HOW TO BUILD STRONG & RESILIENT SKATE KNEES

WHY SKATERS NEED RESILIENT KNEES

Ok so step one for healthy knees is realising that you expect a lot from your knees when you skate. From popping tricks, taking impact from landing, and all the tasty ways we can eat shit - whether it’s falling and rolling, sack of potatoing it, coming to a stop quickly from a drop, running out from a bank, or sacking the ground whilst doing the splits.

Even the more subtle movements - like stabilising you in grinds, slides, manuals and pushing - have your knees working hard. And all of that often for periods of time longer than a marathon.

The legends in and around your knee supporting all this are a bunch of different muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage and a flabby little shock absorber called the meniscus. Your knee is actually two joints - one that flexes, extends and actually rotates a tiny bit, and the weird little floaty bone on the front you know as the kneecap.

Now even though its main movement is some pretty basic shit - just flexing and extending - getting strong and resilient knees for skateboarding is actually way more complex than just working that motion.

(Later on I'll be showing you a huge variety of exercises you can do.)

Like we just saw there’s a massive variety of movement involved in skating that puts the knee in many different positions, each applying different forces to the knee.

Fuck knows how much force Jaws has been exposed to but Soletech, the guys that used to make éS, Emerica, and Etnies did some research back in the day where they analysed the impact forces of different tricks down a 9 stair handrail and measured impact forces as much as 17x the bodyweight of the skaters jumping down it, so we know it’s a huge amount.

But even for those of us that don’t jump off buildings, the lower forces from skating flat and ledges can accumulate too. For example, the other day, one of the skaters I coach told me he filmed his whole session and counted close to 1000 trick attempts!

Now all that impact has to be bad right? That’s why skaters' knees hurt, wellll yes and no…

First off, force doesn’t affect all of us the same. You see, your whole body is connected and moves as one piece. If a certain part of the chain lacks mobility, or is weak or unstable, then your ability to handle force and move well changes.

For example, lack of stability and mobility at the ankle might lead to changes in how you move at the knee or hip, to compensate for the lack of function and ultimately find it elsewhere. These different movements and positions might be less suitable to handle force, placing excessive stress in places you don't want it.

This can lead to wear and tear damage to the tendons or ligaments around the knee, causing overuse issues like jumper's knee/patella tendinopathy, patellofemoral pain syndrome. Or more serious, sudden injuries like ACL and meniscus tears.

Things like this totally change how impact and the intensity of skating affects your body.

But even if you were to move absolutely perfect, impact being bad for your knees is still a common misconception - and not just in the skate world.

Yes, it is true that every one of us has a limit to how much impact we can handle and recover from, and passing these limits is when pain and injury can kick off. Whether it’s from one massive amount of force causing something like an MCL tear, or smaller ones repeated over time without enough recovery causing wear and tear like cartilage damage.

What is inherently bad for your knees though is actually the complete opposite - not skating at all and not using them - and we know this from research comparing people who stayed active across their lives vs the ones that didn’t.

Why? Well you lose what you don’t use. But using your body - through say, skating - causes it to adapt to get stronger and more resilient, so those same tasks cause less strain next time you do them.

Take Haans, a 45 yr old sedentary office worker that e-scoots to work when it’s dry, but doesn’t skate. If you made him jump down a 12 stair, well, he’s likely going to eat absolute shit and probably blow out his knee. But a skater who regularly skates gaps can jump down the same stair set a bunch of times and wake up the next day as if nothing happened.

Or what about that classic type of skater that used to skate all the time, but now their partner makes them go to shitty social events and they’re only allowed to hit the skatepark once every 2 weeks where they go hard for 2 hours.

Well, these weekend warriors often develop knee pain too, whereas ones that skate 3x a week and skate hard for 2 hours each session don’t and feel absolutely fine.

It’s not that these skaters who didn’t develop problems were born just better able to handle concrete. No, they’ve gradually built their resilience by exposing their body to impact, and the forces and movement they do when they skate.

So there’s a knee health impact spectrum from couch potato on one side to Jaws on the other, with the sweet spot for healthy knees being somewhere in the middle. Exactly where on that spectrum will change from person to person. The key takeaway here is that impact is essential to keep your body healthy, but shocking the system with too much force, either at once or repeated over time, is a recipe for a delicious shit sandwich.

To sum things up so far, the resilience of your knees and how much impact and skating destroys your body depends on how well you move and how much force you can tolerate.

This is really where the secret sauce for pain, injury reduction and longevity lie, and if your goal is to skate for as many years as possible whilst reducing the chance of knee pain and injury risk, just skating is NOT enough. Especially if your go to recovery methods are beer and kebabs.

Let me repeat that… you cannot get everything you need to keep your knees healthy and resilient purely from skating.

When you’re young, maybe. But everyone will hit a point where it won’t be enough. And in fact, the way many people skate actually increases their risk of pain and injury, which we’ll get to later.

So what the hell do you need to do?! Well, let me introduce a tool that is so powerful at keeping your knees feeling good. No, that’s an understatement. A tool that whether you choose to use it or not, will be one of the main deciding factors as to whether you’ll keep being able to feel good in your body as you age, and not just on your board.

SO HOW CAN YOU BUILD STRONG AND RESILIENT KNEES?

By combining exercises that take into consideration the movements we do when we skate and the forces involved, especially the ones that put us at risk of pain and injury, with what we know from decades of research on knee health, we can start to build a very solid training program to get your knees resilient and healthy for skateboarding.

Now before we get to exactly what you need to do, I have to say that the purpose of this article is ‘prevention’ and education. It isn’t designed to treat any chronic pain or injuries. If you’re in that situation, I would 100% recommend hitting up a professional, like a physiotherapist or sports medicine doctor. For everyone else, I recommend adding these kinds of exercises into your program, or hitting me up for coaching if you’d like help.

1. TRAINING LANDINGS & FORCE ABSORPTION

It’s been shown in research on other sports that 72-95% of ACL injuries occurred when landing from a jump, rapidly coming to a stop, or suddenly changing direction - and a bunch of other knee pain and injuries are triggered by similar situations.

Obviously these movements make up a huge portion of what we do when we skate. Whether it’s landing a trick from a gap, running out and bailing, even landing in a grind or manny. Now don’t let that scare you, these movements aren’t inherently bad and will always be a part of skating, but there are certain things that make them more or less risky.

One of them is your ability to absorb impact.

Before I break this down, get up now and do a little test - I want you to film yourself stepping off a sofa or chair and landing on the ground and we’ll look back at this later in the article.

A lot of skaters I’ve worked with when they first came to me couldn’t effectively absorb impact, and even some of the biggest pros in the game don’t. Chris Joslin is a good example of this, as he often lands stiff legged. Whereas Reynolds is an amazing example of good force absorption with his deep squatted landings.

The thing is, rigid landings send way more energy/force through all parts of your knee whereas soft, ninja style landings distribute it evenly throughout your body, reducing the sudden blow of force where you don’t want it.

Imagine you’re driving in a car and suddenly slam the brakes on to avoid running over a badger, vs slowly coming to a stop at a traffic light. How do each of these feel? Obviously, slowly decelerating is going to feel way smoother, whereas slamming the brakes on will jerk you forwards and your mate sitting in the back seat will fly forwards squishing their sandwich between the seat in front and their own face. That actually happened to my mate when I crashed my car at the age of 18 lol.

Anyway, it’s the same with your body. Slamming on the brakes is like landing rigid, whereas flexing your joints allows you to decelerate slower, better distributing those spikes of energy/force through your body. The more you do this, the more your knees will thank you and even your chances of rolling away from some high impact tricks will go up!

I would put money on Reynolds aging so well being partly down to how he absorbs force. Now that doesn’t mean you have to land deep squatted every time, even he doesn’t land like that every time. But considering how much you can jump in a session and how high the forces can be, you likely want to avoid these stiff landings as much as possible and aim more for flexed landings.

To do that you need to build a foundation of mobility, strength, and control to absorb force well with a combination of exercises that target all of the key joints involved like the ankles, knees, hips and back. Along with exercises called plyometrics that target your ability to absorb and use elastic energy.

Building this solid foundation so your body can handle the way you skate is the basis of training. Here are some exercises that fit into this section (for demonstrations, check the video above. They're listed below in order of appearance):

Now there’s also a huge skill component to landing, which is where we put our mobility and strength to use and which you can train with actual jump and landing exercises.

One cue that's helped the skaters I work with lock in this skill is thinking "landing like a ninja" - soft and quiet. This often causes someone to flex their joints without thinking so much about it. In general, if it feels like a hard landing, it no doubt was.

You can also practice the skill of landing soft on your board too - from tricks on flat, to tricks down gaps - and again, not trying to overthink it, but trying to feel your way to moving better.

2. STABILITY, REACTIVITY & CONTROL

Carlos Ribeiro is the walking definition of stability and reactivity. He can hold insanely long grinds without barely moving his body, whereas a beginner wobbles all over the place just trying to push down the street. When stuff goes wrong, he often reacts quick enough to gracefully save a bail that a muggle non-skater would die in.

Elite stability and reactivity like his doesn’t just get him skating as well as he does, it also gives him a level of protection from injury too.

How? Well everytime you move, your body is interacting with the environment and all the forces that are coming at you from everywhere to potentially throw you off balance. From the outside, like cracks in the ground, landing on an uneven surface, a sticky patch on the ledge. To the inside, like your arm swinging or your weight shifting too far to one side.

Thousands of times a second your body reacts to these forces - through things like muscle contractions and changing the position of your joints to keep you balanced and stable. There’s no time for thinking, it’s an ultrafast feedback loop largely outside of your conscious control.

Stability is all about being able to react to change to stay balanced and move how you want, but it also allows you to tolerate and create more force in general, reducing how much force you offload to parts of the body that weren’t built for it. The slower your body reacts to correct its movement and the more unstable you are, the more your chance of injury risk and pain will go up.

One common area where instability is visible in skating is the knee going inwards, something called "knee valgus".

Valgus can happen when pushing down the street, stabilising in mannys and slides, but also bailing and jumping down gaps. This pattern has been associated with general knee pain, but also chronic issues like jumper’s knee/patellar tendinopathies and even ACL tears.

In fact, high force, stiff, single leg landings, combined with knee valgus is a pattern identified in a large number of ACL tears.

That said, don’t start thinking valgus is always a problem and guarantees an injury. That’s not the case at all, especially if it's not triggering pain and you don’t usually land stiff legged in general.

It happens to many skaters when they land squatted, and on top of that deep landings and valgus aren’t a pattern for ACL tears. In fact your knees going in to a certain degree can actually help you create more power to pop tricks, or create more space to absorb force with those deep landings.

Ultimately, in a huge number of situations knee valgus is totally natural. But if it’s excessive and there’s a clear compensation, I think it’s something we want to try and minimise, as we focus on improving our movement in general.

Ok! Let’s go back to the video you filmed of yourself landing (that you probably didn't film) and see how you looked. Did your knees go in excessively? Did you land stiff?

Movements like knee valgus off the board, often improve just by becoming more aware of the movement, and through education on better landing technique, which alone has been shown to reduce injury risk.

So it really can be useful to film yourself training, analyse your technique and try to improve it (This is something I do with every single skater I coach online).

On top of that we'll see stability improvements from just general training, but we also want to get specific with our exercise selection - targeting strength and endurance of the whole body from the foot, lateral hip muscles and core. We want to hit exercises for single leg balance, but as skateboarding isn't static, we need to be picking exercises that challenge that dynamic stability too.

Here are some exercises that fit into this section (for demonstrations, check the video above. They're listed below in order of appearance):

To summarise this section, variety in the way you skate, train and unfortunately fall too, is key to developing those reactive Carlos Ribeiro feedback loops.

Skating is so unpredictable, falling is so unpredictable, injuries are so unpredictable. So the more variety of forces and movements you can react to, stabilise, and handle, the more resilient you're going to be in general.

Which brings up an important topic…

3. SKATE STYLE & IMBALANCES

Which is, the way many skaters skate - primarily in one stance. (I’ve done a full article/video on this going into way more detail, so just a quick side note here.)

When we skate each side of their body works completely differently. If you're pushing down the street, one leg is stabilising on the board whilst the other swings to push you forwards. If you're popping a trick, you jump more or less off both legs, but one is snapping down whilst the other slides up.

So each side of your body is doing totally different things, often for long periods of time, which can lead to imbalances in the function and capability of each of your body.

Now, imbalances aren't inherently bad, and the human body is imbalanced in general, but if they’re excessive and one side doesn’t have the strength and function to handle what you do when you skate, that's when problems kick off.

If you normally skate in one stance you might fall more or less in the same way, but remember skating is massively unpredictable. Meaning one day you’re gunna fall in a weird way, or on the other leg, and if that side can't handle it, because it simply hasn't built the resilience to these different movements and forces, you never know what's going to happen.

This is where training can really fill in the gaps, because if you're working with single leg exercises, you can really build up the function of each side of your body so it can handle the stresses of skating even more.

It's not about being perfectly, it's about making sure each side of your body can handle what you throw at it when you skate.

Oh, and skate more switch too!

4. POSTERIOR CHAIN, DECELERATION & CHANGE OF DIRECTION

Now there’s another huge, essential player when it comes to building those skate ninja knees we haven’t chatted about yet…

I’m sure someone out there just screamed “quads” at their computer screen, and yes, you do need strong quads for skating, but you’ll get those from skating and a variety of exercises we've chatted about so far, like squats, split squats and knee extension exercises.

That said, too much strength or activation of the quads - relative to the hamstrings - is actually more of a common problem than quad weakness for athletes, and can cause more harm than good. There’s no research done specifically on skaters but considering how many times skaters squat to pop tricks, it’s likely the case for us too.

The essential player I’m talking about are the muscles down the back of your body - calves, hamstrings, glutes, back muscles, etc. - called your posterior chain. Along with the quads, these are at play in all those landings and bails and a huge amount of what you do when you skate.

“I have a posterior chain?!” You’re thinking, as you feel reunited with a long lost brother. Well yes you do, and you better start giving it more attention if you want healthy knees!

You can think of it as your body’s braking system. Like a parachute, it’s primarily the activation of these muscles that slow you down as you land, decelerate and change direction.

If you imagine the quads want to extend the knee, whereas the hamstrings want to flex it, too much strength in the quads can overpower the hamstrings, causing you to land stiffer. The quads also pull the shin forwards relative to the shin, which alongside those stiff landings, is another risk factor of ACL tears. On the other hand, the hamstrings do the opposite, pulling the shin back relative to the femur, reducing the load placed on the ACL.

So we want to go hard on the posterior chain with different exercises to build strength and control. We want to train lengthening of each muscle group under load (the eccentric portion of an exercise).

For a calf raise, this is the lowering portion, which lengthens the muscle under control. Or for the hamstrings it's during hip flexion with an exercise like an RDL or knee extension during a hamstring extension exercise.

Not too long ago, this local skate shop did this speed race competition, and multiple guys got hamstring strains from it. Now, these guys skate all the time, but not this intense, which not only supports what I said before about not randomly increasing intensity, but it also brings up another important point - most injuries occur at very fast speeds, we’re talking literally milliseconds here.

Training slow and controlled can build a good base, but we can't leave it there. Linking in the last section, we need to be reactive, and able to activate our strength at high speeds.

This is where combining more traditional resistance training with higher speed training is key. A lot of the jump style exercises I’ve shown so far are a part of this, but we also want to hit deceleration a bit more specifically with skate specific exercises where we're mimicking the speeds involved in skating.

Exercises where we're rapidly coming to a stop - like you would when you land or bail; changing direction - like you would when you bail or twist for certain tricks; and sprinting and decelerating from high speeds - like you would when you run on to your board or come to a stop when running out from a bank.

Here are some exercises that fit into this section (for demonstrations, check the video above. They're listed below in order of appearance):

So by picking exercises that allow you to hit not only the movements you do when you skate, but also the speeds and therefore the forces involved, you're going to really give yourself a massive protective effect against all of the shit skateboarding throws at your body.

AND you're going to end up skating better too, which is something I haven't even mentioned yet in this article. The focus has really been on helping you build strong and resilient knees for skateboarding, but the truth is, all this stuff is actually going to help you skate better as well. Win, win.

THE HOLISTIC APPROACH

So no matter what the internet says, there’s no such thing as the one magic exercise for knee health. Resilient, healthy knees for skateboarding are ones that can handle a huge variety of forces and movements. By improving things like control, mobility, stability, strength, power and endurance, you raise your tolerance to skating, so it doesn’t cause such a stress to the system. What used to destroy your body, now doesn't even affect you because your bar is so much higher.

But alongside making your body an absolute beast, building certain habits can make a big difference to injury prevention and resilience too.

1. WARMING UP

For example, a proper warm up can be a powerful injury prevention tool, with research showing a reduction in total injuries across football seasons for players that warmed up (not to mention the countless additional research showing the benefits of warming up).

This doesn’t mean static stretching though, a proper warm up is one where you do exercises similar to the ones I showed before, with the goal of getting you physically and mentally prepared to skate.

2. BEING PROGRESSIVE WITH SKATING & TRAINING

The next is what I touched on before - progressively and consistently skating. No huge spikes in skating intensity, or so much skating it's beyond what you can recover from.

And the same goes for training. You don't need to be totally destroyed from your workouts to get results. So be gradual with increasing intensity, and especially if you’re new to it or mixing up your workouts.

3. NUTRITION, SLEEP & STRESS MANAGEMENT

And finally increasing your tolerance to absolutely everything by focusing on proper nutrition, quality sleep and not stressing so damn much.

Tied into this lifestyle focus is getting to a healthy weight. It's probably not surprising to hear that excessive weight is going to increase the stress placed on your joints.

There are so many articles on this website going into all of these topics, so click the previous link and look around.

Alright! I know that was a long one, so if you've made it this far - respect!

To sum it all up, the “just skate bro” skaters are scientifically speaking, full of shit.

If you want healthy knees that not only feel good today, but ones that keep you skating for as long as possible, you can’t just skate. You need to take care of yourself off your board too and take advantage of training, to make your body as resilient as possible and fill in the gaps that you’re not getting from skating.

Now you know what it takes to keep your knees strong and resilient for skateboarding, the question is just do you love skating enough to do the hard work?

If you'd like some guidance to take all of this information and combine it into a workout program that works for you, along with building lifestyle habits that support your health and skating, then let's work together. Click here to check out the online coaching I do for skateboarders.