How To Get Rid Of Knee Pain Forever, The Best Knee Rehab Exercises, The Ancient Chinese Technique To Keep Your Knees Young & More With Ben Patrick, The "Knees Over Toes Guy".

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, my doctor says I have irreversible cartilage damage. I can never play my sport again. I will never regain full knee bent. These are the exact kind of things I fix every day. If you had never in your life heard of training back muscles and all you had done was bench presses and push ups and you wonder why you have terrible shoulder pain and someone came and said, well, let's strengthen the back muscles, that would be pretty common sense. I can put my shoulders to the floor behind me like it's nothing. Even for people with good knees. 99% can't do that. You know what I'm saying?

Help performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, folks, my guest on today's show is kind of like the up and coming go to guy when it comes to knee pain and really a whole host of kind of biomechanical performance issues. His name is Ben Patrick. You might know him as the knees over toes guy. He's pretty prolific on Instagram in terms of the information that he's dishing out as far as kind of like an outside the box approach, as the name knees over toes implies to fixing your knee pain and also doing things like improving your sports performance, your vertical jump capabilities. Just a whole bunch of issues that athletes and gosh, a whole bunch of other people who may not play basketball or noon ball every day but still have debilitating knee pain, need to know about. His company is called atg, which stands for Athletic Truth Group, and that's based out of Clearwater Beach, Florida, which is where I used to go to race the Ironman. What'd they have? The half Ironman World Championships they used to have down there, the White Sands beach in Clearwater, Florida, that was known as the Race to Go do. If you wanted a really fast bike split because it's all super duper flat down there in Florida. The hills are just like with the, the overpass that go over the roads are about the, the biggest hill you get. But anyways, Ben, Ben was a basketball player, transformed his basketball career when he went from being being injured to figuring out what to do about these, these knee injuries that he was having. And I've, I've been messing around with his program myself because I sustained a knee injury. And so I'm kind of, I'm kind of in that half ways Y phase right now between like rehabbing, comma, still cleaning things up, meaning I still have to go in and get one final scope done next month with some. Some stuff that's just hanging around in the knee joint causing some inflammation. But I'm already starting to use Ben's programs to begin to strengthen and bulletproof my knee, so to speak. So it bounces back even faster after that. So. Ben, I'm stoked to talk to you, dude.

Man, I really appreciate that intro. I've been a fan of yours since before you knew me. And I actually used some key quotes from you in explaining my system to people. So this is going to be really fun.

Yeah. You know what's funny is way back in the day, this was, you know, because a lot of the programs I do, and it sounds like you're kind of of the same. The same type of persuasion are to scratch my own itch. Meaning like I did a program for managing your own sacroiliac and hip joint pain, but by addressing hip mal rotation issues. And it was just basically like an online ebook with all the different stretches and strengthening programs you could do to re rotate your hips back into alignment, along with how to self adjust your SI joint. And then I messed up my IT band training for one of the Ironman World Championships like 10 years ago. So I spent six months rehabbing it with everything. Back then it was aqua jogging and PEMF and acupuncture, just like everything that you could throw at the IT band. What works, what doesn't.

And.

And I called that one bulletproof your knee. And a lot of these things, I'll just get injured and then throw a whole bunch of stuff at it, figure out what works and what doesn't, talk to a whole bunch of smart people, and then kind of package it up. And when I found your knees over toes program, you're putting a lot of really, really good work into this whole idea of an outside the box approach to knee pain. And I know you've got kind of a cool backstory, so fill me in, man. How'd you get into all this?

So I grew up totally obsessed with basketball. You know, by the time I was 5, I knew I wanted to go to the NBA. By the time I was, you know, maybe 9 or 10, I realized, holy crap, I don't have the genetics to go to the NBA. So I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to work like, my strategy was just to outwork anyone that I possibly knew or met who played basketball. Right.

Yeah. Which is a familiar story, by the way, because my hometown guy is John Stockton, who do face a similar uphill.

Battle so, so John Stockton was like one of my motivations. He had various books. He would wake up at 4am and like go out and practice defense. So just so you know basketball players, you don't go practice defense by yourself, you know what I mean? He was that kind of a savage. And so he was, he was waking up in like it was fourth grade that he was. You're talking fourth grade, I forget. But that's maybe like 10, 11 years old, you know, he was waking up at 4:00am I set myself an alarm for when John Stockton would wake up and I had a piece of paper that said what would John Stockton do? Because it's not like I was a morning person, I didn't want to wake up. But that alarm would go off and the light would be on and I would see what would John Stockton do? And I was like, well he would wake up, you know what I mean? Ultimately where that got me and my genetics, you know, my dad had never grabbed the rim or anything like that. By the time I was 12, I had chronic knee issues that never let up until I was about 20 years old. So I was already from 12 to 20 trying to figure out my knees. And to explain this to someone, it's actually pretty cool because the very thing that made everyone scared of knees over toes is that we're talking almost 50 years ago, some data was studied and okay, when the knee goes over the toe, there's more pressure on the knee. That piece of data scared everyone, right?

Even when I was in college when I would take biomechanics and my kinese classes and a lot of the, like the exercise rehab courses and when we were in the athletic training room, that was basically general consensus was watch the, you know, watch the football players while they're in their squat workout band and make sure nobody's got their knees going over their toes because that's gonna give you patellar tendonitis, bro.

Yeah, Anyone who's studied your work extensively knows that a human body that has pressure on it actually ages biologically younger within reason. Yeah, exactly. So the way that you create a short term problem would be by not understanding knees over toes training and by doing something that was too much. Right. So a basketball player, every time Michael Jordan ever landed from a dunk, his knee went over his toes. Like these are just. Every time you go downstairs, even when you catch an Olympic weightlift actually like you don't really have a choice and your knee goes over your toes and when you decelerate, there's tons of impact. Your Knees going over your toes, if that exceeds what you can handle, if that exceeds the pressure you can handle, that can create pain or injury. But the way you really create major long term issues is then by avoiding those pressures in your training. So now you're still experiencing them in life or in your sport or in intense heavy weight exercises or something like that, only you're not prepared for it. And your patellar tendon actually can grow and strengthen just like a muscle does. So it's no different than not having muscles prepared for something. You can not have knee tendons prepared for something. And that's exactly what's happened. So now if you look over the last 50 years, knee problems have reached epidemic levels and there's very little understanding about knee ability. So that's what I started calling my program was knee ability. I only sell ability. My job is I help people achieve less pain and more ability by increasing their pain free ability. So my program is actually like the gentlest knee system ever by the way.

I would have called it Abilonee.

That's pretty.

My sons and I play game. We make up words every day. So this will come quickly to me. Yeah. So you need to go back and call it a billy knee. But I rudely interrupted. Do continue.

No, that's hilarious and very clever. But that's the idea is the way that you're going to achieve long term health, the way that you're actually going to totally understand your needs, understand how to have healthy knees the rest of life, your of your life, how to have outlier quality of life. The wins I get for people are oh my gosh, I'm 65 and I'm back hiking. I'm 90 and I can walk again on my own, I'm 60, 70 and I can run again or I'm 18 and I had to give up my sport and now I don't. And that's what happened for me is I actually ended up getting my first division one scholarship at age 23. So I've never heard of that occurring of someone finishing high school. No recruitment at any level, partially artificial kneecap, meniscus transplant, quad tendon repair in my left knee, more diagnosed tears in my right knee. But at that point I was too depressed, already hooked on painkillers, didn't just wasn't going to go down the surgery route again.

Which is by the way a huge issue too because I ran into that because I've been fighting this knee thing. Well, I had some patellar tendonitis in college because I played middle for the men's volleyball team. And then I was playing whole set for water polo. So I basically had the shearing force of the egg beater kick, that use in water polo combined with that repetitive impact because we'd volleyball for like two, three hours a day. Then sometimes I'd be out playing sand in the early evening. So some days I was four to five hours of jumping, which is the.

Number one cause of knee pain in young people is jumping sport, right?

Even more so in females with their hip angle. But for me, I got almost depressed in college because I went for six months having to take a break from almost anything except, like, light cycling and upper body work, and thought I was gonna have to get a surgery. And I was like, 20. I would have been. Yeah, I was 20. And so I wound up getting advised by three different orthopods to go in and get knee surgery. And then the fourth guy who I went into, he just basically did. Did like a hamstring analysis on me, a Trendelberg test, you know, just basically like. Like a real good PT workup. And essentially he was like, dude, your. Your main problem is your hammies are so tight that you're. You're pulling your patella out of alignment. And I guarantee, like, if you just go off your hamstrings hardcore for the next month, you're gonna know some significant changes. And. And I. I was like, you know, it kind of sounds like you with your what would John Stockton do? 4am habit. I went after it like a freaking bulldog with the hammies. Everything from deep tissue work to long stretches to. To, you know, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation. It's just do. And within a month, like, my knee pain was gone and then stayed gone all the way up until I did Ironman triathlon. In that one year, I got it band syndrome that I wound up fixing with that. That bulletproof knee program. And then finally now, like, starting a year and a half ago, I started to get cartilage degeneration, which I've seen now in an mri. And so I got the cartilage all kind of, like, repaired, minimally invasive, by Dr. Matt Cook down in San Jose. And now the. The last thing is I've still got this little, like. It's like. Like a flap sticking up out of the cartilage, right, that kind of like rubs and clicks every time I walk. So I got to go in and get that scoped up and cleaned up. But long story short is the reason I interrupted you, as you were saying, that that you were, you had been on, on painkillers was that twice in this whole sequence? I've prescribe me painkillers due to like the debilitating throbbing that occurs at night and I'm, I'm scared to take them. Like, I, I, I have twice like taken oxycodone and cut it into quarter and taken like a quarter just so I could fall asleep at night. But I, there are so many horror stories of athletes and it starts off with some nagging little pain that they take a couple of painkillers for and all of a sudden it's like full blown addiction. So that's another, another hole you don't want to fall into.

Absolutely. And I also think for the knee I've probably, you know, what I'm going to try to cover in this podcast is rather than just theoretical or hypothetical things that almost assuredly I've done more than anyone else. And one of those is having conversations with people who have knee pain. Okay. The modern age has allowed me to have thousands and thousands of conversations with people who have knee pain. And the painkillers can be a major risk of major knee injury because it's covering the pain. Meaning I don't take anything for, I actually don't take any supplements of any kind. But like, even if there was a great natural painkiller, I wouldn't take it. If anything, I would take something to increase my pain, meaning it would alert me to where I have pain so I can address and get that area so it doesn't have pain. You see what I'm saying? So what you'll find in a lot of people who have major injuries is that they actually started taking painkillers prior to that. So now the painkillers did work effectively, so they didn't even realize the damage they're continuing to do. And then they have like a quote, unquote failure freak blowout. You see what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah. Or the other, the other two would be, which is very common now, nerve block, which just basically shuts down the nociceptive signal, pain signal to the brain, which is great if you're in pain, but again, it lets you push through and do tissue damage that you might not be aware of. And then the third would be, of course, the corticosteroids. Same thing, short term fix, it'll melt pain away. And I mean, you get more than 4 or 5 of those over the course of a year and you risk serious cartilage degeneration and tendon and ligament wear and a Whole bunch of issues related to corticosteroids. So, yeah, opioids, nerve blocks, and corticosteroids. Fricking work like magic. And then two years down the road, you get a joint replacement because you pretty much just blown out everything as you push through the pain that's there but that you can't feel.

Exactly. So let's look at what people can do about it. I'm gonna cover. You know, we can definitely cover more, but. But I would like to talk about the two things that it is insanely unlikely anyone in the world has done more than me over these last 10 years. So I'm 30 now, and like, to give you an idea, I train seven days a week, I go out and play basketball, and I'm jumping the highest of my life in my 30s, dunking every which way, even though I had never grabbed rim by age 20 and thought I would never dunk and had long given up on dunking and only from the knee training. Someone saw me playing basketball and was like, I think you could dunk. And I was like, get the out of here. But I've only kept going up. So, like, I'm 30 and I'm actually getting younger. Like, I'm getting bouncier.

By, by the way, for people who, who want to see go, go to Ben's, like, Instagram channel. If you guys go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ben Patrick. I'll link to all Ben's programs and his Instagram and everything, but you guys can see his hops on Instagram and demonstrations of some of the really unique exercises he works in.

Tons. Tons.

Yeah. So exactly.

Anything I'm talking about. Yeah, I don't have any secrets.

You've got hops.

I appreciate that. Basically, the two things I can really look back and assuredly have done more than anyone in the world in the last decade are almost opposing qualities. One of which creates healing, the other which creates bulletproofing. So if we look at what creates healing, how do we get natural healing of a knee joint, but in a way that increases that shock absorption so that you don't have the wear and tear, right. So you're running into cartilage stuff. So that's your shock absorption in there. And so you could be pain free and pushing your body really hard and then all of a sudden wind up with pain because of that degeneration over time. If you think about the activities causing that, running would be one of them. Right. There's like, over time, there's a lot of impact from Running, it's been said that a marathon is the equivalent of squatting like 500 pounds or something in terms of how much force it is playing sports, all the landings. So think about you. Look how much running have you done? Look how much jumping you did when you were younger. There's so much impact, and all that impact is coming forward into your knees. So if we start from a place where they're having successful results with preventing cartilage degeneration, it's simply backward walking in China, that's been passed on from generation to generation to generation. But for something like running, I don't think backward walking is enough. It's just an interesting thing that they figured that out thousands of years ago to prevent cartilage degeneration in the knees. So they, they pass it on and they make their elderly walk backwards.

Yeah, and quick, quick rabbit hole with the backward walking thing in China. I think, I think it's crazy. And I actually started doing this. Somebody gave me a hard time the other day at my 40th birthday party because they're like, you know, every time I drive past Ben's house, I want to tell him he's gonna die getting hit by a car. Cause he's always walking backwards up and down, like the road behind his house, which, which is, which is true. And I used to do it, like now and then, and now like every day. Because I go on a walk every day. I do probably about one tenth of the walk and I go on long walks walking backwards. I wasn't aware, I think, until you told me that it was like this old Chinese thing for keeping the knees healthy. But I would love to. And I don't know if you plan on maybe explaining later on, as you're explaining your technique about why that works, why the backward walking does the trick. But, but be sure to come back to that if you don't plan on addressing it right now.

Oh, yeah, we're going right into that right now. So that technology exists there for their elderly essentially to keep maintaining the ability to walk forwards. When you walk backwards, you're now strengthening completely different muscles. And if anyone listening to this is to stand up right now and then just take one step backward and stop and just hold that position, you would see that your knee is over your toes. So when you go backwards, you're actually doing knees over toes training, you're putting pressure on your knee. The pressure sends a signal to the body that you need to be stronger there. But unlike doing some heavy weight exercise or trying to bend too far into pain. If you find a pain free level of backward, well, now you're able to put that pressure that you need to adapt and you're able to get a lot more blood flow. But what did I do was not just backward walking. I've done hundreds of miles now backwards, but against resistance, which I actually think is safer and more effective in the sense that, let's say you're hooked up to a sled set, my second favorite after a sled on turf. So you'll start seeing sleds on turf in a lot of gyms now. They don't usually have a belt set up. I have my own belt that I just finished designing that'll be out on Amazon. Way cheaper than any of the belts out there because it's not like a common thing. So I'm bringing a cheaper one. But if you imagine dragging a sled backward on turf, it actually like slows you down. So it's almost less impact but more pressure. So we need that pressure on the knees over the toes in order to cause the adaptation of that area. And when you do this, I mean, you can really get with this leg, you can get a 10 out of 10 burn. So for 10 years now, I've been chasing that 10 out of 10 blood flow. It takes a lot of blood flow to get down to the tendon level and even more blood flow to get down to the ligament level. So if anyone just understands this really quick, muscles, tendons, ligaments, you have an inverse thing going on here. The muscle is the weakest of the three, but the muscle is the most flexible of the three. So the ligament is the least flexible, but the strongest. The tendon is in the middle. So the tendon is more flexible than a ligament, but not as strong as a ligament. It's stronger than a muscle, but not as flexible as a muscle. And in terms of blood flow, it's very easy to go get a bicep pump. Much harder to get blood flow like to your knee, the tendons in your knee. And then even hardest to get it into a ligament level and even wicked hard in terms of getting down to a cartilage level. But I'm dead certain that you can actually create changes to the cartilage, these degrading kind of things. You can gradually reverse them out by finding a pain free level and gradually resisting it to the point that you're getting 10 out of 10 blood pumps pain free. So what I have used is a sled on turf. There is a company called.

But you're not pushing the Sled, you have a belt, you're dragging the sled and you're walking backwards.

Great question. Backwards is mandatory. You can also. So like if, let's say you had like a 10 or 20 meter space, you could just go backward, forward, backward, forward, backward, forward. But you would have to do as much backward as forward. You see what I'm saying? So I'm actually a huge fan of forward on this lead for getting into leg strength and foot benefits. Because so much of what we do in the weight room, our foot is just flat, flat, flat, flat. Leg presses, leg extensions, hamstring curls. What about our frickin feet? So when you're even pushing a sled and if you want, if you want to know, if you really understand a subject, see if you can teach it to a six year old. And I'm able to teach six year olds knees over toes. You know how I put some weight on a sled and I ask them to push it and their knee immediately gets way over their toes. But this is a very, this is getting a lot of pressure, but it's not that jarring impact. You're actually, it's a more controlled pressure. So you get stronger, you get blood flow to heal and strengthen at the same time. So I, so I, now my ideal scene is I push pull. So every day, seven days a week, I push pull on the sled. But the backward would be the foundation. And it's always, it's not always as easy as to have a sled set up that you can like push and pull. Like someone could go on Amazon, get just like a cheap $50 sled, put some weight on it, go out to a park and start going backward every day. Then the next, the next sleds will have like pushing poles and you could set up for backwards. And I was starting to say there's a company called Torque Fitness and they sell one for $1,600. I'm designing one and I don't even care if someone hears this and beats me to the market, go for it. I just want the tools out there. So Torque Fitness has one, but it's a bit bulkier than is needed. And there's no, you know, with the sled, you know how much weight is on it. But with the torque, one has internal resistance, but you don't actually know like what you're accomplishing. So it's very easy. I have one being designed right now that measures your distance in time. So it's very simple. Like okay, I went backward 100 meters in X amount of seconds at X resistance. So those are $1,600 right now for torque. I own them and buy them wherever I go because $1,600 is still cheaper than treadmill and a heck of a lot cheaper than knee surgery. So that thing is amazing. And you can push, pull with that thing.

This is like a sled that actually has the wheels on it, right?

Yeah. So it has an internal resistance. So you can put it right out of the garage. And I mean, within five minutes you'll have, honestly, I think better than a PRP injection. That's just my honest opinion based on actually training people on this. The amount of people who have come to me, quote, my doctor says I have irreversible cartilage damage. I can never play my sport again. I will never regain full knee bend. These are the exact kind of things I fix every single day. So with that sled concept, we have a fundamental difference between. Let's think about a squat. Okay? Let's think about a squat versus pushing and pulling a sled. The squat, you let the weight move you, Then you move the weight. With the sled, the weight never moves you, only you move it. So if you're going backwards, only you move the sled. If there's £1,000, it just won't move. When you go forward, only you move this sled. If there's a thousand pounds, it just won't move. So think about my mom who's 67 and I've rehabilitated her ability to run 100% pain free. Like she looks like she's in her 20s running and she does the sled every day. My program is sled plus at least two exercises. That's it. That's how important the sled is to us.

Yeah, well, well, you definitely got to let me know once that sled comes out, because I will. I have a sled, but the problem is like my driveway. And look, because I live out in the sticks and my sled is not on wheels. It's just one of the, the cheapo sleds and I've got a belt and everything on it and I, I got it, you know, you know Brian Johnson, the liver king. Have you heard of this guy before? He's big on TikTok right now, but he, he has this work called the barbarian where he'll put ankle weights on two kettlebells, sled and backpack and do like a mile long sled drag. Apparently anyone who works for his, his ancestral supplements, Liverpool capsules company has to like do this workout as as, you know, proof that they can actually work for the company or something like that.

But I, I think that's awesome.

I bought that slide to do the workout because it, I tried to work at, it's pretty hard. I just did like this farm road back behind my house and it definitely ripped, ripped me wide open. But the sled doesn't like it just, it's a pain in the butt to drink.

You have an actual metal sled, you need turf. Yeah. Because again, what we're trying to create, right, we're trying to get the pressure, but without the jarring effect. So what would be the worst? Like, so if you look at someone's knee gets worse and worse. What becomes scariest to them would be like landing. You see what I mean? Like the higher the landing, the more freaky it gets. Right? So it's not that the pressure inherently is bad, it's that this jarring pressure that you can't handle as bad. So that's where the sled comes in. That allows us to get significant pressure. I mean your whole body gets stronger, you start sprouting, you know, people who thought they'd never have abs, it's like, what the heck? How am I getting abs? Because you're getting, it's like the. Anyone who comes and experiences with me in person uniformly says it's the toughest workout they've ever done. But the point is that you're able to get that pressure in a pain free way, in a non jarring way. So we actually intentionally start slowly. So if I'm doing 100 meters, I'm actually only going more intensely as I go. So like I'm taking very controlled, smooth steps forward and backward, gradually building up the blood flow. And then as, as that blood flow is there, more and more. It's this amazing feeling of being able to exert at 100% without any pain. You know what feeling I'm talking about? You've probably experienced that so many times in different ways. But when you're like, when you're giving everything you have, but you're not in any like actual like joint or spine pain. Do you know what I mean?

Mm, yeah. Yeah. And that, that's another thing that I was thinking about with the so called backwards walking, which also if you guys look it up, you might find it listed as, what's it called? Retro. I think they just call it retro walking.

Retro walking, yeah.

Yeah. The interesting thing is a, there's actual studies on. I think there was a four week study and I'll find it and link to it in the show notes. And it looks specifically for chronic osteoarthritic patients. And found a significant increase in functional mobility of the knees and decrease in pain from four weeks of this retro walking. Not even with a sled or anything. Like, these people are just like, walking backwards, like, like I do with my death witch walks along the busy road behind my house. Honest, I like to do a slight uphill grade. And sometimes if it's like super snowy and icy out like it is now, I'll just do it on the. On the treadmill. Because if you put your treadmill on like two or three miles an hour, you know, you.

Or turn it off is what I do.

Yeah, mine almost has too much resistance off. But if I put on a super low speed, it's decent. And by leaning forward on the treadmill, you can kind of sort of simulate a sled push. And then you can also. You can also go backwards on it, so you can get a little bit of what you'd be getting from a sled on that. But then the other interesting thing that I've noticed, maybe not just from the backwards walking, but also from doing the other elements of your program, because I just do. I think there's about eight different exercises you sent to me. It takes like 15 minutes to go through them all. And so I've started to do that just two to three times a week. And the other thing, though, that I've noticed is it seems to really help out with pelvic mobility and also lower back pain. Like, sometimes, you know, at the end of the day, I'll have a little bit of lower back pain just from, you know, working all day. And, you know, even though I have a standing desk, your hips kind of get tight. But this. This backwards walking not only seems to be magic for the knees, but also it's. It seems to really help alleviate low back pain.

Yeah, the studies on it are actually phenomenal, including for the lower back. And it sets a foundation that it makes it easier to get into more hip exercises. I'm gonna read you a message because a doctor sent it to me last night. His name's Brian Ziegler. He's a physical therapist. And he says, though I'm sure you're already aware, but the research in support of rokp, that's what I call it reverse out knee pain, because it's like a broad category of dragging a sled or this, you know, so we just call it reverse out knee pain. Right. So he says the research and support of ROKP and all the really cool things it does. It does make me wonder why it hasn't been a standard of care for all knee pain for decades. I have research going back to the 80s showing the superiority of ROKP for muscle recruitment, force reduction and pain reduction. Almost seems to make any clinician that prescribed forward walking for knee pain negligent. And yet this was never mentioned once in PT school and not a single one of my 30 coworkers use it as a rehab tool. So that's why I had to be knees over toes guys, because the gross misunderstanding of this, it didn't work out. It didn't work out for me and it didn't work out for millions of other people. And when you run from understanding a subject, that's how you create a long term disaster. So this one category of just getting stronger backwards, if all you did was do it for just the simple concept of like, okay, if you think about most workouts and most sports performance, I mean, seven times as much money is spent studying acceleration as deceleration. So we already have lives where we've all tried excessively to go forward, you know what I mean? Like, like playing volleyball and jumping forward, jumping forward, jumping forward, you know, like basketball, running. It's not necessarily like the human body was designed to go from like a three hour practice to a this or that, you know, like there would be more of a balance, you know, like if you think out in the wild, what are the odds you'd be doing 3, 4, 500 jumps a day? There's no way, you know what I mean? So we've already excessively done it. So if all you did was just for the same reason, if you had never in your life heard of training back muscles and all you had done was bench presses and push ups, and you wonder why you have terrible shoulder pain, you know what I mean? And someone came and said, well, let's strengthen the back muscles. That would be pretty common sense. So if all you did was just from a common sense perspective was work backwards, you'd be putting in a smart investment. So can backward walking work? I think well enough for maintaining the ability to walk? I think it could get good general blood flow. But I think when you add a sled to the matter on turf, or one of these tank sleds that uses internal resistance so that you can do it on any surface. Even if you had, if you had an incline that could be pretty good, however, then you have the going down, so you'd have to go like extra slow down to make sure that you're not overdoing it. And like we covered with a treadmill at low speed or turned off completely and like using your strength to go backwards, those are all really good things. But the whole time for me I've been using an actual sled or a tank sled, you know what I mean? So I also can't say that like, yeah, a hill is going to work as good as these other things when I'm dragging a couple hundred pounds, you know what I mean? So if you think about the pressure with the knees of our toes of dragging a couple hundred pounds 100 miles and now people are like, you know, think I'm bull. And I get messages that say, you know, let's just be honest, you were dunking easily in high school, you know, and I'm like, you just gave me the best compliment ever. You know, it's almost for so many people. It's unbelievable how I've gone from being a athlete with knees to now having like freakish knees and being able to jump so high. But I'm also the only person who's actually put that much pain free pressure on that exact quality. You see what I'm saying? So there's the foundation right there. Now everything we do though, there's going to be different reactions to it in the sense of that's one exercise. So that didn't take us through a full stretch, that didn't stretch our hips, that didn't work, the front of the ankle, that didn't work, the hamstring, that didn't. You see what I mean? So it's like, yes, that would be a great start, but it's also not like that's all I did.

Yeah, well, I know that's not all you did because there's like so many other kind of cool elements of your program. And I know that there's like some little toys you can use too, like these boots and calf stretchers. But before we get into some little toys, which I think are cool but might be slightly distracting compared to the stuff you can just do for free with your own body.

Exactly. Actually the second thing is just totally free. And that's the second thing. When I mentioned I was trying to be clear that two things I've for sure done more than anyone else. Look, I can do a front splits, you know what I mean? I can do Nordics with the best of them. So I have both hamstring strength and length with the best of them. It's not like it's only, you know, it's not like it's only knees, but it does have to be clear that the backward and the second thing I'll cover, which you don't need anything, like, those are the things I've done proportionally more than other people.

So I want to get into a few of the other moves that are the key core elements. And obviously this is an audio podcast, but in the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com BenPatrick, I'll link to video demonstrations of some of this stuff too. And obviously Ben systematizes all of this with his actual programs. You can go online and buy one of his programs where he walks you through all this too and kind of customizes it to you. And I'll put the information for that in the show notes. But I think some of this stuff is pretty easily described via audio and I think will help people wrap their heads around this. So walk me through some of the key fundamental exercises because they're so cool and unique and they're just simple to do anywhere.

Yep, exactly. So the whole thing I just described this reversing out knee pain and you know, it puts you in this advantage of getting the pressure, getting the blood flow. Now, the other big angle to making like freakish natural healing is the concept of motion and compression, which maximizes production of synovial fluid, the delivery of nutrient to the joint. But if we think of something like I remember seeing, even to credit Asian culture, again, I remember seeing these. There's been some viral videos of like 80, 90 year olds and they're down doing like bottom quarter squats, you know what I mean? Full knee bend. That even for me in my younger years, I would have been like, oh my God, that would be so excruciating for me even to do right. And even the studies, full knee bend, just like the knees over toes thing gets a really bad rep and your knee naturally goes over your toes to some degree. But when you do a full knee bend, that gets a bad rap. But I mean, 164 research papers were analyzed and doctors concluded that not only is it not bad, but actually it's a desirable quality that's an effective lower body protector and you actually get less knee pain and jump higher. But when we go back to that short term thing, even seeing that data, back when I was in the shit zone, I couldn't just go down and bend my knees. You see what I'm saying? It was too painful. So the whole thing that unraveled this for me and which is why I now understand this subject so thoroughly is that I understand now that if you don't get that motion compression of fully bending a knee yet that's how you get the decay. You're not getting the nutrients there. Your body quite literally thinks you're not using it fully. But if you work through pain in that motion too, you can also cause damage. So I actually work this. If you imagine like putting a foot up on a chair and just like bending it, you know what I mean? Just gently bending it. And over time you actually wind up getting a really good stretch in the back leg. So when you see the end product, I'm essentially doing a split squat, fully bending my front knee without my back knee touching the floor. Meaning you have to actually have remarkable hip flexor length. And if you think about that, it's not a passive stretch for the hip flexors. So you're actually loading the hip flexors almost like a Romanian deadlift or something like that. You're actually loading the flexors in a stretch position, which also helps give some more room for the knee to bend and stuff like that. So my left knee, with the partially artificial kneecap, I was told it would never fully bend again. Go look at some of my videos. I can actually, from a full squat, I can spring up and dunk a basketball. Meaning I have like, I have world class knee bend.

Yeah, your knee, your knee range of motion is ridiculous in terms of like, you know, you, you landing in, in like almost like a full crouch with your knees. Like I can put my shoulders to.

The floor behind me. Like it's nothing like that's, that's even for people with good knees, 99% can't do that. You know what I'm saying? So the point is that again these two things I did this reversing out knee pain and then the concept of just finding your 100% pain free knee bend. You see what I mean? That was the ticket. And one side at a time. Because odds are if you've had a knee issue and you try to get into deep squats, one knee gives you more problems. So now that can make things even worse by doing double legged squats. Because now you either are working through damage on that side or now you're shifting and getting even more out of balance because you're naturally just trying to get through the exercise and use the other side. So I'm actually a huge fan of restoring full knee bend squats. Never with a bounce, always with a full pause. Totally putting the ego out of the equation. Meaning using fricking Dumbbells or kettlebells and stuff like that. Using stuff to elevate your heels and actually restoring a full knee bend, but not out of proportion to doing that one side at a time with this Astrograss split squat. So to me that's the magic zone. Is that so? Like in my program right now, on Mondays I do the Astagrass split squat and on Thursdays I do the Astagrass squat. But again, totally with the ego out of the equation. Magical form.

Even though you could do it loaded, you can also. And a lot of people listening in who might have knee pain right now you'll start this just like totally non loaded, like in your basement or in your living room.

You'll actually start at negative. I started it negative loaded, meaning it was also a huge. It's wild. Sometimes the most common sense thing, like I thought I couldn't do this stuff because I actually couldn't even do it with my own body weight without pain. But no one ever told me, well, do it less than your own body weight. You see what I mean? I saw an old guy yesterday on Instagram and he was doing his backward walking in the fricking pool. So this is a guy who can't walk who's restoring his ability to frickin walk by walking backward in a pool. But anyways, for, for my intensive purposes to get into the full knee bend, I had to elevate my front foot greatly and I had to use assistance with my hands. You could hold PVC pipes or have some table near your chair near you. It's impossible not to find something that you can do this with. Then you gradually put in more repetitions and more repetitions. And what are you doing? You're now delivering those nutrients to the joint without creating damage in the process. So that you're maximizing your chances of recovering back a little bit stronger, a little bit stronger. So you have a scale, any exercise has a scale from negative weight to body weight to loaded. And so you could apply that to someone who thinks they can't do a chin up, like so what? My mom can't do chin ups, but we go on the cable machine and she works one arm at a time and she goes to a full stretch and then she pulls the weight down to a full control and pauses at the bottom. And it's easy to explain with something like a chin up, but it hasn't been explored enough. Not enough to be broadly known, not enough to have been tested with thousands of people like I have for the knees, because this Knees over toes thing scared everyone off from the subject. There's your two secrets right there.

Okay, so, so the, the two, Two secrets being backwards walking and, and the ATG split squat. Like if you're doing nothing else, like those two, like just basically like every day.

No, the, the. Okay, so the ATG split squat requires more recovery, whereas the backward walking concept. Yeah, you can actually, like, do that every day. You see what I mean? A lot of people like to just start with my bodyweight program. I have that online so you can have feedback for 49, 50amonth, no contract. I also have that in a book called Knee Ability Zero on Amazon. It's that program alone with no weights and no equipment has already produced thousands of knee success stories. So that will give you like, a really good schedule for doing this stuff when you're just, like, trying to get out of shit zone. Don't have the equipment. Like, I want to fricking start now. You see what I'm saying? You could just start now. So you could have it like on an app with feedback coaching your form. Or you could start with a book if that's what you prefer. I just understand that people like to learn in different forms. It's probably terrible. You know, it's not necessarily good or bad for business to like. It's probably better to just do one.

Or other for business, but it makes sense. Like, I'm one of those guys who's like, give me a cheap ebook and my Kindle in the gym. Like, I'm not much of an app guy. I just like, just like a printed 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper that's in the corner of the gym. Just because I really don't like to drag my technology and dink around with an app at the gym. So I'm one of those minimalist guys who would like, get your Knee Ability zero book and just have that open on Kindle on the gym floor. But then other people like the fancy bells and whistles apps that walk them through everything.

Yeah, and in my case, the purpose of it is actually to coach form. So we coach tens of thousands of form videos every week. So what this means is that, like, for someone to know they're, like, progressing right, it can really help to be able to send in your video of what you're doing. You know, like, this is a. This is a more sensitive subject. It's not like, here's a clever way to get like a good pec workout. Do five sets of five and then three sets of 10 on exercises that you see in the gym every single day. No, it's like here you're about to do things that you've never seen anyone do in the gym in your entire fricking life. You know what I mean? And you already are in pain trying to work your way out. So that was the purpose of, the purpose of the online business is just to make it affordable. It's the cheapest there's ever been for like actually coaching your form. And the reason I'm able to build that business is because I've helped so many people. I have a list waiting of people who are just dying to work for me to help other people because they've used it to help themselves. They're already using it with others. We have over 500 coaches around the world who are now being certified in this stuff, so that was necessary. I paid about 10k to get my form coached on so many of these tools. So I would go around to whatever experts. Charles Poliquin, super hardcore guy, probably the greatest genius I've ever met. Absolutely like shivering when you're like doing your form in front of him. But I also, from reading and stuff, I didn't actually realize that my form sucked. You see what I'm saying? So that's why. But for me it was like integrity wise, like I have to have it available for people to get their form coached. It would be way better business wise. I could just be by myself just cleaning up, you know what I mean? Not having to organize a business or worry about all that. In the end of the day. I think it's going to work out if you run your business with integrity and produce the results. So that's where it is so that people can get coaching on these things. I actually didn't used to be an app guy and even now I'm like, thank God for this app because I can just go look at my schedule each day and see stuff. That's how it works. And then you can use common sense. It would take 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 podcasts to cover it all. But like you can use common sense that like I'm selling ability. So like, okay, I'm also responsible for the most views on Nordics and which regresses to so many gentle things and tibialis raises. I'm responsible for innovating equipment for training the tibialis, but it's just because I'm selling ability. Like there's, there's nothing in any joint of your body that I don't want you to have pain free ability. You See what I'm saying? So that's, that's kind of the, you get just better and better and sharper and sharper at your subject when you're just pushing ability, ability, ability. So that's, that's what I do. It's a full body program. It's balanced. Yesterday I was training my wrists, elbows, shoulders so that they're, you know, pain free and able to withstand demands and last for a lifetime. You know, I think that gave a pretty good overview. But if I didn't stress that the reverse out knee pain and the ATG split squad are the most important, someone could totally neglect really taking the time to master those and understand there's important. You see what I mean? Like, if that was all I could get in on the world, like I would be okay with that. You know what I mean? If I was in a Jim Carrey movie and I could only teach two exercises, like, I would be okay with that for my career.

Yeah, yeah. There's one other that I mean there's obviously a ton of different kind of like body weight exercises. Everything from like that, you know, where you're sitting on the ground with your knees flat or with your legs stretched out in front of you in like an L shape and just doing literal like seated leg lifts on the ground. There's the tibialis raise where you've got your back against the wall and you're just drawing your knees up towards your shins, you know, with it. With a pretty big emphasis on shin development. And that's actually question I wanted to ask you because it seems like a lot of these bodyweight exercises, they're not done with the knee over the toe. They're instead done with the leg stretched out in front of the body and strengthening. What seems to me to be either a, the hip flexors, kind of like the ass to grass split squat that you described, where if you're doing it really slow and under control, you are loading the hip flexors or they seem to be triggering the tibialis muscles. Why when it comes to knee pain, would you focus on the tibialis muscles and the hip flexor muscles in addition to some of the muscles, tendons and ligaments that get stretched when you do like a knees over toes astagrass squat or split squat.

Exactly. So I'm knees over toes guy, not because knees over toes is magical, but because completely misunderstanding that subject is very disastrous. You see what I mean? So, so it's not like I'm doing more knees over toes training than knees behind Toes training. So if we look at the tibialis, every step you take, like we walk around and we're planting heel first. So if we want to reduce that, like, degradation over time, we want to have really strong shin muscles. It's almost like having a lighter weight body. So think about this for a second. People with more body weight. Like, if you go onto Google and you try to find out what you can actually do about knee pain, did you know that Google tells you that there's actually nothing you can do other than lose weight? Meaning everything else is either drug or surgery or see your doctor. There's actually. Google doesn't believe you can do anything about knee pain other than lose weight.

Stupid Dr. Google. Jeez, I thought Dr. Google was the go to.

Unfortunately, Unfortunately, Google is reality. So it's up to us to change that reality. See what I mean? So reality is not the same as truth, but Google is reality. So. But if all we do is just extrapolate that data, well, crap. It's not like people who are obese are, you know, out doing extreme sports. They're often just going through day to day life and they have more knee pain. You see what I mean? So if we just take the simple act of getting those shin muscles stronger so you don't even have to load your knees, like, we actually get the blood flowing through the feet and the tibialis and the calf muscles before we even get to the knees. Just to put odds more in our favor and to reduce the impact that comes into the knee in the first place. Plus, how many people. Okay, real question. In your lifetime, how many times have you taken your tibialis to failure? Now think about how many times you've taken your chest or your back to failure.

Until I started doing your exercises, I'd never taken my tibialis to failure.

So we all have the same odds of knee pain as obese people. Do you see what I'm saying right there? Because of the fact that if you build muscle that's still weight building in all these areas above our knees, disproportionately to how our body was actually designed. So we're already off on a bad foot. No pun intended. I got to remember that line. That's a good one. Yeah, we're already off on a bad boy, right? We're already off on a bad foot with weak feet, weak ankles, weak shins, compared to how our body was designed. Like, that wasn't the intentional design. We're all out there walking around now. Factor in when you actually watch a Volleyball jump on a wood surface. Not a single high jumping volleyball player in history doesn't slam hundreds of pounds of force through that tibialis. What that, that step before the actual jump that, you know, that penultimate step. I don't know what words, you know, you and I, I mean I'm in basketball so like, I don't know what words are common, but like when someone goes into a jump, be, you know, if they're stepping right, left step like a, like if a right handed volleyball player was going to hit the ball, they're planting so much force through that tibialis muscle and then what people don't watch is the landing after. So basically there's so much force coming up through those ankles before it gets to the knees. So theoretically, if you were strong enough, like you know, through the ankle, you wouldn't even have an excessive amount of force to the knee in the first place. But as we know those things can go excessive. Like we talked about 3, 4, 500 jumps a day. It's not like our body wasn't designed for that either. So that's why the tibialis becomes important. It's the first line of defense. If someone wants to see it in action, they can go on YouTube and they can look up tibialis race and they'll see my free video of exactly how to do it right from my program, which has over half a million views and then look up Michael Jordan foul line dunk in slow motion. It's a freaking tibialis race. Like when Michael Jordan dunks from the foul line, he's planting heel first. The amount of force going up through that foot, ankle, shin into the knee like so, you know, it's common sense and I think we can understand it there based on. Because there's no study on strengthening the tibialis. Not one. We do know that if we're overweight we have more chance of knee pain and blah, blah, blah. So if we're in the gym and we're building muscle and all this stuff, but we're not training the tibialis, then we're essentially designing a body that's more designed to have knee pain, right?

Yeah.

So that's why the tibialis. As for the hip flexors, number one, there's very few just like blanket statements you can say about the human population. But one of them you can say is that we all have tight hip flexors, flexors and now yanking around, just trying to stretch them. That could help. And probably a lot of people have had relief of various things from that. But as I described on that ATG split squat where you're actually like your knee is not touching the floor, like you're not resting your hip flexor, it's loaded in a stretch position. So that's huge for strengthening it. But then we also want to be strong at raising our knee. So if you think about running or something like that, and now imagine your leg is so heavy that you can't pick up your knees, which most of us have because we train squats and deadlifts and leg presses and leg extensions, we don't actually load hip flexion, we load hip extension. That's where the money is studying. That's the potential. Hip extension is the potential. But now to actually pick up that leg the way our body was designed, we need strong hip flexors. And so that's actually been found to be the biggest muscle size difference between regular humans and elite sprinters. Not the hamstrings, not the glutes, which are very different, but the hip flexors. And I've trained so many people in the freakiest fast guys comparatively have freaky strong hip flexors. But if you don't, what do you think running around is going to be like when your legs feel like a ton of bricks, you actually have to run with more trauma. Like you don't run as gracefully, you don't run with as good of mechanics. And it's all very well to say, oh, sprinting is enough exercise for hip flex. Yeah, it probably is, but not when you're like me and you were in a fricking wheelchair and on a walker for like two years. You see what I'm saying? You lose your hip flexor strength the moment you stop sprinting. You start proportionately losing your hip flexor strength compared to what it should be for our body. Our body wasn't designed to just all of a sudden go through long periods of never sprinting. It was designed to sprint probably to run from danger or whatever, probably the rest of your life at various times or you get eaten. So those of us with bad knees, by the nature of stopping running our fastest sprinting, then we wind up my, I'm not going to send people with knee pain to go start sprinting, you know, so we, it's the same concept. Let's just address the pain free ability of the area. Now I'm fast. I didn't expect I'd be fast either, you know what I mean? So. But I've done, but holy crap. Over the last, let's say three or four years now My speed has changed tremendously, but I've also done more actual loaded. Like, to me, raising my knee, like hip flexors, I care way more about than my bench press. I haven't done a bench press in the last three or four years, but I've lifted weights with my feet a ton, you know, and now I run faster. And people say, oh, you can't change genetic speed like that. Well, you haven't done all this stuff, and it's all common sense.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, got it. So I want to shift into. Because, like, you mentioned, like, we could do seven or eight podcasts on all the different moves and the entire philosophy behind the program. And that's kind of like why you have your program structured online and available there for people. But I do want to cover just a few of, like, the. The fun toys that people could have around, because there's all sorts of kind of like, things, things to enhance this. We talked about the sled and the sled belt, obviously, so we've got that one out of the way as something that would be beneficial for someone to have around. And also establish the fact that you could. And there's some videos of you demonstrating this online. Use a hill or a treadmill to kind of sort of simulate what a sled would be or a car in.

Neutral is actually fantastic. So, like, like, my Jeep has like a little hitch on the back.

Good point.

So I already have my samples on the sled belt and I hook up and I go, push, pull. So I. Okay, all right. I shouldn't advise people to do this, but I don't even have anyone in the car with me. And I just. I put the car in neutral and I drag it backwards and then I push it forward and I go backward and forward, backward, forward. And I mean, within five minutes you have like an out of body experience, you know?

Yeah, yeah. No, I used to do that when I was triathlon training in our old cul de sac. I don't really have a driveway conducive to that now, but there's some other stuff, too, like slant boards and tib raise apparatuses. So walk me through some of the goodies.

So I think sled is the most important, and so that could be finding a gym or getting one or whatever. But, like, I think. I think a proper sled setup is most important. Then the second is some kind of a slant surface. The reason for that is if we just all had that marvelous ankle mobility like we did as kids. You know what I mean? It's much Easier to train that full knee bend. So when you actually lift your heel and you get on kind of like a, some kind of slant board, I'm literally trying to design more affordable stuff for all this. So I have something called ATG Buddies. You can actually go on Amazon and buy industrial sized doorstops. Mine will be bigger and better designed, but you can actually, for like 20 bucks, buy an industrial sized doorstop to elevate that heel. Or you could get a slant board or something like that. But again, I'm training that, that one side at a time. So it's actually much easier for me to have like a smaller rubber grippy thing to elevate my heel than like a bigger slant board. Anyways, that really locks it in on the muscles you're trying to hit and it allows you to get that full knee bend a lot easier. So I think that's. To me, that's the second most important. Mine will be super cheap slant ports. You can get a good one for like 100 bucks. Mine I'll probably sell for like 40 or less bucks. And then third, I actually rank a back extension. And the reason for that is because we're doing all this knee work and I'm not trying to throw people into heavy deadlifts and squats. To me, those are sports. Like, if you want to do them, like, awesome, I'll help you do them better. But I don't do them. I really try to rebuild people on a single legged back extension where you slowly go up, squeeze the glute, you lower all the way down. You can even grab the pole underneath and get a hamstring stretch at the bottom. Then you come up, then you switch legs at the top so that you're getting like tons of time under tension in that extended position. So I rank sled slant back extension because with those three alone, it's like absurd how much results you can get with just sled slant back extension. And if people see me doing the freaky Nordic hamstring curl or whatever, that's not even essential. That's an optional toolbox. The back extension I do every Friday of my life, that's. That's an essential.

The back extension is different than the, that's different than the reverse hyper machine. Right. Are we talking about just like the standard back extension family of exercises?

I'm talking about the cheap one that you see in every ymca. I'm talking about that one. But it's how I use it. I'm not swinging. I'm going slowly the entire time. Yeah, I'm stretching at the bottom and then I'm fully squeezing my glue to the top and then I'm switching sides.

I had, I had one like a hundred bucks on Amazon on the dusty corner of my garage and I drug it out and started using it. Once I started doing same thing, I keep myself in really good dorsiflexion and do it super slow, right.

And you could imagine like we're trying to rebuild the body. So, like, I'm not just trying to throw on heavy deadlifts and things, which everything in fitness I think has awesome benefits in its own way. I'm trying to help people in my own way. And this allows us to get really strong hamstrings and glutes and lower back in a really gentle way. Actually creates a ton of back success stories. When you think about that, that using the back extension for that max pain free blood flow while using the ATG split squat to open up the hip flexors. So those are my big three. Then when it gets into training that tibialis, one of the problems that people run into is if they're not strong enough to do the bodyweight version. So many are, but many aren't strong enough. So now there's tibialis loading devices so that you can actually like, you could start with a pound, two pound. So it's like you can actually regress even the body weight tibialis by doing it loaded. So that starts to get pretty cool. And then there's this device, like I use various things to work the hip flexors. You don't even need any equipment to work the hip flexors. But it's pretty cool to know how much weight you're lifting with your feet. And so there's this monkey foot, which is awesome. You just clamp it onto a dumbbell. And now you can actually see like, okay, with strict form, how many reps and how much weight can I lift with my foot? You know what I mean? How strong are my hip flexors?

Measurably, that's the one that I have that is still okay. So I knew I was gonna record with you, and I actually reserved some time this Saturday to make sure I have my whole setup going out in the, out in the garage. But the monkey foot is still in the box. I haven't taken that one out of the box yet. But you literally just attach a dumbbell to his legs. Yeah, it's almost like. Yeah, like the leg extension machine at the gym, except it actually allows for range of motion because the weight's actually attached down by your ankle, almost like a boot.

And this guy's. I'm not even doing leg extensions. I'm actually just doing like knee raises with it. But you'll notice as you're doing that you're actually getting like really gentle into that knee bend a little bit. So it's so people with knee issues will often notice when they start doing that, it's like, oh, wow, like my knees feel a little better. But that's because we're getting a little bit of that motion and compression going on where we're improving your day to day mechanics by having stronger hip flexors. You don't have to worry about them being too tight because we're also working them in a lengthening position. So like that's really the magic in training when you're working the ability to contract a muscle and lengthen it. If you're missing either one. Yeah, you're going to be going to physios thinking there's stuff genetically wrong with you and you're actually just like not even training your body naturally. So you're gonna, you're gonna really like that monkey foot. Yeah. Sled, slant back extension, something to load the tibialis. Really? Those should just be machines. Like, you know how you have like seated calf machines at LA Fitness. I love seated calf machines too. There should be a seated tibialis machine right next to it, to be honest with you.

Yeah, but, but honestly, like that one exercise that you have where you just get close to the wall and then you shove your knees over your toes and do calf raises with knees over the toes against the wall. If I get 25, 30 reps on that, like, I feel like I really don't need a calf raise machine like a seated calf raise machine.

I know, but imagine if you were like 100 pounds overweight, you know what I mean? Or if your knee, like if you had like such gnarly surgeries that you couldn't even like bend it over your toes, you know what I mean? So, like, fortunately those seated calf machines are in every LA Fitness. If I do my job right, there'll be like seated tibialis machines next to them, you know, by the time, you know, within a decade.

Well, I'll, I'll, I'll hunt down a lot of this stuff and show people examples in the, in the show notes.

Keep everything I'm describing. I actually have links and discounts for. So like everything I'm describing, you can literally type like atgjims.com and it's like a shortcut to my Medium blog. Like, Medium is just like a free blog. So I keep a list. Yeah, Like, I keep a list of everything that I use, and I reach out to every company and try to get a discount code for it so someone can save a lot of money, actually, just by going right to that list. And it's in order of, like, what I think is most important.

Yeah, I think I have that one printed off somewhere in my. Somewhere in my gym. But I'll link to it in the show notes. You know, the other thing I wanted to ask you, because I know we're starting to run up on time, but something that maybe playing devil's advocate here that it seemed like your program was a little bit deficient on, and I wanted to ask you if this was purposeful or if this was just something you decided not to focus on because it was irrelevant. You know, Brett Contreras, the glute guy, obviously has the idea of the hip extension and a lot of these, these apparatus that are used to strengthen the glutes and a whole host of glute strengthening exercises with the glutes as being one of the. One of the muscles that's often targeted for, for training for a wide variety of performance parameters and then also for injury prevention. How come you don't have a big focus on glutes in your program? Or do you? And I'm not seeing it.

So the first thing that allows you to really use your glutes so that ATG split squat, when you unlock the antagonist muscles, when your hip flexors are now all of a sudden really opened up, you'll go out and run or something and you'll be like, what the heck, my glutes are sore. Even though, you know, because you're actually like using your glutes more because you can actually extend your hips better. But also a lot of people assume that my, like, they'll start like the body weight program and they'll assume that's. That's literally a program with nothing. You know what I mean? It's much harder to get elite glutes with nothing. So the more we come up the chain, we are going to need to get some loading and stuff like that. So what I do. Okay, Mondays I did that ATG split squat with load. So not only is the back hip flexor stretching, now as we get deeper, that front glute gets majorly plateau busted. That front glute is going through full range of motion one side at a time, which is awesome. Then today was, oh, look at all the sled work I'm doing. So all the. So I do an even amount of forward and backward. Oh my gosh.

All that forward work. That's true sled work is pretty bomb for the glute.

If you're a girl out there and you just want like the sexiest pair of glutes that are like popping girl or guy, and you just want amazing glutes, do as much forward sled as I've done, you know what I mean? But I'm always going backward as much as go forward. But seven days a week, seven days a week I'm pushing a sled. My glutes are.

That's kind of funny. The girls, the girls with the most impressive glutes I ever see at the gym, they're doing the, the stair climber, like the stair mill to nowhere. Taking it two, two steps at a time. But if you watch them, they're, they're, they're leaning forward, knees over toes. So they're actually doing a very, very similar motion as a sled drag, except they're doing it as almost like an uphill stair climb.

Yeah. So I'm doing so much glute work seven days a week with the sled, I'm getting through, I'm getting him like totally plateau busted with the ATG split squat on Monday. Today I did three sets of 20 on a dumbbell Romanian deadlift. Where you ever do a Romanian dell where the. You're not going for like max weight. You're like really trying to get a great upper hamstring stretch. So that also helps you, that also helps you, like if you're, if your hamstrings are super stiff, like bend over and you're already like, you're not even able to like use your glutes very well. You know what I mean? So you already rounded up like a, like a dog shitting. You know what I mean? So today I was doing Romanian deadlifts, which really potentiates the glutes. And then every Friday I'm working on that single like, back extension. So back extension is already great for the glutes. Now pause at the top every rep and contract your glutes. Now when that gets easy, do it one side at a time. Now when that gets easy, add load. So I'm doing single legged back extensions, full stretch at the bottom, full glute contraction at the top. So my glutes are actually like freakishly strong from my program.

That makes sense. And look what I think you should do, Ben, maybe for like your April first exercise is release humped over dog shitting exercise where you're just like out in your yard, you, you, you hunt yourself over and kind of crawl across your yard with your back hunched over like a dog that's getting ready to take a, you know, as they, as they do, you know, they, they make it look so easy. They just kind of hunch over their back and stuff starts to fall out and then you can kind of like go backwards and drag your ass on the grass, you know, as the way to, to wipe. And you, you could do the, the Ben Patrick dog ass to grass exercise. That's, that's going to be your April Fools.

That'll be the elite extreme program. But you give me a totally good idea. Like I take every, like every criticism, I look at it and I go like, okay, how do I take responsibility for that? So like I'll make a really good, I'll make a really, I'll script up a really good video describing what I was just describing to, you know, on like, on like how to get killer glutes so that people have a resource that they're realizing like, oh, we actually, like, we actually are training the glutes. Just because I'm not taught, you know, I think it's just more because most programs like they're like talking about the glutes more. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, first of all, I know that for the ATG program like Ben mentioned, it's like $49.50 a month.

It's $20.22 for the first month with no long term contract. So you could, you could pillage me right now during the holidays, learn everything, look at all the programs for $20.22.

Well, if anything doesn't work out, you could sell used cars and then also a ton of stuff just like for free online. Ben's super generous in terms of putting a ton of really good stuff out there. Which is why I actually think you found success in the industry, Ben is. That's what I found is just help people put out a bunch of really good content and give options for people to take a deeper dive with personal coaching or whatever. But yeah, it all starts with just finding stuff that frickin works and put it out there to help people. That's always been my M.O. and I think you're doing a good job doing that. So I'm gonna hunt down pretty much everything that Ben and I of kind talked about for those of you listening in. And if you go to Bengree, I.

Can send it to you to make it pretty easy. That's easy.

Yeah. You got my email. So BenGreenful Fitness.com Ben Patrick and I'll just like put a chock full of shownotes in there and then if you have specific questions, leave them in the show notes. You know one other thing I should mention or send me a dm. Yeah, either way you, you can be careful what you wish for, bro. The other, the other thing that I should mention is that obviously there's some benefit I've found to deep tissue work to some trigger point stuff. Have you ever seen the knee pain Bible, Ben?

Yeah.

Okay. Do you have any thoughts on trigger point release or pairing some of this stuff with some foam rolling or anything like that? Do you mess around with any of that?

No. So I took a really exact approach that was going to be I'm going to see exactly what my body can do if I don't do anything, anything for recovery whatsoever. So I don't take any supplements, I don't do any recovery, I'll never get a massage, I'll never go on a foam roller or anything like that. I've been doing it for years. At which point now I look back and I go, holy shit, I just did the smartest experiment ever. Because now it makes me master my training so well that I don't overtrain, that I'm. Do you see what I mean? Like you imagine if you couldn't do anything for recovery, how precise you'd have to get with your training. But now what am I doing for other people? Great, do my program and go take your supplements that you probably know so much about the supplement side of it and the treatment side of it. My God, now you have all the tools. But if I'm getting results from that shit, how do I know it's for my exercises? Maybe my pro, you know what I mean? So I'm just trying to play my part in the game. So it's very important to me like I don't anything for recovery. That way someone could do my program, go out there and try to feel even better than me. Like go for that, you know what I mean? Like go learn from experts in their different fields.

Yeah, that's something I always like to emphasize because I know I have a lot of listeners who are kind of like of the biohacking flavor who like to pop a pill and go sit in the sauna and do Wim hof breath work to fix an injury and there's some benefit to those type of things for blood flow for lymph flow, for even the mental component, if you're meditating and manifesting healing, I don't have anything against any of that stuff. And anybody who's listened to this podcast for a while knows that. I also heavily emphasize the blood, sweat, and tears component and actually getting out and doing the work. And Ben's program, like you mentioned, I mean, you know, 15 to 30 minutes, three times a week with stringing together all these exercises, that's doable, especially when you consider, like, you can do a lot of this stuff against your wall while you're watching TV at night rather than sitting and watching TV at night. So, like, it's. It's not as though this is yet another thing to try and squeeze into the schedule. A lot of this is totally doable to squeeze in, at least in my experience.

Appreciate that. Yeah.

All right, folks. Well, we've been going for a little while, and I got a boogie just because I have another podcast coming up soon, so. So I will put all the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com BenPatrick Ben, it's been super great to kind of get to know you over the past few months. And now that I'm on the cusp of finally getting the last little piece of clickie poppy flesh out of my knee, I have a feeling that I'm going to be close friends with you and your books and your program for about the next six months. So I'm sure we'll be talking more.

I'm here to help. I'm super honored that you had me on and, you know, thanks for everything that you're doing in the industry to show people and help people and empower people to be in charge of their own health, which is probably the most priceless thing there is.

Thanks, bro. All right, I'll talk to you later. All right. I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Ben Patrick, who I think I called bro 10 times on this show. So that that shows that we're. That we're really friends. Signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you, and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I'm in. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.