Patellar tendinopathy — what athletes call jumper's knee — is the most common chronic injury in volleyball. Most athletes treat it reactively: ice after practice, a foam roller routine from YouTube, playing through discomfort until it becomes a real problem. The smarter play is to never let it develop in the first place.
At The Performance Lab, we screen every incoming volleyball athlete for the movement patterns and strength deficits that predict patellar tendon stress. The goal isn't just injury prevention — it's building an athlete whose body can handle the volume of jumping that a serious volleyball season demands, without breaking down by October.
Here's how we approach it.
What Actually Causes Jumper's Knee
Patellar tendinopathy develops when the load placed on the patellar tendon consistently exceeds the tendon's capacity to recover. In volleyball, that load comes from repetitive jumping — approaches, blocks, defensive dives — compounded by the fact that most athletes train year-round across club and school seasons with very little true off time.
The injury is fundamentally a load management failure. Not a weakness failure, not a flexibility failure — a load-management failure. The tendon absorbs more stress than it can dissipate, microtrauma accumulates, and eventually the athlete feels the dull ache below the kneecap that signals patellar tendinopathy is developing.
Two things make volleyball athletes especially vulnerable: high jump volume and poor landing mechanics. The first is inherent to the sport. The second is correctable.
Landing Mechanics: The First Screen
When a volleyball athlete comes through our door, the first thing we film is their landing pattern. A single-leg landing from a box drop tells us everything we need to know about where their knee stress is going.
A healthy landing pattern distributes force across the hip, knee, and ankle in roughly equal measure. An unhealthy pattern — the one that predicts tendon stress — shows up as a stiff knee, forward trunk lean, and excessive knee-over-toe angle with minimal hip bend. The athlete is loading the quad and the patellar tendon to absorb almost all of the impact, instead of spreading it across the entire posterior chain.
This is a mechanics problem, not a strength problem, and it's fixable in 4 to 6 weeks of deliberate practice. But most athletes never get the feedback, because nobody films their landings.
The Eccentric Loading Protocol
Eccentric strengthening — loading a muscle during the lengthening phase of contraction — is the most evidence-backed intervention for both preventing and rehabilitating patellar tendinopathy. For volleyball athletes without existing symptoms, we use it proactively: heavy slow resistance on the quad under eccentric load, two to three times per week, integrated into the broader strength program.
The classic version is a single-leg decline squat on a 25-degree board. It isolates the quad eccentrically and builds tendon tolerance under controlled load. For athletes with a training age under two years, we start with bilateral work and regress the movement until they can control it cleanly. For more advanced athletes, we layer in greater depth and load over the program arc.
This isn't a standalone protocol — it lives inside the full strength program. Eccentric quad work without hip strength to support it is an incomplete fix. We train the whole chain.
The FMS Screen and What We Look For
Every athlete at The Performance Lab goes through a Functional Movement Screen at intake. For volleyball athletes, two patterns are especially predictive of knee issues: the deep squat and the hurdle step.
A deep squat score of 1 — where the athlete can't achieve the position at all — tells us the hip mobility and ankle mobility are limiting how load distributes across the lower body. The knee is forced to compensate. Over hundreds of jumps, that compensation adds up.
A hurdle step that shows the standing leg collapsing inward signals weak hip abductors. That hip collapse under load becomes knee valgus in a landing — one of the most common contributors to both patellar tendinopathy and ACL injury in female athletes.
When we see either of these patterns, we build the corrective work directly into the training program. Not as a separate "prehab" routine that gets skipped — as actual training that the athlete does and that we track.
Load Management Across the Season
The other half of prevention is managing total jump volume across the training and competitive calendar. This is where most performance programs fail volleyball athletes: they train hard in the off-season, the club season starts, and nobody adjusts the programming. The athlete is now absorbing team practice volume, club match volume, and the same off-season training load on top of it. Something breaks.
At The Performance Lab, we coordinate with athletes on their full calendar. When club season ramps up, we reduce plyometric volume in the training program and shift emphasis to strength maintenance and recovery. The goal is managing total systemic load — not just what happens in the weight room.
This sounds obvious. It's almost never done. Most performance gyms run the same program in October that they ran in June.
The Printed Report Card Tracks It All
Every six weeks, every athlete at The Performance Lab gets a printed report card with their movement screen scores, performance metrics, and any noted movement corrections. The FMS overhead squat and hurdle step scores live on that card. If a score regresses between re-tests, we know exactly when it happened and can trace it to what changed in the program or the athlete's external load.
Prevention only works with data. You can't manage what you don't measure. That's why the report card exists — and why athletes stay healthy across a full year at The Lab in a way they don't at programs where nobody's tracking anything.
What to Do Right Now
If your athlete is a volleyball player in the Bloomington area and has ever complained of knee pain or stiffness after practice — even mild, even occasional — bring them in for the free assessment. We'll screen their movement patterns, watch them land, and tell you honestly what's building up and what we'd do about it.
If they're perfectly healthy, the assessment is still worth doing. Knowing the baseline is how you keep it that way.