Knee sleeves are used to both protect the knee from future injury and increase the compression around the knee joint itself. This protection is especially important for knees put under great daily pressure in sports such as powerlifting/ weightlifting and crossfit.
Knee sleeves can help improve your training in a number of ways:
They aid in recovery:
- They help to compress the muscles around the knee joint.
- Compressing the knee encourages blood flow through the blood vessels of the knee. Using knee sleeves can result in less pain and swelling both during and post performance.
They help with the function of the knee joint:
- Using sleeves helps keep the knee warm, limits patella movement, and can increase proprioception (the capacity to feel the position of a joint in space as sensed by the central nervous system)
- Sleeves can provide more than just mechanical support for the knee but are also used to improve proprioception when using this joint in a movement such as a squat or a clean.
They can give a psychological advantage:
- Many people feel that when they use knee sleeves it helps them lift heavier.
- This psychological aid can enable people to push past their perceived limits of their body on that day and lift more weight. This is great for competition as fatigue can set in very quickly and make people feel weaker than their body is letting on.
It helps increase the elasticity of the joint in relation to explosive power movements such as the olympic lifts:
- Using thicker and tighter sleeves can help an athlete to spring out of the hole during a clean/ snatch or any squat.
- This rebound aid can take the pressure of the bounce off the joint itself and spread it evenly to the surrounding muscles.