HAVE YOU BEEN told that knee bends are not good for you? It is NOT true, but it all started this way! The following is from the Sports Illustrated March 1962 issue.
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The Knee is Not for Bending
Deep Bends and Duck Waddles Fall to a Texas Professor’s 20-Year Anti-Squat Crusade
John Underwood
The unacknowledged leader of the abolitionist movement and the provider of most of the damning statistics is an associate professor at the University of Texas who has studied the knee for 20 years. Professor Karl K. Klein, in fact, is on such familiar terms with it that he speaks of cartilage and ligament as if they were sons and daughters, and even keeps a piece of the gristly, milk-white cartilage from his own knee in a jar of alcohol on his desk.
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t was, thus, a delight to Klein in July of 1961 when the Army ordered an end to two decades of squat jumping, though his joy was short-lived—the brass promptly substituted a Deep Knee Bend, with rifle. This, in Klein’s view, was reverting from fire to pan—”anything below a half knee bend,” he says glumly, “is useless and ruinous.” A finer endorsement of Klein’s position, without strings, came in the August issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The AMA “generally disapproved” of deep knee exercises, and spoke darkly of their “potential for severe injury (medial cartilage deterioration) to the internal and supporting structures of the knee joint.” And in New York last week the superintendent of schools passed the word to gym teachers: no more exercise involving the deep knee bend.”
So all over the country KIDS — yes KIDS — were told not to do knee bends. KIDS who live and play in that position.
In her book How to Keep Slender and Fit After Thirty, copyright 1961, Bonnie Prudden, way ahead of her time, wrote about it this way:
“The study had used football players and weight lifters who had incurred knee injuries presumably when in the deep knee-bend position. The writer had picked two of the three most knee-damaging sports for his study. I wondered why he had left out basketball. Those knees the writer talked about were not injured just on the day they gave way. They had been overworked (and often undertrained), strained, and battered (especially in the case of footballers, who sustain innumerable blows from the side) until they were ready for the final push and the final tear.
The net result of that totally mistaken paper was that children in elementary schools were told knee bends were dangerous (so was everybody else, but imagine elementary schools! That’s just one step past the time when most of what children do quietly is done from a squatting position). We’ve been years and years trying to undo the mischief and I’ll wager it has cost the life of many a soldier. Can you imagine getting into or out of a slit trench or foxhole without the strength to more than half bend a knee?”
MORAL OF THE STORY: never believe the experts because tomorrow what they said will either be disproven or no longer be in style. BE YOUR OWN EXPERT. NEVER STOP QUESTIONING.
ALWAYS perform your knee bends and squats using good form and common sense so that you will be able to continue negotiating the stairs, the airport, getting up and down off the floor, in and out of chairs, and enjoying your daily walk with your furry dog companions and neighbors.
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If you have questions or need help, email me at enid@bonnieprudden.com.
For more information about Bonnie Prudden®, Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy®, workshops, books, self-help tools, DVDs, educational videos, and blogs, visit www.bonnieprudden.com. Or call 520-299-8064 if you have questions or need help. Enid Whittaker, Managing Director, Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy®
