BEN: We are live.
Knees over toes guy here with ATG mentor Keegan Smith.
We're going to try to bring it to you, in 10 minutes.
What time is it? Can you see a clock where you are?
KEEGAN: I got one.
BEN: Okay good.
Keegan's responsible for making this 10 minutes on the dot.
We're covering, what is short range?
Keegan was the first to define short range and long range and we'll definitely follow this up next
week with a long-range video but let's start with short-range.
Keegan, why don't you break it down for us?
What is short range?
KEEGAN: To me this is like when I saw what you're doing, Ben, with the system that was really working, this is what really blew me away.
I'd been playing around with these ideas in my brain and you were the guy who's like you had the sequence down and you were doing this thing where you're doing sleds first and you're working on step-ups and you're kind of talking about like “hey don't even worry about doing split squats or doing full range squats if your knees are really tender”, you don't even do that and it looks like they're just different quad exercises, what's the difference?
But the difference is if the muscle is under stretch, if the tendons are under stretch then there's more passive tension that goes together with the muscular tension, and that makes a lot more tension on the connective tissue.
The short range is where the muscle is in the shortened position, there's not much tension on the connective tissue, and in the extremes it gets crampy. The l-sit position is a really good example of extreme short range.
BEN: Right, yes. Because anyone watching this will put it on Youtube. We'll put visuals. An l-sit would be a short-range exercise.
KEEGAN: So those kind of movements where you get crampy. They're hardest in the shortened position. Those ones tend to be very gentle on the tendons and you can generally, do them for high reps and get a lot of blood flow and bring healing to the area.
I mean we know and love that most with the knee work with the short range of the quadricep but it actually works really well for pretty much any joint. There may be some differences between the
extensors and the flexors. We've never actually spoken about that but Charles made a big distinction between the flexes and the extensors. Maybe that's a novel topic to bring to this podcast.
BEN: This would be fun to try to break down in 10 minutes but if you've been watching me, then you see me go backward with a sled. I’m convinced that over the last 10 years, I’ve done more backward sled and it's a short-range, meaning the muscle and tendon are not going through a great stretch.
To get the healing going for the tendon, you don't actually have to go through full range of motion even though that's what we're known for in ATG is going through full range of motion.
We use the short-range, something like backward sled, to get the healing and strengthening going simultaneously at a pain-free level which later makes the full bend stuff feel better.
On the other side, Keegan, I’ve been helping my dad with his elbow with just a band push down. So for your tricep. If you think about your elbow and your knee. So if you think about your tricep extending that's very similar to the knee.
So you can apply some of those principles but like you said with an l-sit that's like flexors now and that's where you said it gets crampy and if you think about the hamstring, if you try to actually hold, if someone just stood up tall right now and tried to do a hamstring curl, you can't even curl your hamstring all the way up. But that's the opposite of a Nordic which gets farther which gets tougher as you go longer rather than shorter so you've used banded hamstring curls.
Louis Simmons used banded hamstring curls for high reps pumping so that would be even there for a flexor though we still know that a banded hamstring curls much gentler than trying to do a Nordic.
A Nordic we're going to need for the bulletproofing but I wouldn't advise someone, “oh you're trying to get to where you can do Nordic start doing Nordics every day.”
You know what I mean, that would be a big risk but with the banded hamstring curl, you could do that more often to get blood flow.
I think we got dug a little deeper but keep going this is going to be a heck of a challenge but our job is that someone understands what short range is.
I guess we could break down like what are the key benefits of short-range training.
KEEGAN: The biggest thing for me is it takes away the fear of going really heavy or even doing plyometrics because if you do happen to flare something up then you know how to settle it back down and that was a big fear of mine as a rugby coach working with professional athletes.
If you give an athlete tendonitis and then that becomes something that they deal with for the rest of their career, you don't want to be that guy but if you have the tools, you have the logic of “I’ve bothered that tendon, now I need to work the tendon.” Gently bring a lot of blood flow into the area. Bring all the fluids that come with it, aggravate the area metabolically but not mechanically that's really what I think we get without…
BEN: How to build up a tendon gently starts with the short range and to throw a good visual on here. I’m obsessed with getting on a slight incline and getting the other leg out of the way and doing similar to a Poliquin step up but just pulsing in that position because you totally control it, you can go with two hands, and two legs so my dad is loving it because my dad is always strong.
Anything that gets into the tendons. Like you said it gets scary. So he's going two legs, two hands to balance, and getting a great quad burn but what's he doing every rep? He's going knees over toes every rep meaning he's actually strengthening those tendons every rep.
That's where the short-range comes in.
It allows us to get into those areas that we want to get stronger but that we're kind of scared to and I think that with the sled, I think all the forward sled work we do kind of gives that effect for the Achilles tendon, I think it adds tons and tons, not that you don't get stretched too but you're working that short range constantly, you're getting tons of blood flow perhaps even on the backwards. The way that we do it we actually coach it with strict form.
We're pushing through the foot so I think the sled for the Achilles and patellar tendons.
I think the sled is just an unbelievable low learning curve and it's short range but someone could see and go “oh my god look at that deep squats, oh my god, bending my knees all the way in training, that would be too hard” or something like that and we're called ATG as it's synonymous with ass-to-grass but what are we both saying is the foundation is not ass-to-grass, the foundation is short-range.
We're saying that sled is the foundation so maybe there's other anything you want to wrap up in there but I think we've got some pretty good visuals with that Poliquin pulse with all this sledding in here.
KEEGAN: Old guys love it and are using it before you do the long-range stuff.
I’ve heard a bunch of guys say “I just always do short range now”.
It doesn't have to be quantified as much as we love to quantify things in the ATG system.
If you just get everything feeling good and then you move into the work that you care about quantifying, it's not there to break any world records, it's simply there to facilitate what you're about to do.
One of the other key things with the short range is it's great for building the mind-muscle connection.
Because you can do high reps without a lot of mechanical damage it doesn't cause a lot of stress and inflammation to the area.
You can get away with a lot of reps and I think that's the secret to your dunking Ben like you say every time we do more and more sleds we just jump higher and it's like you're doing thousands of reps.
If you do a thousand rep workout versus someone doing a 10-rep workout, I back the guy with a thousand rep workout as long as he stays healthy.
BEN: But like you said there's less breakdown but we're still able to work those areas so some people commented on some recent dunk reps of mine and they're like “wow, you're looking extra bouncy” or whatever, and but I was back using the sled and not just using the sled, I was using it before I would go play basketball so I would actually do the sled pushing and pulling getting that 10 out of 10 burn with no pain and we know from sled training you can recover lightning fast so now I’m advising and we'd always notice this that it's like, guys would be having the game of their life an hour after doing sled and some people started using sled to actually warm up to play basketball and I think that's so cool that you could get in your sled work, put money in the bank for your feet, your Achilles, your knees, it's low intensity on the back but you actually get really strong glutes from the forwards.
You get an unbelievable workout, you get cardio, and yet within 30 minutes to an hour you can be playing the best sports of your life but that's short range.
Only the savages would do long-range workouts and then go have the game of their life that can happen too but the long term is more for long-term bulletproofing.
They go hand in hand.
KEEGAN: Pain-free sets the gains, gains free thing there as well the opposite of doing sled first and everything, having a lot of blood flow and all that, stuff that desensitizes the area to an extent would be to go in really cold, to go in with no blood flow, imagine you go into a game like that, where everything's cold, everything's a little bit sore, you just get out of the car, that's the opposite of doing the sled and obviously that's not going to work.
It's like playing with the extremes of the ideas is a good way to look at why it might work.
BEN: that totally makes sense, well good luck to our editor who's going to try to put some visuals to this.
Thank you guys for watching.
We'll keep breaking down an ATG definition once a week as with all of my claims of schedules there's only a 73 chance that I'll stick to it but Keegan and I are pretty committed I’m getting a schedule down and we will we'll try to keep breaking down a definition each week with visuals if you watch it on Youtube so you can really see and visualize what we're talking about.
Any last words brother?
KEEGAN: Let's do it.
BEN: All right, see you soon
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