Date: September 26. 2026
Mary Smith recently shattered the age 85-89 world record for 200 meters!
She’s been doing knees over toes for many years and sent me an update with her new record - and to tell me she’s still doing knees over toes.

There’s no secret exercise I haven’t already taught for free hundreds of times, and today I’ll again teach how I help people start winning with knees over toes - regardless of age.
The main survival ability people lose in relation to age and knees over toes is DOWNHILL/DOWNSTAIRS.

Walking backward is an undercut to that ability!

A safe and accessible way to start is by holding hands with a partner who is facing forward.

To increase strength for my parents, I had them drag a sled backward (and also push it forward).

When you use a sled or resisted treadmill, you don’t have the same risk as going downhill.
For demonstration purposes, Nana tried to drag 1,000 pounds backward. It didn’t move much… but she was unharmed!

Another way to progress is by understanding how gentle and scalable the stepdown exercise can be!

By starting with your non-working leg behind you, and pushing off with its toes, you have a gentle exercise for the working leg and knee, with infinite tiny levels between super easy and elite ability downhill.

A slantboard makes this easy to apply but a $3 concrete block and a $5, 2 inch by 6 inch by 5 foot board have worked great for me, too.

I don’t think everyone has to do every exercise.
I do think exercising backward and the stepdown exercise should be common knowledge, given their accessibility, simplicity, and excellent results.
The misunderstanding of “no knees over toes” was a 1970s university assumption without long-term research.
Ample research now backs up walking backward, the stepdown exercise, and even natural squatting with your knees over your toes (which was the ultimate banished exercise in the knees over toes family of natural abilities).

That mistake held back the field of knee exercise for 5 decades, and many college textbooks in existence today continue that mistake.
Life ain’t perfect. It was an understandable mistake and the textbook update process is understandably long.
No biggie.
I’m super duper grateful for my job of passing on true data and the best solutions I know, for FREE.
To Mary:
Thank you for the incredible inspiration!
Life is hard but you make the future look brighter.
Yours in Solutions,
Ben
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