This week our ATG blog focuses on the differences between knee pain and bulletproofing. In Ben’s article “Knee Pain vs. Knee Bulletproofing
By Logan Kelly, July 8, 2023
Hello All,
My primary specialty is knee ability training and reversing knee pain. I am an ATG Certified L1 coach (1 of 2 in Ohio). ATG stands for Athletic Truth Group and was founded by Ben Patrick (KneesOverToesGuy on social media) with a focus on helping people get out of knee pain. To expose everyone to more of ATG/KOT, I will be summarizing articles written by Ben and other ATG coaches. This week we will be talking about “Knee Pain vs. Knee Bulletproofing” The full article is only available to ATG members, but I will post video links that go along with the article. “Pain v. Bulletproofing”
There are two main rules to follow when trying to bulletproof the knees.
- NEVER WORK THROUGH PAIN
- WHAT WE CAN COMMUNICATE TO, WE CAN CHANGE
Regarding our first rule, working through pain is not a complete failure of modern medicine. In fact, modern research indicates that working through the pain of 2-3 on a scale of 10 is acceptable while rehabbing. HOWEVER, Ben believes that even working through low pain levels still carries the risk of more destruction vs. construction. “Pain-free muscle burn is always the goal of every session because it means you are maximizing the chances of constructive adaptation.” More simply put…
- “Pain = destruction of the body”
- “Pain-free muscle burn = construction of the body (upon recovery)”
This goes directly into rule two. The pain cuts communication with the affected area, while pain-free muscle burn floods the area with communication. This can seem like an uphill battle, but that is why the emphasis on ROKP (Reverse Out of Knee Pain) has so many options for all levels of people. See ARTICLE 2 and follow these instructions. Ben’s best advice (at the time of writing) is “1-3 sets of 2 minutes on, 2 minutes off, up to 3 days per week” for getting communication to the knees. He also states that the protocol can be used as a warm-up for any ATG program or as a warm-down to speed up recovery and gains. It could also be done before and after the session. This even bleeds into sports-specific training…
“Anyone that has been through modern sports training has OVERDONE forwards running and UNDERTRAINED backward ability. In fact, 669% more money is spent studying acceleration than deceleration, even though a majority of pain and injuries are accumulated in deceleration.”
Here is a link to a study where a group of 13-15-year-old kids were tested on forward vs. backward ability. The backward running group increased their speed by 33% more than the forward running group and gained 4x more vertical jump increases than the forward group!
Another study looked at the effects of backward sled drags on recovery. Here is the link to that article. “Backward Sled Drag effective with recovery under 3 hours”
– Coach Logan
Videos:
Deadmill/Treadmill/Reverse Sled
ATG Split Squat Troubleshooting
Lower Support Full ROM KOT Squat
Upper Support Full ROM KOT Squat
Studies/Articles:
