Building A Bulletproof Body - Knees Over Toes Guy - #467

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ben Patrick, otherwise known as Knees Over Toes Guy. He's an athletic coach and an author. Keeping our bodies bulletproof is something everyone wants as they age. Bad knees, backs and shoulders not only stop you from doing the things you want in sport, but then begin to suck the enjoyment out of your life too. Thankfully, Ben has some solutions. Expect to learn the three most important exercises to maximize your body's robustness, what Ben's biggest takeaways have been from Andrew Huberman, the relationship between flexibility and strength, how to make your shoulders more mobile and less painful, the optimal training frequency to see results and much more. But now, please welcome Ben Patrick. Dude, you are everywhere right now. You're on fire. It's a competition between you and the Liver King for who's got the most exposure on Instagram at the moment.

**Ben Patrick** (1:15)
Hey, I'm lucky, man, but not an influencer.

**Chris Williamson** (1:20)
No, not an influencer, I agree. And I don't mean to put you in the same bucket as the Liver King, although he does do a lot of sled drags, man.

**Ben Patrick** (1:29)
I appreciate it. I mean, that guy's reaching a ton of people. I don't think I have as much engagement as him. So I'm honored for the comment, but he's got me beat.

**Chris Williamson** (1:36)
Yeah, yeah. He does do a lot of sled drags.

**Ben Patrick** (1:38)
Very cool.

**Chris Williamson** (1:40)
So talk to me about the first major injury that you had, because as far as I'm aware, you had a laundry list of injuries throughout your athletic career as a youth.

**Ben Patrick** (1:54)
Yeah, around age nine, I had something where my knee would kind of, it would pop out of place and sometimes it wouldn't go back in. It was probably 20 years before I, not quite 20, but almost 20 years later before I realized a lot of people have this. So I've made videos on this now. Probably someone listening to this right now is like, oh my gosh, I thought I was the only person whose knee pops out of place. So starting at nine, I knew my knees were a little bit shaky compared to other people. And by 12, that was really chronic pain. Maybe around 14 is when doctors thought I had the first real severe injury to it. So nine, 12, 14, those are dates that come to mind. So definitely not like a normal developing young adult body because my knees were having injuries and pains.

**Chris Williamson** (2:42)
What was the sports that you were pursuing?

**Ben Patrick** (2:45)
Just basketball, which when you go so crazy hard, hard after one pursuit, probably just about every sport is going to have some kind of overuse injury that you could just overuse, drive yourself into a problem with an area.

**Chris Williamson** (3:00)
What are the most common injuries that basketball players get?

**Ben Patrick** (3:03)
Knees by far.

**Chris Williamson** (3:05)
Okay, why?

**Ben Patrick** (3:07)
Well, we not only run a lot, but you're running and then stopping, running, stopping. And yeah, you have that in football, soccer, but then we're jumping thousands of times. So you're adding the running, stopping, cutting and jumping. So it seems to have the greatest total volume of the stops and the jumps. So in terms of the actual amount, like if a mathematician just analyzed how many pounds of force is going into someone's knees, you know, basketball players would be putting the most stress on their knees.

**Chris Williamson** (3:40)
I guess as well, the shoes and the court is designed to facilitate that super fast deceleration.

**Ben Patrick** (3:48)
Yeah, it's made to grip so you can thrash against yourself harder, basically.

**Chris Williamson** (3:52)
Fuck, yeah. I have a friend, Ross, in Australia, we're the same age, so both 34, and he'd played basketball at university up until 21 and then stopped, and I played cricket at university and then stopped. And both of us decided a couple of years ago that we were going to retake up the sport that had captured our youth, right? You know, we'd spent 10 years, all that we did throughout school was play this sport.
And the equivalent thing happened to both of us. I ruptured my Achilles in my first game back, and he decided to start playing hoops two on two, I think, or three on three with some friends. And he tore his ACL the first day that he went back. And I was like, this is such, you know, for every single guy or girl who's done a sporting pursuit throughout their youth and then thinks, oh, it'll be so cool to get back into that a little bit later on. It's like, yeah, it would be, but condition yourself first.