Patellar Tendonitis Exercises: Joel Smith on Knee Health

Based on Episode 126 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a listener Q&A with host Joel Smith.

The most useful patellar tendonitis exercises, in Joel Smith’s experience, start higher up the chain than the knee itself. Smith, the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and a longtime strength and track coach, has dealt with cranky knees and Achilles as a jumper and has coached plenty of athletes through the same thing. His view is that jumping knee pain is usually a symptom of how the foot and the rest of the leg are working, so the fix is rarely just rest, and it is rarely a single exercise. (This reflects a coach’s training experience, not medical advice. See a qualified professional for persistent or severe knee pain.)

Key Takeaways

• Knee pain often starts at the foot. Over-gripping the toes locks the foot and routes force up the shin into the knee.
• Load the tendon with isometrics and slow eccentrics. Smith leans on long-hold isometrics and very slow lowering, ideas he draws from Jay Schroeder.
• Adapt in the long position. The stretched position is where he believes you lay down the best collagen for healthy joints.
• Fix your plyometric waveforms. Long-and-high patterns spare the knee and Achilles; vertical-only hopping hammers them.
• Knees over toes work has a place. Built slowly, deep-range knee work can rebuild tolerance rather than wreck it.

Why your knees hurt when you jump

Smith’s first move with knee pain is to look away from the knee. A big culprit, in his experience, is over-gripping the toes during lifting and landing.

When you grip the ground with your toes, you’re locking yourself into one plane of movement. You’re basically throwing the brakes on.

Lock the foot out of pronation and supination, he explains, and the force has to go somewhere, so it travels up the shin to the next joint, the knee. It echoes the joint-by-joint idea that the painful site is often not the source.

Where the pain is, it ain’t. It’s starting somewhere else.

His fix starts with awareness plus a foot cue he credits to Pat Davidson: feel a tripod of the heel and the two balls of the foot, with only a light press through the big toe, instead of clawing the toes into the ground. Restoring that foot freedom takes pressure off the knee before you ever load it.

The patellar tendonitis exercises Joel Smith leans on

For loading the tendon itself, Smith pulls two methods from Jay Schroeder: extreme isometrics and extreme slows. The isometric is a long hold in a stretched position. The slow is an exercise performed with a very slow eccentric, taking thirty seconds to as long as a minute and a half to lower, with little or no concentric phase. He pairs these with collagen support, but the loading is the point, and the position matters most.

If you can adapt in the long stretch position, that’s the best position to lay down collagen and the best position to adapt to for healthy joints.

For a coach or athlete, the application is concrete: rather than only resting a sore patellar tendon, give it slow, controlled, stretched-range load it can tolerate, and progress it patiently. That long-position adaptation is the thread connecting his isometrics, his slow eccentrics, and his views on deep-range knee work below.

Fix your plyometric waveforms

Smith also blames a lot of knee and Achilles trouble on the shape of the jumps athletes repeat. Hurdle hops and similar drills are often purely vertical, up and down, which compresses the same tissues over and over.

Rather than vertical, vertical, vertical, watch the waveforms. You see long, high, long, high in real sport, and that is way easier on the joints.

Real sport, even the jumping events, moves in long-and-high patterns rather than straight up. Training plyometrics that way lets the body dissipate force horizontally instead of dumping it into the knee and Achilles, and it still lets the athlete be fast. If your knees flare up from jump training, look at whether your plyometrics are stuck in a vertical-only groove.

Are knees over toes good?

Smith is positive on the knees-over-toes idea, with a caveat about how you get there. The body can adapt to deep-range knee loading, he says, but only if you build it slowly.

Catching a heavy clean with the knees far forward when they already hurt will not feel good. Earning that range over time is a different story, and it ties back to his main principle: the long, stretched position is the best place to lay down healthy tissue. He speaks well of the work the ATG and knees-over-toes coaches are doing for athletes rebuilding from serious knee issues, and points to their material as a source of progressions. The takeaway is not that deep knee bends are dangerous or magic, but that tolerance is built gradually, in the long position, over weeks.

The principle underneath: durability before performance

Across all of it, Smith keeps coming back to patience. Tendons and connective tissue remodel slowly, so the athlete who wants healthy knees has to play a longer game than the one chasing a number this week. Build the foot, load the tendon in the position it has to tolerate, vary the jump patterns, and progress deep-range work over time. Do that, he argues, and the knee stops being the thing that derails training. Again, for persistent or severe pain, get it assessed by a qualified professional; this is training guidance, not a diagnosis.

Frequently asked questions

How do you fix patellar tendonitis?
Joel Smith’s approach is to load the tendon rather than only rest it: long-hold isometrics and very slow eccentrics in a stretched position, built up patiently, alongside fixing the foot mechanics (over-gripping the toes) that route force into the knee. Persistent cases should be seen by a professional.

What are good patellar tendonitis exercises and stretches?
He favors stretched-range isometric holds and slow eccentric lowering for the tendon, a tripod-foot cue to stop clawing the toes, and long-and-high plyometric patterns over vertical-only hops. The common thread is loading and adapting in the long position.

Are knees over toes exercises safe?
Smith thinks deep-range knee work is valuable when built slowly. Loading the knees far over the toes with heavy weight while they already hurt is a bad idea, but earning that range gradually can rebuild tolerance and lay down healthier tissue.

Why do my knees hurt when I jump?
Often the knee is the victim, not the source. Smith points to over-gripping the toes (which locks the foot and sends force up the shin) and vertical-only plyometric patterns as common upstream causes worth addressing first.

About the host

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports. A former collegiate strength coach and track and field coach, he focuses on speed, power, and the way the foot, tendons, and nervous system drive movement, and he is the author of Speed Strength. Listen to the full Q&A on Just Fly Sports.