Every step backward puts your knee over your toe, which is the position most knee pain hides from. Add a sled and you're strengthening that position with load, without the pounding that running or jumping brings. The resistance is whatever you put on the sled, so the same exercise works for a knee three months out of surgery and for an athlete building power. It builds eccentric strength in the quads, moves blood and synovial fluid through the joint, and your knee usually loosens up within the first few minutes.
Ten minutes, three days a week, is enough to see real change in a month. That's the dose I started with and it's still what I do.
How to do it
- Hook the strap or handles at your hips or hold them in your hands, and face the sled.
- Take a small step backward, landing on the ball of the foot with the knee bent and travelling forward over the toe.
- Push the ground away with the whole foot as you straighten that leg. The quad does the work, the calf finishes it.
- Stay tall with a slight lean back, and keep the steps short and quick. Long strides turn it into a hamstring exercise.
The weight rule.
Use any weight that lets you keep your knee over your toe on every step. The moment you have to lean way back and yank it with your hips, it's too heavy. Heavier is not better here. Longer is.
No sled? Start at level 1
You don't need a sled to get most of the benefit, and if your knee won't tolerate sledding yet, you shouldn't start there anyway. Work up through these.
- Level 1
Backward walking on flat ground. Ten minutes, small steps, knee over the toe every step.
- Level 2
Backward walking up a hill. The slope adds the resistance a sled would.
- Level 3
Backward walking on a treadmill with the belt off, so you drive it yourself. No treadmill? Put a plate or a ruck weight in a backpack and walk backward on flat ground or up the hill.
- Level 4
The sled, with any weight that lets your knee travel over your toe on each step. If you can't keep knees over toes, it's too heavy.
Whatever level you're on, ten minutes three times a week is the dose. Move up a level when the current one stops giving you a burn.
Where it lives in the Strong Knees System
Backward sled drags open the warm-up on the strength days in Kneehab Performance, and the sled runs through Kneehab Strength as a progression that gets heavier by week six. In the second block of Performance the sled gets lighter and turns into backward sled sprints. If you train at a gym with no sled, the backward treadmill or a weighted backpack covers it.
What I use
Sleds get expensive fast. Mine is a Rage Fitness pull sled that I drag on the grass at the park. It works great on grass or turf and I wouldn't drag it on pavement. I load it with my own kettlebells, usually 70 pounds total, which at six feet and 170 pounds gives me a solid burn by minute ten. If you're buying weight for it, a 53-pound kettlebell does double duty in the rest of your training, and the whole setup runs about $180.
For level 3, a ruck weight in a backpack works well. And if you want the indoor version, I've used the ATG backward treadmill for over a year now and reviewed it here.
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