The Benefits of Sled Pulls for Knee Health

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Ben Patrick

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Ben Patrick, known online as "the Knees Over Toes Guy," is a coach and owner of ATG: an online personal training program for strengthening knees and developing full body fitness. His new book, "ATG for Life," is available now.

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Your exercises have 100% made my knee stronger. Well, 100%. I appreciate that. It's really amazing. So with those kicks, and a lot of people out there can relate, you do that because it's something you want to do. It's not like that's the healthiest thing for your knee to go with this. I mean, the amount of torque is probably like in the thousands of pounds every time you throw out a kick if you add all that force. And it's the same with jumping. Jumping basketball is not good for your knees, but I want to do it. So that's where the sled comes in because every step that you're going backward, you're strengthening your knee. But there's a fundamental difference between the sled and any other exercise that I do. The difference is that only you move the sled. So the sled never moves you. When you do squats or anything like that, you're taking some degree of risk. The weight is going to move you down, and then you're going to move it back. So last time I was in LA, I'm on the roof of my apartment, and I have one of those internal resistance sleds up there. And my neighbor's 82, and he wants to join me for a workout. He doesn't know who I am. I can instantly put him on a sled. And this is an internal resistance one that you can push and you can go backwards. I've seen that one. If you pull up my Instagram, I put so that anyone listening can get the world's fastest education, meaning I made for the podcast, I spent the last week preparing six posts in order. So let's go to that one on the top left. The current human exercise fundamental is walking forward with a machine doing the work for you, a treadmill. It should be the human doing the work. Even pushing a sled would be so much better. You can put an older person on pushing a sled. Only they move the sled, so you don't have the, you know, with a squat or something like that. There's a lot more chance of injury. But we want those effects of a squat. But for example, I go six days a week, I sled, and one day a week I squat. You see the difference there? Is that what you do? Six days. Every workout, I sled first. It doesn't matter if it's upper body, I sled first. Is that how you warm up? That's how I warm up, but it also, it gets my cardio in. If you go right to the second post, someone can see exactly the benefits I'm talking about. You actually get a foot workout when you push a sled. For sure. Okay. And so I think most of us humans, we're missing training our feet. Yeah, I agree with that. So right off the bat, and you were mentioning Louis Simmons and the reverse hyper and how you can rebuild the back. When you push a sled, you get a very similar effect because you're not loading your spine. So pushing a sled and then going backward at least as much. So I do more backward than I do forward, but I sled every day. So every time I work out, the first thing I do is I sled. No kidding, because I've only been doing it once a week, and I've been thinking, I don't want to overdo this. And that's what's interesting is that it's a lot easier to overdo exercises, and it's the crazy impressive exercises I can do that get views on posts. The sled is not interesting. But the sled is what I've definitely done more than any human being over the last 10 years. So the best thing I can do is just relate the exact path I took. So how does one know when they're overdoing the sled? So first off, if the sled had a thousand pounds on it, it just wouldn't move. So you already have that difference. It's much harder to get into a tricky situation on the sled. And we really haven't seen such a thing. People have asked this a lot. What's too much? There's actually in the last five years, there's one dude who has sledded more than me. And I've made him my training partner now. I'm like, dude, your mission in life is to push me. Push me every day of my life. He sleds every day as well? Go look at the second slide on that. My training partner is 43 and he has reversed his body. He can dunk a basketball. He's the guy in all my posts. So he's 43 years old. He's the youngest looking 43 year old I've ever seen. He can now dunk a basketball. He's completely shredded in the last five years. Damn, look at that. That's crazy. He's out sledded me in the last five years. One handed hang while he's extending his legs, contracting his abs and holding a 45 pound plate. That's fucking wild. That's wild. What does this guy do? He's a trainer. Man. Yeah. Fucking sign me up. Yeah, he wrote the gym book with me. It's intended to be like our gentlest starting tips for longevity.