“I’ve got around a forty-five inch vertical off one foot, and about forty, forty-one off two feet. Jake and Jordan Kilganon set up a call for me about a year ago because I ruined my knee pretty bad. Since then, I’m basically back to normal.”
“It was never bad enough to take me out. I just ignored it — and it was fine that I ignored it, because I kept jumping good.”
The day it blew up
“My first dunk, I went up for a double-up, which dunkers know is actually easier than a regular dunk, because I was scared about my knee off two feet. It went fine. Then my next dunk I tried to jump off one leg for a windmill, and it hurt a lot. I was like, alright, fuck it, I’m pushing through. Went for it again — and then my knee just fully gave up, didn’t let me jump. I was cooked.”
“It was pretty bad for a while. I tried lifting about a week after, and deadlifts were basically the only thing that didn’t hurt it.”
Resting
“I just fully rested, and I realized that does not work for me. I would have had to be lifting, maybe doing eighty percent jumps, just to keep my body adapting. Changing that after the call helped a lot.”
“I had two weeks where my knee experienced no load, and then I expected to go to a dunk contest and jump forty-five inches off one foot. That zero to a hundred just did not work at all.”
“When it was really bad, it never warmed up. It just hurt the whole time, which I’d never had before. I could always warm up through it.”
What the rehab looked like
“It was just: whatever doesn’t hurt, jump at that percentage. I’d go on a low rim and jump at fifty percent, a regular session off two feet and one foot.”
“Because I’m such a dunk addict, I switched to my right leg for about a month, and that didn’t hurt at all. Once my knees started to get a little better, I switched to more two-foot stuff.”
“I started with as light a weight as I needed to not feel pain — which was probably the bar, honestly. Then I’d slowly add weight. It took about three to four months to get back to my strength from before.”
“On leg extensions, it must have been fifty pounds when I started. I can do two-fifty now.”
Where he is now
“Today I can jump a hundred percent, but I know if I jump really well, my knees are going to hurt, and then I’ll have to lift and do easier training for a bit. Back when it was bad, walking down the stairs hurt, walking up the stairs hurt. I’m a painter, so even going up a ladder, every single step hurt my knees. That was maybe ten percent. Now it’s probably ninety.”
“I jump higher now, so there’s more force going into my knee, and I’m heavier. In college I was a hundred fifty pounds; now I’m one seventy, one seventy-five. Jumping every day just isn’t possible anymore.”
“I can’t consistently jump high every week, which I think I could before. But I’m still jumping just as high when I decide that’s the day I want to perform.”
“I’m still not strong for how high I jump, so if I want to get better, I’ve got to get stronger. But honestly, I think the knee pain just comes with how high I jump.”
“My last event was for the NBA. I had to jump the first day, then one day of rest, then jump again. I got a flare-up, but it wasn’t that bad — which is probably the best my knees have ever felt, which is crazy.”
“I’m praying I can get back to a hundred percent, but it’s taking so long that it’s hard to even imagine getting there again.”
In hindsight
“Before both those contests, I would have done more lifts — probably just slow lifts. I would have lifted instead of fully resting, and still gone out and dunked, just not at a hundred percent. Then hopefully my knee wouldn’t have gone zero to a hundred and completely blown up.”
“I’ve gone to doctors before, and they’re the ones who told me to just rest — take a few weeks off and the pain should dissipate. I’ve tried that. It does not work. That’s why I came to you guys.”
What worked, what didn’t
“I always do dynamic stretching when I warm up, but no static stretching. If my knee was hurting and I tried to stretch my quad, it just hurt more, so I realized pretty quick that wasn’t helping.”
“If I was just a jumper, I’d probably do plyometrics. But because I want to get better at dunking, I’d rather get all my jump volume from the actual dunking.”
“I’ve heard from a lot of people online that icing and straps don’t really do much, so I didn’t try much of that. The one thing I think actually helps is diet. If I eat consistently bad, or if I drink, my knee flares up the next day.”
“Sprinting was one of the biggest things in getting me to the forty-five.”
“I had no knee issues at all as a kid. I actually thought it’d be the opposite — that getting enough exposure young would make it less bad later.”
“I’m six foot, one-seventy. My squat is kind of a half squat, but I could probably do three-fifteen. My deadlift is pretty good because I have long arms — around four hundred. But the other guys who jump as high as me lift a lot more.”
The dunk-world mindset
“I’ve kind of heard it all. The older guys at dunk contests tell me I’ve got to ice my knees and stretch. But the young guys are on Instagram following people like you and THP, telling me to do the ISOs and have a good warm-up. That’s the route I went, and it helps. The old-head way just seems like something everyone dismisses now.”
“Guys in the dunk community jump way more than a high jumper or long jumper, just because we love jumping so much. Sometimes we’ll jump for an hour and a half straight.”
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