I am rather early on in the program but I’m mainly doing it for my hip moreso than my knees but so far I definitely notice an increase in knee stability and my ankle mobility is incredible. In life and in sports you cannot always avoid having your knees go past your toes, so gradually building the capacity for your knees and ankles to allow your knees to support you when they are past the toes makes sense to me. Everyone is so focused on building hip power to be able to explosively accelerate but this program is all about building the muscles that decelerate the body. Most non contact knee injuries in basketball come when a player plants and tries to come to an abrupt stop. This program builds your VMOs and tibialis and many other muscles that help bulletproof your knees against the extreme forces involved in coming to a sudden stop. The extreme moves that Ben demonstrates are very advanced and the program would never ever have someone do them without following the proper progression. If your knees are fucked up you just begin with backwards walking until your knee pain is reduced enough to progress further. Backwards walking is the safest way to begin building stability with the knees past the toes and this alone can help reduce knee pain.
Fantastic. Appreciate the personal feedback. I do have mild hip and knee issues so I wanna address them before they get worse. How long does his program take, in other words how long do you spend a week on this?
I'm doing the knee ability zero program. Currently I spend about 40-45 mins 3 times a week doing the program. It's 15 mins warm-up with backwards walking and then about 25-30 mins of exercises. I'm sure if I was more efficient and didn't take as long of rests between things I could shave significant time off of that. Depending on where you are at in the progression it's shorter or longer. I'm not yet at the stage where I can do the patrick step-up to full ankle bend so I'm not yet doing the ATG split squat. So as you progress the time commitment gets a little longer as you meet the requirements to begin certain exercises. This time is including various stretches that are included as part of the workout and which I view as a key element of the program.
There are also additional upper-body and off-day stretching routines that you can do on off-days, but I am personally just doing yoga on off-days so I can't give you a review of those aspects of the program.
