Imagine the trainee whose left knee has hurt during squats for four years. Year 2: pain appears, the trainee googles it, concludes "tendinitis," stops squatting. Year 3: tries Instagram physio exercises inconsistently, buys eighty-pound knee sleeves, still doesn't see a clinician. Year 4: tells the coach "I can't squat anymore," programmes around it. Year 5: still painful, still no physio, now blames "genetics."
In the next rack: a trainee who tweaked a knee in Year 3, saw a qualified physiotherapist within two weeks, followed the prescribed rehabilitation protocol for eight weeks, returned to full programming, and has had no ongoing knee pain since.
Inside this one
- Red-flag triage: when to stop and see a clinician immediately
- Three common patterns (PFP, patellar tendinopathy, IT band) with operational adaptation
- Heavy-slow resistance prescription for tendinopathy (Kongsgaard 2009)
- Hip-and-quad strengthening framework for PFP-pattern presentations
- 6-week clinical-escalation timeline baked into the protocol
- Full Technical Addendum with peer-reviewed citations — audit me
The standard it is held to
Every factual claim in this volume names its source, and every claim carries a confidence grade — settled, strong, emerging or contested. Where the evidence is thin, the text says so. How it’s made, in full → · What we’ve got wrong →