“Knees over toes” refers to a style of strength training that deliberately lets your knees travel past your toes during squats, lunges, and similar exercises. It’s both a natural movement pattern and the name of a training system popularized by Ben Patrick (known online as “Knees Over Toes Guy”) through his Athletic Truth Group (ATG) program. The core idea challenges decades of gym advice that said letting your knees drift forward was dangerous.
Why People Were Told to Avoid It
For years, personal trainers and physical therapists repeated the same cue: “Don’t let your knees go past your toes.” The reasoning seemed intuitive. As the knee moves forward during a squat, shear forces (the forces that push the joint surfaces in opposite directions) increase. Research on deep squatting confirms that contact forces at the knee are substantial, reaching roughly 5 to 6 times body weight at the joint between the shinbone and thighbone, and up to about 7 to 8 times body weight at the kneecap joint. Those numbers sound alarming in isolation, and they fueled the belief that forward knee travel was inherently risky.
The problem is that restricting forward knee travel doesn’t eliminate those forces. It shifts them somewhere else, typically to the lower back and hips, which have to compensate to keep you balanced. Artificially limiting how far your knees move also reduces how deep you can squat, which limits the strength and mobility you build in the tissues around the knee.
What Modern Research Actually Shows
The scientific consensus has shifted significantly. A comprehensive review in the Journal of Clinical Medicine concluded that for healthy, trained individuals, pronounced forward knee travel during squatting “poses no health risks and should not be deliberately limited based on current evidence.” The American College of Sports Medicine advises healthy adults to perform exercises through a full range of motion. Forward knee movement is now considered a normal and required part of the squat pattern that should be encouraged in healthy people.
The one caveat: people actively rehabbing a knee injury may benefit from temporarily limiting forward knee travel under professional guidance. But as a blanket rule applied to everyone? The research calls it outdated. Deep squatting appears safe when you maintain a neutral spine, even though knee forces increase with depth. The tissues of the knee, like all tissues, adapt and strengthen in response to progressive loading.
The ATG Training System
Ben Patrick built the ATG system around this principle after dealing with chronic knee tendonitis starting at age twelve. His program emphasizes what he calls “building from the ground up,” starting with ankle mobility, then progressing to knee strength, hip stability, and upper body work. Patrick claims this progression took him from a 19-inch vertical jump to over 40 inches, and his system now counts thousands of knee rehabilitation success stories.
The philosophy isn’t simply “push your knees as far forward as possible.” The central rule is to confront the range of motion that causes problems, but at a level of resistance that stays pain-free. Every rep, every set, every session should be performed without pain. Over time, you progressively increase the range of motion and the load. This is actually a well-established principle in physical therapy called progressive overload within a pain-free range. ATG just applies it specifically to knee-dominant movements that most programs avoid.
Key Exercises in the System
The ATG Split Squat
Patrick calls this the “#1 knee bulletproofer.” It’s a deep lunge where your back knee drops toward the floor while your front knee tracks well past your toes. Research on split squats shows they place less demand on the knee joint compared to bilateral squats like back squats, while recruiting more from the glutes and hamstrings relative to the quads. One study found that knee flexion during a Bulgarian split squat averaged about 96 degrees compared to 105 degrees in a back squat, meaning the single-leg version actually involves less extreme knee bending while still training deep ranges of hip motion. The ATG version pushes this further by emphasizing a full stretch at the bottom and using bodyweight or light load before adding resistance.
Backward Walking and Sled Work
Walking or dragging a sled backward is a staple of knees-over-toes training. It loads the quads and the muscles around the knee through a long range without the high impact of running or jumping. It’s often the very first exercise prescribed in the ATG system because it’s easy to scale (just change the weight on the sled) and nearly impossible to do wrong.
The Nordic Hamstring Curl
This exercise strengthens the hamstrings at long muscle lengths, which protects both the hamstring itself and the knee joint. A meta-analysis of soccer players found that injury prevention programs including Nordic hamstring curls reduced hamstring injury rates by up to 51% compared to teams that didn’t use them. Strong hamstrings act as a counterbalance to the quadriceps, stabilizing the knee from behind during explosive movements.
Tibialis Raises
Training the muscle on the front of your shin (the tibialis anterior) is unusual in most programs but central to the ATG approach. Strengthening this muscle improves your ability to absorb force when your foot hits the ground, which protects the knee from the bottom of the chain up.
Why Ankle Mobility Matters
Your ankles set the ceiling for how far your knees can travel forward. When the ankle joint is stiff, the body compensates by leaning the torso forward, shifting stress to the lower back, or lifting the heels off the ground. Research on squat mechanics shows that people with limited ankle dorsiflexion (the ability to pull your toes toward your shin) struggle to achieve even basic squat depth. Typical measurements for people who can squat to full depth with knees bent show ankle dorsiflexion of around 15 to 20 degrees or more.
If your ankles are stiff, a slant board (a wedge that elevates your heels) can help immediately. By angling your feet, it reduces the ankle mobility required to squat deep, allows your knees to travel further forward, keeps your torso more upright, and shifts more work to the quadriceps. Many people in the ATG system start with a slant board and gradually reduce the heel elevation as their ankle flexibility improves.
Who Benefits Most
Knees-over-toes training tends to attract people dealing with chronic knee pain, patellar tendonitis, or a history of knee injuries who feel like traditional rehab hasn’t worked. The progressive, pain-free approach gives them a way to rebuild strength in ranges of motion they’ve been avoiding, sometimes for years. Athletes also use it to improve jumping ability, deceleration, and resilience in sports that demand deep knee bending, like basketball, volleyball, and skiing.
That said, the principles aren’t exotic. Progressive loading through full ranges of motion, single-leg training, and balanced development of all the muscles around a joint are mainstream ideas in sports science. What the knees-over-toes movement did was package them into a system, give people permission to stop fearing forward knee travel, and provide a clear progression from total beginner to advanced athlete. For many people, the most valuable part is simply learning that their knees aren’t fragile, and that the movement they were told to avoid is exactly the movement that makes them stronger.