Knee Pain in Basketball: What’s Normal, What’s Not

We dig into youth basketball knee pain with clear rules, practical fixes, and age-specific advice that keep you on the court. Learn to separate soreness from injury, manage growth spurts, and swap risky drills for strength that protects your future.

• differences between soreness, overload and injury
• Ottawa knee rule for red flags
• growth plates and sensitivity during growth spurts
• load management and weekly spikes
• recovery that matters: sleep, nutrition and hydration
• weight room modifications for pain-free strength
• mechanics for landing and hip loading
• planning hard and easy days each week
• eight rules for safer decisions and long-term play

If this episode helped you with anything, share it, share it on Instagram, tag me, share it anywhere you want, share it with a teammate and subscribe.

For more information check www.balticmove.net or connect with me on Instagram @Balticmove

Transcript

Welcome And Why Knees Matter

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I told you when you are landing on that single leg after a layup or after a dunk on that single leg on the ground, you are exposing your knees, total body, not only knees, but total body to four to eight times your body weight. Like, why do you need to train that vertical jump if you will be sitting on the bench because your knees hurt? Change those exercises. Okay, so it doesn't matter. Some reporter, some coach said to the reporter that I think they were talking about Zion, and uh in high school they said to him, Look, each jump you do right now in high school will take$1,000 out of your pocket when you will have a professional career later. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Basketball Body and Mind. So this podcast is, if you're listening for the first time, is for youth athletes, mostly basketball, but every single youth athlete sport will benefit from these topics. I try to think from your lenses what would be important, what would be useful for you to know so you can maximize your chances of becoming professional at sport that you do. So, and today's topic is knee pain. If you are a basketball player, most likely, I don't know how many percent, 80% of you have had knee pain. Or if you're too young, maybe you haven't had it yet, but you will. Basketball asks a lot from you, like jumping, sprinting, cutting, stopping, landing. And when you combine that to the fact that you are growing a lot, it's no surprise that you develop knee pain. And uh no wonder why it is called jumper's knee. So, since you do lots of those activities, your knees can feel sore, um, achy, or even painful, they can swell, and uh, we will talk about that you should not be panicking. Uh, I mean, in some cases, maybe, but it's always better to be calm. But by the end of this episode, you will understand what are the differences between normal soreness, overload pain, and real injury when you have to go to the hospital, or why knee pain uh shows up during the growth spurts or heavy training, it can come from the weight room, also, very possible, depending on the things that you do there, and uh simple rules also to keep training without turning that small pain into a long-term problem. So, this I'll be sharing at the end. So, the goal for me is that you would have more clarity so you could do your sport, you could play basketball, you could train and develop your basketball body and mind with I would like to say without knee pain, but I will say with as little knee pain as possible. So, first problem is that you might be confusing normal soreness with the injury, and of course, we never want to feel sore knees, if not only knees, but any kind of sore joints. If we did too much, we might feel soreness in the joints. But this is what we don't want to have. However, you might be playing three games a week, and uh on the other days you practice, you have one day off, but on that day you go and do extra shooting. No wonder why your knees feel achy. But maybe if that is uh like normal soreness, that's fine. You need to deload a little bit and you will be okay. But usually if your knee pain, let's say knee pain, uh fades away in like 24 to uh 48 hours, most likely that was uh not so serious, it was just a load issue. But uh what it leads to problem number two, number two now is that you might be doing too much of the things. So, for example, you play lots of basketball, and at the same time, when you go to the weight room, you train vertical jump, you go for speed, you do too many of specific, basketball-specific movements. You can type any sport you want here, but basketball-specific movements. I will talk later about uh in a few weeks about those specific movements. But if you do too much of jumping, if you want to do extra conditioning and you're going on the court and you're doing like lots of high-intensity runs, or you're working on change of directions, or super heavy skill training, that might be the issue. You're training too much, of course. It can be you're not recovering well enough. So listen to the top recovery methods that I was covering uh a few weeks ago, but that might be that loading issue. So that can come from the court, from the extra running that you do, it can come from the extra weight room sessions that you do for your uh ego-driven vertical jump program that you do. So that can also lead you to the uh knee pain. Next problem that I see that sometimes young athletes, you will be afraid, fearful to tell to the coach that you have knee pain. Sometimes it's uh actually it is a legit excuse for you not to train. And it would be the problem is that you are pushing through the pain, or even in the weight room, you have knee pain, but coach told you to do back squats and just like toughen up. You know, I don't want to say bad words, but just toughen up, and you know, everyone has knee pain, so we just continue doing these back squats or these single-leg squats or lunges, whatever, but your knees hurt too much. So, one analogy that uh I could give to you is uh maybe you will understand better what I mean. So let's say your knee has capacity of let's say 100%, but you go to the weight room before basketball practice and you use your knees capacity with all those exercises up to 60-70%. So you are left with 30% of knee capacity until they start to hurt. So that's how much practice basketball practice you will be able to do at 30% or 30% intensity, 30% of the time, but you are a basketball player. If you know that usually you have a knee pain in basketball practices, most likely you there are some exercises that you should not do in the weight room, like nuts should not do, you should modify them instead of regular squats. Maybe do uh ball sits or wall squats or Spanish squats or have a band behind you and uh behind your um knees and uh just do that type of variation of squats. Okay, so there are certain things that you could change in the weight room in order to help yourself on the court. And uh lastly is recovery. If you are not recovering, you're not paying attention to your sleep, number one, if you're not uh paying attention to your nutrition, to your hydration, to the stress uh management and relaxation, if you don't know what it means, listen to the top recovery modalities that I was covering. So if you're not recovering well, how do you expect that your knees will recover? But Stan, I put ice on my knees after each practice. So what? It helps you 5% of the possibility that your sleep, good amount of sleep, could help you. Of course, you will feel better after having that ice, and you will feel nothing after sleeping those 10 hours one time. But after one time of ice, you will feel good, and you will question should sleep really like works? Maybe I should just put ice for 10 hours and you all feel I will feel better. Listen up, like you will feel good after those 15 minutes of ice, but in a long term, sleep, nutrition, hydration, these are the only things. Okay, I mean, in case of injury, yes, uh, then these will take longer time, but those things are the most important for you. Time, of course, loading, also doing the right exercises, but do not expect that your knees will get better just because you put eyes after the practice. You are hiding that real issue under that ice pack. You need to do the other things, and we will talk um about that. So let's start with understanding of the knee pain. So there are three types of, I mean, there probably there are more, but let's assume that there are three types of knee pains. There is like normal soreness, there is overload pain, and injury type of pain. So this will be super simple for you to understand. So if we have normal soreness, usually it will be more like a wide type of uh pain, like dull ache or like muscle fatigues. But after, as I said, 24 to 48 hours, you will feel completely fine. It will be fine. Then overload type of pain is much sharper, it can be more specific to the movements that you would do, such as jumping or landing, or uh it's only after the training sessions that you feel that sharper type of pain. So this would be um that overload type of pain, which I believe is the most common, and usually don't quote me on that, but most of the times it will be caused by the load, your knee pain. So injury type of pain is usually a collision or a movement after having a collision. So let's say you get bumped and then you made a step in an awkward position, and then you get that uh sudden, sharp, intense uh type of uh pain, definitely you will see some swelling and you will feel that something is off. One rule for you to kind of have in your package, so it's called Ottava knee rule. So if after there's some kind of like a knee type of injury, we don't know how serious it is, but if you cannot walk for four steps or cannot bend your knee at 90 degrees, or have kind of bone tenderness, you will need to get an X-ray to double check for fracture. Okay, either four steps, or you cannot bend your knee more than 90 degrees, or you have some bone tenderness, so then you need to check for the X-ray, okay, in the hospital. So now when you know these different types of uh knee pains, it will be easier for you to understand and take actions, whichever type of knee pain you have. But what could trigger the knee pain? So, as I started with this episode, I was telling that growth is one of the factors when your bones are growing faster than muscles and tendons and growth plates, so the growth plates are more sensitive during that phase. And what are those growth phase uh plates? So when you are growing, there at the top of your bone, there are some it's called plate, but just imagine it's like a line, and from that part your bone is getting longer, so you are growing. So that's why if you're watching a video, so those growth plates are open, so you are just getting longer, your bones are getting longer, you are growing, and when those growth plates uh close, you can see that on the x-ray, it means that most likely you have stopped uh growing. So when you are growing, they are more sensitive, so the bone is not fully formed, so it's easier to damage it. So usually it is that uh when you are growing, you are exposing yourself to the big load, and that's why that's why those uh under the kneecap, around the kneecap, you have that knee uh pain, and it can be usually from too much of the load to the knee, to the tendon, to the muscle, and they're not able to adapt. You need to recover, one, and two, you need to also grow. So that is an issue when at a young age, whenever you're growing 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. So that's why I have an issue with someone working too much on the vertical jump, somebody who is practicing too many times, or uh somebody who is playing multiple tournaments, multiple games uh over the weekend, or playing multiple tournaments over the season. So, one simple another rule uh is like think how like just know how many uh how old are you, and that many hours we say is a rule of thumb, uh, that many hours you want to practice per week. Don't exceed that. But by practice, we mean physical education classes, we mean extra skill sessions, we meet we mean games, weight room sessions, um, and it's not only basketball. So we say that approximately this, but Stan, I'm 28. No, that doesn't apply. We usually go until uh you are in school. So uh coming back to the topic, so when you are doing that too many uh jumps, too many running sessions, too many skill sessions, your needs, your knees will need more time to adapt because they don't need to adapt only to the load that you're exposing, but they also need to grow at the same time. That's why they are much more sensitive. And uh each jump, every single jump, not only hundreds of jumps, not only hundreds of jumps, but each jump will be exposing your knees to the higher load. So if you remember the episode from the vertical jump, I told you when you are landing on that single leg after a layup or after a dunk on that single leg on the ground, you are exposing your knees, total body, not only knees, but total body to four to eight times your body weight. So if you weigh 50 kilos, you are going down to the ground, to the floor, with two to four hundred kilograms. And what if you do that 80 times in a game? Like 80 high intensity jumps, multiply that by 80 and what we had 16, 16,000. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but it's a lot, it's a lot, so that's why we don't need to uh focus too much on high-intensity jumping, sprinting uh drills. If you are someone who is more likely to develop a knee pain, because you know some of you rarely have knee pain, and that's good for you. You can just continue working and you're fine. But if you the one who usually has knee pain, don't stress these things. Like, why do you need to train that vertical jump if you will be sitting on the bench because your knees hurt? Change those exercises. Okay, so it's it doesn't matter. Like it maybe you will not have nice TikTok or Instagram video because you cannot uh windmill dunk, but you will be playing basketball. Nobody will sign uh a deal just because how nicely you can dunk. Of course, it will attract attention, but then they will see, oh, that guy, he cannot play, like his knees are always sore, he cannot practice, it hurts. No, so that's why don't spend too much time on uh focusing on that. And if we talk about age-specific, I talked a little bit, but uh age-specific nuances or age-specific advices that you could do. So for age 10 to 13 years old, around the time you start growing, focus on the fun, have some movement variety as I was talking, also, basic strength and exercises and uh reduce jump volume, especially the high-intensity jumps. If you're playing more than three times, I don't think like a uh if you're playing basketball more than three times a week, and in Lithuania, they really do play more than three, reduce the jump volume in the training session, even though kids are feeling fine and they don't have knee pain when they are jumping. Maybe we are risking that they will develop because nobody cares about how they jump, how many times they jump, uh, if they do some weird weird actions while they are jumping, like rotating and so on. Focus right on the quality rather on the quantity with those kids. I mean, always we need to focus on that because it might predispose them and that in future they will be more likely to have knee pain. So have some fun, uh, do a variety of movements and focus on basic strength exercises with correct form. For the little bit older ones who are 14 to 16 years old, you might be having knee pain because of the load. So for that strength, muscle strength, I don't know why I said that, but I said it, but strength becomes very important. However, if in the weight room, when you are training, you are feeling knee pain, you of it depends. Sometimes you want to push three uh through the knee pain, but if you are feeling knee pain, it's not correct. You should barely feel anything while you are working, you should feel muscles, not knees working. As I said, we don't want joint pain. So, how can it look? Your team does a square your team coach uh says, Okay, today we're doing squats. You try squats, it hurts. You put a band, uh be attach it to somewhere, and then you put your both um legs in the ends of the band, and you do like a like a Spanish squat, but with the band, but you're still moving up and down, and you feel it still hurts. Then you do just a holding isometric Spanish squats. Uh, you know what? Usually it doesn't hurt, but you know what? It hurts. You go to the wall sets, you go to 90 degrees, it hurts. You go to above 90, oh, it doesn't hurt. Grab the heaviest dumbbell you can hold for one minute, and that is your squat for that day. Okay, but don't forget that you need to work on the all the other muscles around. You need to work on the quads, uh, on the hips, on the hamstrings, on the Um adductors, AB ductors on the glutes, all those muscles they need to work. So for someone who is um having knee pain, they might have zero problems, usually, zero problems doing deadlifts, especially Romanian deadlift. Okay, so you have to work tremendously, super hard on all of those muscles that are not causing you knee pain. Because when your muscles will get strong or significantly stronger, you might feel less in your knees because muscles will be strong enough to take all those thousands of kilograms, as I was saying, all those thousands and kilograms on the court when you are landing, jumping, sprinting. So that's why we need strong, strong muscles. And if you are not paying too attention to recovery, you will not be able to increase the load on the court. Recovery will kind of empty the tank, empty that uh capacity, as I said. So if you have collected 100% of the load and then your knees start to hurt, but you just barely like slept and your nutrition was terrible, maybe you will recover to 50%, and then you will have only 50% of the capacity left for you to train the next day. But if you slept well, if you ate well, if you ate a little bit more of the vegetables, anti-inflammatory type of food, you can Google it. Usually it's like green leafy vegetables will be great. But if you did good, and also always sugar, sugar is the one that caused not causing influencing negatively or influencing so that you have a more inflamed body. So sugary drinks, any type of sugar is no go if you have knee pain. Anyway, coming back to that, if you are eating like trash, not sleeping well, playing computer games, and your recovery is not good, the next day practice will be not good. Your knees will hurt, and you like, why do they hurt? And for other person who also plays as much as I do, it doesn't hurt. Maybe the other person lives the same way as you do, but he just doesn't have the knee pain for other reasons, or maybe he's recovering well, and you see him only on the practices, and uh, of course, recovering well consistently, consistently. And let's go to the group number three, age 17 to 19. Your growth will slowly will slow down, so it's good because you have less of the energy stores going for growing, however, it's not good because uh maybe you would like to grow a few more centimeters, so next time your knees hurt, appreciate that knee pain a little bit because it means maybe that you are growing. So happy. I wish those knees will hurt forever, so you will be growing forever. But uh, in general, you understand that since we are growing less at that age, more recovery will go. Uh more things that you do for recovery will go for recovery rather than growing, so it's good, but you really need to take care by that time your mechanics. If you did not do that in uh the previous age, so this is very important. Your body is at different playing at different level, different speed, different body weight. If your mechanics are still terrible, that you don't know how to manage yourself in space and you land awkwardly, you have zero stability in landing. So you really need to focus on that before thinking about developing working on the vertical jump. How to test your um how to test your mechanics? Record yourself, look how you land. Do you use your hips when you are squatting down? Do you initiate the movement with your hips rather than with the knees going forward? Or like does your body bend forward? So record yourself from the side view and watch yourself. Also, do a jump, see how you land again. Do you initiate the movement with your hips? Knees are more important for jumping, however, if we're talking about absorbing forces, hips will be much more important for to absorb the force rather than going directly to the knees. Okay, another thing very important in this age, load management. So I think everyone knows what it is, but like managing that your weekly load would not spike more than 10, maximum 20% of the previous week load. So if you're shooting every day 100 shots, and then next day and next week you start to shoot 300, so that will be not 10 or 20, and not 30 if you thought that will be 300% increase. So most likely you will have sore knees unless your body is capable of uh adapting to that, so you will not, but most likely you will have, so bear in mind load management will be very important, and what is super important recovery, recovery, super important at this age. You will be able to talk to the coaches if you are feeling terrible knee pain, talk to them, explain. You are not BSing them, you really feel that knee pain. But if you are someone who always complains and my knees hurt and I just rest, I will we'll talk about it later. But if you just rest and do nothing, of course your knees will not get better. You need to train them, you need to work those muscles, those muscles around the knees in order to be able to endure that load later. So, what we talk about those adjustments just recently, and resting is not good. You need to, if you have knee pain, maybe you can rest a little bit to degrees for like one maximum two days to decrease that inflammation, but you need to slowly build that tolerance up. It's very difficult to build that tolerance up with basketball training sessions, it's much easier to build that in a controlled environment, which is weight room. So treat like whenever you go to play, whenever you go to weight room, treat each jump like uh okay. I'll use this example in one ESPN uh article I was reading, and uh, some reporter, some coach said to the reporter that I think they were talking about Zion, and uh in high school they told him, Look, you have to, or maybe it was P3 performance. Anyway, they said to him, Look, each jump you do right now in high school will take$1,000 out of your pocket when you will have a professional career later. I think it was about Zion. So imagine this each jump, treat that each jump as like 100 euros, 10 euros, 1,000 euros, depending on the level you will achieve. But each jump you do is like clink 10 euros, another layup, 10 euros, and then we see everyone is form shooting under the basket because everyone wants to be rich. Anyway, so you need to manage the volume. So when you go to the weight room, don't start with 50 jumps right away, do 10, see how your knees react. You come next day, okay. Let's do 20. Okay, it will be double, but it's still not that much when we are talking about hundreds uh of high intensity, hundreds of high-intensity jumps, so then we are uh talking about the high volume that you don't want to increase significantly. But you need to build that capacity slowly. Other things that you can do if your knees hurt when you are playing five-on-five, maybe you can reduce the impact. Maybe you could ask, hey coach, could I work a little bit more on the skills today? My knees are bothering me a lot, or hey coach, can I go to the weight room instead and do some exercises to help my knees? Or you foam roll the quads, hamstrings, all the ties? Maybe, maybe you would do less off-shooting because each shot you take, you are jumping. So maybe you would instead of shooting, you would just be passing the ball because your knees hurt. Of course, you don't you want to shoot, but would you rather shoot or play? You know, so if you are feeling that your knees are getting tired and you have 20 minutes of shooting, do extra skill, do extra uh work on skills or on uh dribbling and then pass the ball to others, they will appreciate. And last thing that you could do is important, is uh also it's about the recovery that you need to plan to have easy and hard days. We don't want to have only easy days, as well as we don't want to have only hard days. If each day is hard, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, game, Friday, Saturday, game, each day is hard for you, you will not be able to recover. Your knees will hurt. If not knees, you're back, if not back, your Achilles. Something will hurt. You need to manipulate. So one day needs to be hard, next day needs to be easy. If you push for two days, the third has to be easy. Thumb of rule is no more than three high intensity days. Game, if you played more than 25 minutes, is a high intensity day. Medium, okay, depending on the game, but 15 to 25 will be medium intensity day. And then easy up to 15. I mean, unless it was super tough, 15 minutes straight you played, so then it's of course difficult. But don't let's not get to into the details. Think about that three high intensity days is uh per week is really difficult. If you have more, you might be overloading your system after each hard day. We want to have uh recovery day. Before hard day, we can have medium day. Of course, it depends, but if you have these kind of black and white answers, it will be easier for you to understand. But nothing is black or white, everything is like it depends. But my goal here is not to say that like hey Stan, what I what what I need to do for vertical jump, it depends. Stan, if my knees hurt, what I need to do, it depends. Uh Stan, what should I eat? It depends. Of course, it always depends. And if you need more black and white answers, let's have some rules that I believe are important for you to have, understand, use uh when you are playing basketball. So, rule number one is if your pain, knee pain increases while you're playing, most likely you need to stop or reduce the load. It's obvious, but you still go through it. If it gets worse, stop it. Stop it. Uh, work on the other things because pain is signaling that something is off. You need to change something in order not to continue breaking or damaging the tissues. Okay, of course, not always possible to stop if it's during the game. Uh you might need to push it through. I'm not recommending that, but I know that people do. Some people take uh medicine and they then continue pushing through. But um keep in mind if it's getting worse during the practice, change something. Maybe don't jump uh off one leg, maybe don't jump, work on your skills. Um, so you still will be running and playing defense and changing direction, but don't shoot three-pointers, don't shoot in general, pass the ball to others, work on other skills, change something. Rule number two is if you have pain that when your knees warm up, you feel better. Usually it is safe, but you need to pay attention. This is a signal that if you will not do, if you will not change anything in future, most likely you will develop that rule number one pain that it will increase during the activity. What you could do, do do some isometrics. I'll I would start with that. Do some isometrics, foam roll your quads hard, foam roll your quads hard. That would be important thing to do. Also, you need to check flexibility. Can you touch glutes with your heel and knees touching each other at the same time? So you're just standing on one leg, bend your knee as much as you can, and do you have enough of quad flexibility? That would be a simple test for you to do. So maybe you need to do you need to change that thing, you need to change your flexibility, maybe you need to change your strength. Rule number three is during growth spurt, pain is very common. Unfortunately, it is common, and many of you will have knee pain. So if you have grown more than eight centimeters in a year, you are growing fast. Sometimes people grow 10 centimeters, which is what three inches, and I have heard crazy stories seven inches in a summer. But if you are growing eight centimeters in a year, you are growing fast. And if your knee pain, if you have knee pain and nobody can know why, so that is an issue. Rule number four is that pain will change the way you move, and it can start hurting other areas, it can start hurting other sides of your knee, like inside, below the knee. It can move around, or maybe your back will hurt just because you are planting it differently, your feet uh you are planting your foot differently. So limping is no go. Is no go. If you are limping because of the knee pain, it's go back to that rule number one: stop doing what you're doing, change something, get assessed, uh, go to doctor, check. If they cannot find anything and everything seems okay, you still need to change something. You cannot do the set, you cannot go the same path as you were going and expect that you will have different results. If you have a coach, strength coach, talk to the strength coach, ask him what you could do. If you have no strength coach, talk to me, I'll help you with whatever it can. Rule number five is swelling or locking or some kind of like instability. You need to stop immediately. Immediately. And very important for you to get assessed. If you have swollen knee or kind of knee catches, you go to the hospital. If knee like catches and locks, probably you will need to have uh you'll need to do MRI. Also, if you do a knee deep knee flexion, like bending your knee maximally, and you feel that also. So, yes, definitely do MRI. But you need to get a professional assessment to double check, it's not normal, don't push through that. Rule number six persistent week, which is more than a weak knee pain. You also need to check, even if you're resting, it hurts. Um get assessed. It will cost you uh few uh dollars, few euros, whatever it will cause, but you at least will know what is with you, or maybe that it's just knee pain. There is nothing. So if you know that there is nothing, you know that what you can do. I told you those isometric exercises, foam rolling, stretching, whatever you need to work on, coach will help you find uh what you are missing and work on that. Rule number seven quality will beat quantity as always. Quality is the most important thing, even with the vertical jump. If you remember, you if you want to improve your vertical jump, you want to jump for quality, for max effort, not for max amount of jumps you can do. Same with the knee pain, more games or practices will not automatically make you better. If you will overschedule yourself with too many games, too many um activities, probably it will leave you sore in the knees. I mean, anywhere you might be tired, but you should prioritize not only training but recovery also. Remember hard and easy days. What I was telling one day per week is a must day off, but recovery, such as sleep, nutrition, hydration, super important. And rule number eight is when you are unsure to play safer. If you or your coach can decide whether you need to push through that pain or you should get subbed, get subbed. Maybe your brain, your mind, God is telling you something. Hey, today's not a day. Today's not a day. So get subbed. Okay, go check that knee, see what's up. If nothing, perfect, you know, continue working. But if something is off, most likely something is off. You cannot just kind of push it through because maybe it will get worse. It's better to know that there's nothing rather than play with the thought, what if? So for you to kind of remember, it was pretty long episode, but for you to remember what you could take from this episode, so let's break it into three simple key takeaways. So, first, that not all knee pain is the same, you know the differences between soreness, overload, um, and injury. You remember that Ottawa rule, like four steps, remember that? So it will help you to make smarter decisions. Second takeaway would be that usually knee health will come to load management. You have to respect the growth. If you are growing, you need to train a little bit less, not more. You need to build the strength, not only work on the vertical jump and prioritize recovery. I don't know how many times I said it recovery. And third, that your goal is long term success. In basketball. And it's not about pushing through everything. It's about training hard and smart. Staying available will be the most the best ability you can have is availability. Meaning coach says, Hey Stan, let's go. Team needs you. Let's go to play. You know what, coach? I cannot play. My knees hurt. So if you're not available, you are minimizing your chances. If you have knee pain or other type of pain, you're not available. Maybe you can play, but not at your max abilities. So it's fine that you have knee pain. Most of us will have when we are playing basketball, but not doing anything about that is a choice. And I don't want you to take that choice. I want you to take choice of possibility, choice of choosing doing something, and all of those things: recovery, uh, strength, flexibility, load management, hard, low days, these are the choices that you can make in order to maximize your chances. So if this episode helped you with anything, share it, share it on Instagram, tag me, share it anywhere you want, share it with a teammate, uh, subscribe. And if you have any question, or if you have something more that I have not covered it today, let me know and I will make another episode about the knee pains or any other question that you have. But for now, keep training basketball, body and mind.