Slant Board

The ‘Knees over toes guy’ has had a quite the rapid rise in views this year and I certainly took notice given my own struggles with knee pain. I’ve watched nearly all of his YouTube videos trying to gain an understanding of his exercises and methods, and have started to implement them into my own training. In particular I liked the look of his revers set up progressions, as I know this type of movement can be a trigger for my knee pain. I started with a very small range of motion step forward, then stepping off a low box, which he calls a ‘Patrick step up’. The next progression for me was carefully increasing the reps to where I am now performing 5 x 20 reps each side 3-4 times per week. I will continue this for several weeks before moving on to the next progression which is the ‘Poliquin Step up’

Some basic progrssions.

The Poliquin step up requires a slant board, which I didn’t have, and would be prohibitively expensive to import (to New Zealand) so I decided to build my own. I wasn’t sure what the best dimensions were, so that was the first thing to figure out. Ideally, I would have built it as wide as my powerlifting cage would allow, but a better option was 500mm wide so that I could stack it on top of my lifting blocks. It needed to be slightly larger than my size 11 feet/shoes so 300-350mm would be more than large enough for the top. The angle was the next question. A full 45 degrees is much too steep, so I was considering 22.5 degrees (half of 45 degrees) until I saw in a video Ben Patrick (the knees over toes guy) said it was about 30 degrees. Having built it, this does feel about right, however I also think 22.5 degrees would feel fine too it that’s all you can manage.

I wish I has access to the right skills and tools to be able to draw all of the parts out on paper, measure, cut and assemble everything, and have it come out perfectly, but I don’t. To work around this, I cut the boards in stages. Using 20mm plywood I cut the top first with the angled cut facing down (because it looks terrible due to my lack of ability with a skill saw). I then cut the back of the slant board at the correct angle, so that I could measure and cut the bottom to size (this saved by having to use trigonometry, I can, I just can’t cut accurately enough). Then finally I could place these boards together and trace the triangle for the sizes (again saving me doing trigonometry).

Everything was screwed together and given a good over all sanding to make it all look good. I taped strips of sandpaper tape for grip (also known as grip tape) and the board is done.

I’ve used the board in testing a little bit and it feels good, and very solid. Hopefully this can be of some help to others who are looking at the knees over toes videos and would like to get into some of the exercises.