Elevate Your Training with the Best Slant Boards
Take your workouts and injury prevention up a degree with these angled fitness accessories.
If you’ve ever been on the wrong end of a knee injury, you know how debilitating it can be to your training progress and everyday life. As such, it’s vital to keep this key joint protected during workouts, and the easiest way to help prevent injury is by strengthening the musculature around the area.
Strengthening your knees and other lower-body joints doesn’t need to be a complicated endeavor, though. Tools like slant boards can be simple and effective in stretching and stressing these areas safely, allowing you to reach a new range of motion without complicated movements or heavy equipment.
Slant Boards, Explained
Slant boards, as the name suggests, are angled platforms that place you in an inclined or declined position depending on your orientation. This exaggerated pitch allows the knees, calves and other key muscle groups to stretch more efficiently, creating a more natural flexion and stress that helps strengthen the areas over time.
The angled experience can also create a more natural squatting motion that allows the knees to travel over your toes. This is similar to what you’d see when performing a back squat in a worthwhile pair of weightlifting shoes.
Other Benefits of Slant Boards
Outside of training your knees, slant boards can be utilized to help strengthen your calves and other lower body areas like the Achilles tendon. Using a slant board regularly can help keep these muscles and tendons stretched for maximum performance and injury prevention. After all, we experience injuries when a load is placed on a weak portion of our kinetic chain. Keeping your lower body used to these stretches and angles can create a stronger base, allowing for increased output when you do decide to go all-in for a sprint, lift or jump.
Another great benefit to using a slant board is that the stretches available can be a great way to target your vastus medialis oblique, or VMO. This muscle is important in keeping your kneecap tracking but can be difficult to activate in other exercises. Training with a slant board can help improve the VMO's stabilizing abilities, keeping your knees functioning properly and pain-free.
Additionally, slant board exercises don’t require a dedicated trip to the gym. Your bodyweight can be more than enough resistance to create a proper stretch across the targeted areas, and you can even get a session in while performing other tasks. Standing at the sink doing dishes? Sitting at your desk answering emails? Riding as a co-pilot on a long weekend drive? All potential instances where slant boards can be employed.