The Benefits of Walking Backwards
bbc.com
bbc.com
I'm about 30 and have noticed a significant increase in my overall athleticism since starting to regularly follow his recommendations, and I was fairly athletic to begin with. My parents are in their late 60s and both were having regular knee pain that they say has almost completely vanished after a few months of some of the more basic exercises as well.
Longer discussion with him on walking backward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdofViBpO-U
But the problem often is (and it seems its valid for you too) that people are extremely focused on the sport(s) of their preference, but completely ignore overall health, ie by working out muscles and stabilizing system not primarily used in their sports. Ie not many runners ever hit the free weights or machines so their upper body looks like from Auschwitz, and it would benefit them massively long term - joints last longer, overall connection with the body is stronger. Not many runners do dedicated exercises to make their knees and ankles stronger. And so on.
I mean tendons and ligaments and rest of connective tissues also require focus when training, I'd say even more since it takes significantly longer to build any stamina/strength into it (so usually when starting working out muscles develop fast with connective tissues lagging behind and then folks end up with injuries since you need it all working together perfectly under serious load).
Walking back is severely impractical in real life and in outdoors outright dangerous if alone, so there may be smarter ways to reach same result. But it requires a bit of thinking, dedication and discipline. Just like rest of our lives.
Some exercise routines are better than others. If you want to get stronger overall, you probably want to do something like PPL. If you want to have a more robust and athletic lower body, the exercises recommended by the knees over toes guy are probably what you want. He didn't invent them (although I think he actually did play a role in making the tib bar a piece of equipment you can easily find and buy), but he's done a better job than anyone else I've seen of synthesizing it all.
Any training that moves metabolism and nervous system from homeostasis (dynamic equilibrium) to allostasis (stability through variation and predictive regulation) is good. This is known phenomenon in sports. You must cycle through different training regimes in weightlifting and endurance if you want to keep improving.
Try juggling, learning an instrument, waking backwards, standing in one feet, everything seems to work for as long as you still struggling to learn. It becomes homeostatic state when it is effortless and you must increase difficulty.
Keeping the body in a state of always adapting to the new stress
That's NOT the way to increase strength to the maximum. Eventually you plateau and improvements stop below what you could potentially do.
You have to do cycles. You increase the weights day by day, then at some point you drop down to lower weights and start going up again.
For example, when going for a long hike, you have to stop and rest regularly. Still, you need to keep moving forward to make progress
When I get this, it is usually because I have just entered a relatively serious training program from relative rest, something like adding 20+ miles a week. I generally cannot walk forward at all.
However, there is usually no limitation at all to my backwards walking or running, so I spend a week or two not just walking backward as necessary, but also in training, I will do backward track intervals with no IT band pain at all, until I forget about it and try turning around. Anecdotally, it improves recovery time for the IT band, but also causes the opposite problem to flare up in the MCL.
Note that present tense is for convenience. It’s been a long time since I’ve run.
Mine stemmed from my quads being significantly more developed than my hamstrings / lower posterior chain. Any imbalance between the front / back of your legs/hips can cause tracking issues, which will then overload your IT band or in the case of walking backwards, your MCL.
Also pressure point therapy using a lacrosse ball right into the hip attachment of the IT band was one of the few things that gave me relief. Good luck.
I wonder if this study would replicate.
0: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/CABN.7.4.380.p...
As a dissertation and a psychology study, the small sample size is somewhat expected, and a power analysis would (i suspect) indicate that it is perfectly valid for the statistical test being used (36 subjects is pretty close to 80% power for a moderate effect size for simpler experimental designs like this, if I remember correctly). These studies are not intended to serve as a critical and seminal authority on the subject but to add evidence to the literature, which then is taken as a whole to understand the underlying phenomena. Especially in a world where grants are reserved for only the flashiest and trendiest technologies and topics and publish or perish rules the day, papers with small sample sizes are a symptom of a lack of funding for these questions and relentless demands on researchers' time and effort, and I would bet that these researchers were doing the best they could with the resources they had. I think hackernews is rather uncharitable about psychology research in these respects.
As a note, this study was published in 2009 and thus likely conducted at least a year or two prior, at which point preregistration was not common for the cognitive field (and indeed it is still in its infancy). So, it is not surprising that this study was not preregistered and nor, I would argue, should it be considered a red flag.
I have known two healthy people who fell while walking backwards and struck their heads. One died and the other spent many months recovering.
I'm not suggesting a helmet, but it is something to consider.
The other was a successful young engineer in his late 30's. He just tripped over a toolbox that was in back of him.
They both hit the back of their heads, and neither had any previously known health problems or attacks of vertigo.
I don't walk backwards as a rule. But I trip over all kinds of stuff (mostly the kids toys) walking forward.
..
0: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11728329/#:~:text=Central%20....