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Knee & Tendon Pain: Injury Prevention & Warmup for Dunking
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Mar 27, 2025
If you want me to coach you personally to jump higher click here: If you want a FREE week of jump training click here: 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.
View Video Transcript
0:00
Watch this video if you have knee pain, if you've had knee pain in the past and maybe you don't have
0:05
knee pain and you're a jumping athlete but you want to prevent it in the future. And I'm specifically
0:10
talking about tendon pain, right? That goes for your Achilles and your patellar tendon. So here
0:16
and here specifically. I'm not talking about ACL injuries, meniscus injuries, any kind of ligament
0:23
issues. I'm talking tendon pains, tendinopathy, okay? If you watch this video, you're going to
0:28
be able to make it through your basketball game, your volleyball game, through a dunk session
0:33
even if your knee pain is really, really bad. I'm going to teach you exactly how to warm up
0:40
your knees to be able to handle jumping no matter how bad they hurt. And I'm being dead serious
0:46
Like you could be at a nine, eight out of 10 pain and warm up so that you can jump pain-free
0:52
The reason I know how to do this is because I am a professional dunker. I started getting knee pain
0:58
when I was 14. It started as growing pains. You might know it as Osgood Slaughter's disease
1:03
It's these big old bumps right here, which is literally just tendinopathy, which is made even
1:12
worse by growing. But you do it just like how you would tendinopathy and you can get rid of it. But
1:16
I was dealing with it since I was 14. I hear all the time guys talking about older dunkers. They'll
1:22
be like, oh, I remember when I used to be able to jump in a warm-up. That was never me. I've had
1:26
pain since I started, but it was a blessing. I legitimately believe that the reason I can jump
1:35
a world record 50.5 inches today is because I got hurt so often when I was young and that taught me
1:40
so much about my body. And injuries are inevitable. You're going to deal with it no matter
1:46
what skill level you're at. Eventually your outputs are going to get so high if you keep training that you're going to run into some issues. So the fact that I was able to learn
1:53
how to deal with injuries at a young age allowed me to train at a super high level. Fast forward
1:58
I'm 18, 19, and I started doing professional dunk contests for the first time. Around this time
2:05
the knowledge wasn't like it is today. There wasn't an Isaiah Rivera YouTube channel, a John
2:09
Evans Instagram that could teach you how to get rid of knee pain. So I was doing all the wrong
2:14
things in terms of knee pain, and I was jumping a lot. And because dunking was my job, it's what
2:19
literally put food on my table, I had to do dunk contest. And at this time, my knee pain was so bad
2:26
it hurt to go up and down the stairs. Doing a bodyweight squat, I can pull up. I actually used
2:30
to track my knee pain even back then. Seven out of 10, eight out of 10 pain. And I had to still
2:35
do dunk competitions. One, I loved it. Two, I needed to pay my bills. So out of necessity
2:42
I learned how to warm up my body This method I about to show you I also partly learned it from necessity and I also partly learned it from Kilgannon Jordan Kilgannon if you don know who he is one of the best
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dunkers of our time. I think, I believe around 2017 is when he started dealing with knee pain
3:01
for the first time in his life and he used a very similar method that I'm about to explain
3:05
to basically continue dunking. He actually told me even at his worst, he was still always able
3:12
to jump, right? His number one rule is never go more than a week without jumping
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So how is this possible? How can you have debilitating knee pain and still warm up
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well enough and correctly enough that you can handle jumping? Because I know you've been in
3:27
the position where feeling good and you, you know, you walk into the gym, you're feeling ready to go
3:33
and then you go jump, boom, your knee feels like it exploded. How on earth is it possible to feel
3:39
that, and I'm telling you, you can jump 100% without pain. It is something I like to call a
3:45
tendon pain guided warmup. Before I get into it, there's a few things you have to understand
3:49
First, you have to understand the pain scale. Oh, by the way, I have chalked my hands. I was
3:56
working out before making this video. You have to understand the pain scale. We like to rate pain
4:02
from 1 to 10, 1 being no pain at all, zero pain, 10 being the most excruciating pain possible
4:10
A 3 or a 4 for me is when it starts feeling a little bit sharp, a tiny bit of a sharp pain
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A 4 is sharp, 3 is like a dull ache. That's the best way I can describe it. In order to do this
4:21
consistently, to grade your pain consistently, you have to do it a lot every single day. And
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eventually you get, you start to understand where your pain is at from 1 to 10. But if you've never
4:29
done it, it's going to take practice because it's a subjective measure. So you have to use it a lot
4:35
in order to understand your body. It does start teaching you a lot about your body when you start
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doing it a lot though. So having said that, now that you know what the pain scale is, now you have
4:44
to choose a test that's provocative, right? So I usually like to do a body weight deep squat on my
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toes. I do that every morning and then I know where my pain's at. So that is the pain scale
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Now, every exercise has its own pain scale, right? Drops, you can rate your pain once a time when you do drop from a 24-inch box
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It's going to be a little different dropping from higher and higher heights. Standing jumps, it's going to have its own scale, and it's also going to change depending on the effort level
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Full approach jumps, again, same scale, but it's going to differ based on the effort level and so on and so forth
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One foot jumps and other exercises. This is exactly how to warm up for a session
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How to warm your tendons up so that they can handle a session
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One caveat before I explain this This is like your super special ability that you only use sparingly okay So if you have a tournament coming up or an important basketball game or in my case the biggest dunk contest of my life
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I'm not going to force my body to do this because you will feel it the next day. This is just to get through a session
5:53
You can also warm up in this weight in the weight room and for a typical jump session
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I just wouldn't do it as an extreme. For reference, I just went through a crazy knee flare-up because I did functional overreach
6:05
I went from one session a week to four jump sessions a week in highly specific weight room work as a test to see if it would increase my vertical
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With the knowledge that it might be risky and induce tendon pain, that was what happened
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Didn't jump 51, got tendon pain. And then dunk season started. So I've done two events
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The first event, I was at a feeling of four out of 10 during the jump session
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I had a dunk show three days later. I was at a nine out of 10 in the two days before the dunk show
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Did the dunk show completely fine. Four weeks later, I just did another dunk event
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Again, I didn't do my tendon rehab all the way through, but I did this warm up, got through it just fine
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I have a dunk contest in China. When this video goes live, I'll probably be over there actually
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Um, but again, I'm going to use the same warmup and only do this when I'm hurt, right
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When I'm not hurt, I don't think about the warmup. I just do my ISOs, do a few warmup jumps and I'm good to go
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So only do this when you need it. Don't make this the norm. Having said that, this is how you do it
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Go onto the court, do your three to five sets of knee extension isometrics or Achilles isometrics
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If it's Achilles pain, then you're going to do your dynamic warmup, right
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Your skips, your sprint development drills, your dynamic flexibility. then you're going to start jumping
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Most athletes will do that whole warm-up, and then I tell them to jump 10% effort
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and they go and do a 50% effort jump, especially my short guys out there
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My athletes, if your standing reach is below 7'9", you guys are the worst at this
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because it takes more effort just to touch the rim, and you don't want to look like a bum
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and you want to impress people that don't care, quite frankly. about how you jump in the gym and they're going to forget about you in 30 minutes when they leave
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You go and jump way harder than you're supposed to. Bite the bullet, kill your ego and go and do a baby jump and just touch the net
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It might be even less if you're really short. Do a 10% effort jump and barely touch it
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When you do that 10% jump, rate your pain 1 to 10
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If your pain is a 3 or higher you need to decrease the effort level If your pain is a two out of ten you need to do another jump at the exact same intensity at the exact same effort level And if your pain is a one out of 10 which is no pain
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that's your body giving you permission to increase the effort level by five to 10%
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I didn't say 30%. I didn't say 40% by 10%. You know what that means? If your vertical is 36 inches
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That means jump around three inches higher, five to 10 percent, one point eight inches higher
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So you just touched right here. You're going to touch here now. I didn't say here. And then
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this much higher, jump like two inches higher. And that's it. And then repeat the process. So
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now you're jumping at 15 percent. Where was your pain? If it was a three out of 10, go back to 10
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percent. Do more jumps there. Then go back up. If it was a two out of 10, stay there. You're going
9:16
to stay at a two out of 10 effort level until it becomes completely pain-free. Once it's pain-free
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then you go to 20%, then 25% and so on and so forth. For reference, this process, if I'm at like
9:29
a four out of 10 pain when I'm doing my ISOs, it takes 40 minutes, 40 minutes to get from 0
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to 100% effort with no pain, 40 minutes. I see a lot of you guys that have pain scores that are
9:44
higher than mine and you guys are trying to warm up even faster when you shouldn't be okay that's
9:50
pretty much it the same goes for weight room movements you can warm up in the exact same way
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if you warm up like this you can get to a hundred percent effort with no pain dom dunks dom dot dunks
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at on instagram dominic gonzalez he has a 46.5 inch vertical 5 8 dunk cam 2022 he was jumping
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feeling good, right? One of his best jumping days ever, which is usually when tendon pain
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is most prevalent because you're pushing outputs that your body is not used to
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You know, 10 minutes in, comes up to us, says pain is a 9 out of 10. John went and took him
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through this exact warmup and he went on to have one of the best dunk sessions of his life with no
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pain. You know, the Spider-Man saying, with great power comes great responsibility. This is a great
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power. Do not abuse it. If you abuse it, you will turn out really bad and then we're going to have
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to fix you up. So if you found that helpful, please like the video. Let me know if you have
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any questions in the comment section. And like always, guys, if you want me and John Evans to
10:54
coach you personally to jump higher, go to THPstrength.com and use the code THP for 10% off
10:59
your first month. The prices on there aren't going to be on there for that much longer. We're going
11:04
fast. And once we hit a certain limit, we're going to increase the price. That way we can provide the
11:09
best quality coaching for you guys. So sign up now, take advantage of that, and I will catch you guys
11:14
in the next video. Peace out
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