount of athletes that we get that have tried, not going to name
3:29
programs, but have tried programs from people that specialize. Like, this is what their marketing is
3:34
is getting rid of knee pain. And I'm talking all of them, not just the biggest one, which you guys
3:40
probably know the name, but all of them. Like, we literally just had a guy, his name's Jackson
3:45
He's a long-distance runner. Debilitating knee pain for, like, a year or two
3:50
Tried everybody's program. Nothing worked. Literally within a month, we have him literally running
3:56
I think he's going to do one-hour runs this week. Completely. Well, not completely gone, but the pain is now manageable after not being managed for about a year
4:08
So really freaking good at what we do. but uh yeah i uh started posting my dunks they started getting traction um and when i was like
4:19
19 20 the pain really just got horrible to the point where i was about to quit pro dunking and
4:25
it's one of the most depressing things ever to love something so much that you are literally
4:29
willing to do it for eight nine ten hours a day and you can't even do it for five minutes because
4:35
of knee pain. Then I met my coach, John Evans, and he introduced me to
4:43
Ebony Rio's research, Joe Cook's research. We started doing a progression, managing my load
4:49
stopped doing what hurts, which is jumping. We started doing isometrics so that we can get that tendon more resilient get the pain sensitivity down start actually building collagen in my knee in my patellar tendon
5:08
And in six weeks, I was able to jump without pain for the first time since I was literally 13
5:15
Remember, I started getting knee pain at 14. I hadn't jumped all throughout from age 14 to 20
5:21
Every session I had was painful. and I thought it was normal. I thought that's just what everybody went through
5:29
So isometrics were a huge part. It was literally the bridge between stopping the activity and then getting back into jumping
5:40
So as far as how often I do this, so obviously today is a rest day
5:45
I do my isometrics three times a day. Five sets, three to five sets of 45 seconds
5:53
and I spread them out around every six hours. So literally, I do a set as soon as I wake up
5:57
set a timer for six hours, do my five sets, and my timer goes off again, I'll do my other five sets
6:05
I try to push around 70% effort on it. Usually, I try to find the position that hurts about a three out of ten
6:12
Right now, these aren't painful. because I have my knee pain under control
6:17
Not even under control. I don't even feel the knee pain. At least the original knee pain I had when I was 14
6:22
I haven't felt that in years. But the right knee pain, all that stuff
6:25
I don't really feel it, which is a good sign. Usually that means I'm going to freaking fly
6:32
But my general guidelines, find an isometric where you feel about a 3 out of 10 pain
6:37
on the first set, and you know you're doing the right iso, you know you're doing the right intensity
6:41
the right range of motion, the right effort level, if there's an gesic effect
6:47
gesic means that pain drops. I always say, the ogy I always give is
6:52
isos are like ibuprofen. You know you're doing it right if pain drops
6:56
directly afterwards and it lasts for a while. That's why we do isometrics right before training
7:02
because you get the gesic effect and it really warms you up well
7:08
and then you're able to do your activity. So that's my last set
7:13
I think that was four sets. So, yeah, we do three to five sets. And that's pretty much it
7:18
That's all I'm going to be doing today. I'm really excited for tomorrow
7:24
The only thing I kind of sketched out about I starting to feel sniffles For those of you guys that don know I am a father I have a baby daughter and she in daycare and she gotten
7:36
sick so much this year, which means I've gotten sick a lot. So I'm feeling like, you know, that
7:41
off feeling you get right before you get sick. So, but hey, whether or not I get sick, I still think
7:46
I'm going to go, I'm going to fly and it'll be a good environment for jump training. But yeah
7:51
next video you see will be the dunk session which will be uploaded tomorrow super excited about that
7:57
i don't think jordan's dunks are going to be in there usually he likes to post his own dunks in
8:01
his own channel um but yeah it's going to be me nathan george rj austin and kilgan and uh
8:09
should be really fun uh like always if you want to get coached by me one-on-one to jump higher
8:14
especially if you have knee pain. If you have knee pain, like I can't stress enough how good we are
8:22
at getting rid of that. And I literally, I guarantee you're going to get rid of that knee
8:26
pain. If you do not see a noticeable improvement in your knee pain within a month, I have no problem
8:33
refunding you your money. As long as you do every single workout, you do exactly what we say
8:38
you stop doing what hurts, follow those guidelines. I have no problem with that. And I know we're not
8:43
going to because we've literally, every person, we have like a 99% efficacy rate. So, and the 1
8:51
are the people that did what, uh, we told them not to do. So if you have knee pain, go to THP
8:56
strength.com. It'll be the best decision you ever made in your life. Stop wasting your time with
9:00
uh, these random people that suck out. Um, and finally like the video helps the channel out a
9:08
lot. I think the information I give is extremely valuable. I try to just give you guys everything I
9:15
know out for free. Even though I have a coaching program, I like to give you guys the tools needed
9:21
so that you can do this by yourself. And then if you want to skip the headaches of that and the
9:26
planning and if you want the accountability and you want someone with you every step of the way
9:31
that's what my coaching is for. But at the end of the day, the reason I have my coaching at the
9:35
price it is at the moment and why I put out all these things for free is because I wish I would
9:41
have had this when I was 16. I would have avoided a lot of pain and misery and depression if I would
9:48
have had all this information out there. So hopefully that was valuable for you guys. If it
9:53
was again, like the video and I'm going to catch you guys in an exciting video dunking tomorrow
#Pain Management
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