The 8 Pillars of Transformation

I went from in pain with a 19 inch vertical jump, to pain-free with a 42 inch vertical jump, by training according to the following 8 Pillars:

1. Strength, through
2. Length, according to
3. Structural Balance, on a
4. Gradient Scale, with
5. Elasticity, and
6. Technique, all influenced by
7. Body Composition, and all ultimately powered by
8. YOUR INTENTION.

1. Strength

Without strength, your bones would fall to the floor. It is your muscles that animate your body. And specifically, how strong you are, vs. how much your body weighs…

…through 2: Length

But expressing your strength is not a matter of holding your body stiff: the greater strength you have through the greater length, the more athletic you are! Many have given up on this pursuit of both strength and length, determining one or the other is truth — but in reality, both — in harmony — are how the body moves.

…according to 3: Structural Balance

Your ability to fight gravity and prevent injury also depend on WHERE you build your Strength through Length. Which body below do you think has the 19 inch vertical jump, and which do you think has the 42 inch vertical? I weigh the same in each photo, but the body on the right is built according to Structural Balance, and the body on the left is not.

Structural Balance breaks down into 3 main categories:

Structural Balance Sub-Section #1: From one pair of joints to the next pair upward.

Can your knees handle the power of your hips? And can your ankles handle the power of your knees? Right from the ground up, what your ankles can’t handle must go up to your knees. Do you do as many sets for your ankles as you do for your squats, deadlifts, and bench presses? Of course not — no exercise system ever has.

Until ATG.

ATG is only for truth — wherever it comes from. It has no bias. It adheres only to physics and statistics — not conclusions or opinions, no matter how widespread they are believed.

ATG is built on observation — not belief. You are free to believe what you want, and you should only believe something because you observe it to be so — not because I or anyone else tells you so.

And based on gravity: your ankles must have adequate strength relative to your knees.

Your knees must have adequate strength relative to your hips.

And your hips must have adequate strength relative to your upper body.

The bigger your upper body, the more demand on your hips.

The more powerful your hips, the more demand on your knees.

And the more force your knees apply, the more demand there is on your ankles.

You can actually manufacture pains and injuries just by ignoring gravity and building a body in reverse order, as has been done by modern exercise science, due to 669% more money spent studying acceleration than deceleration…

You see, your ankles and your knees are the primarily decelerators.

I made this “Why Build From The Ground Up” video (anything underlined in my articles is a link, just click!) to illustrate this phenomenon.

The result of more money, more sets, and more reps on your upper body and hips — with a LOT more effort in the exercises involved — has led to undue stress on the knees, shins, Achilles, ankles, and feet.

By statistic, lower leg pain and surgeries have soared to epidemic levels. As you can see in my before and after picture above: I didn’t lack hard work — I lacked education in Structural Balance.

Being balanced from the “ground up” has nothing to do with opinion — it simply has to do with physics.

You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to the universe. So I stopped lying to myself, even though it meant going against the mainstream ways of thinking about strength training. Thus, Athletic Truth Group was born.

Key Understanding: You’re Not Just Muscle…

In building from the ground up, you are respecting your tendons, which are biggest in INVERSE ratio to your muscle size. Let’s examine…

Your glutes are bigger than your quads.

Your quads are bigger than your calves.

But did you know your ACHILLES is the largest tendon in your body, far larger than your gluteal tendons?

And did you know that tendons are STRONGER than muscles?

Yet your lower legs are statistically, the dollar spent, the MOST NEGLECTED area of modern exercise science.

Money talks. Money influences how our societies form, how our politics form, and — no different — how our exercise science has formed.

As we come up from your calves to quads to glutes, your tendons keep getting proportionately SMALLER.

Hidden FACT: Your lower body has an inverse ratio of muscle size to tendon size.

This does not mean we become some system where you don’t address your glutes, because again: ATG has no master other than physics, and your glutes ARE the most powerful muscles in your body.

In fact, we use 4 completely different exercises to get glutes measurably in the upper 1% of society.

But we do this without disobeying physics, and so we earn our way there from the ground up.

Structural Balance from the ground up is actually only 1 of the 3 sub-sections of Structural Balance, so let’s continue…

(Example to sum up Structural Balance Sub-Section #1: ZERO studies have been done on strengthening your tibialis, even though it’s biologically the first line of defense for your feet, ankles, Achilles, shins, and knees. We have it down to measurable testing and training, just like modern exercise science’s beloved bench press [which doesn’t even address the length, by the way — Shoulder Ability actually goes into tremendous detail on this, including bench press math and solutions by angle!])

Structural Balance Sub-Section #2: From one side of the joint to the other.

Just because I’m the “knee guy” doesn’t mean I’m “all quads.” Once again, you’ll totally “get” the ATG system when you see there is no bias towards any one quality over another. And so I have also paved the way to hamstring measurably in the upper 1%, standardizing multiple exercises in the process.

And this front-to-back Structural Balance devotion goes for all joints: ankles, knees, hips and shoulders (and even elbows and wrists [<yep: we have articles and programs for those, too!]).

Structural Balance Sub-Section #3: From one side of the body to the other (Left vs. Right).

It is not enough just to have balanced joints from the ground up and from front to back of each joint. You also need to be balanced from one side to the other: right ankle to left ankle, and so on.

Let’s take only the ankles to see how many flaws your body can accumulate over the years.

Your ankle strength could be imbalanced…

1. Compared to your knee strength.
2. From Calves to Tibialis (VERY common imbalance, since most people — even pro athletes — have never truly trained the Tibialis).
3. From Right Calf to Left Calf, or From Right Tibialis to Left Tibialis (also SUPER common due to imbalanced jumping and/or kicking plants.)

That’s ATG in a nutshell.

ATG’s purpose is simple: do what you love, without pain.

The fact myself and hundred of others continue to have insane speed and jump transformations is simply a mathematical byproduct of fixing the weakest links, thus stopping the power leakage and allowing your total power to continue going up without you holding yourself back, thus allowing more adaptation without pain or plateau.

And it’s absolutely INCREDIBLE how great each of our potentials truly is when we never violate the laws of physics!

…on a 4: Gradient Scale

None of the above matters if you don’t have solutions on a GRADIENT SCALE.

Working through pain = DESTRUCTION.

Pain-free challenge = CONSTRUCTION.

Pain is your body’s signal that something you are doing is harming your body. Your body is communicating to you. Are you listening? Or are you icing, taking painkillers, and trying other means of SHUTTING YOUR BODY UP.

Your body is not lying to you. It was not designed incorrectly. It was not designed to be incapable or in pain. It was designed to function pain-free and all we have to do is respect these laws and our body thanks us.

Another subject for another day, but the very guy who coined “RICE” (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) has since recanted and said he was wrong, and that ice only delays long-term healing!

Meanwhile, anti-inflammatory drugs have been found to wear DOWN your cartilage, even though they are prescribed to us every day for our cartilage PAINS — yikes. My high school basketball coach got me hooked on them, and not long after I tore my meniscus — which is cartilage.

Read my Meniscus article for more understanding of this.

And so my career has resulted in something like knee training being broken down into 7 levels (atgonlinecoaching.com membership > Knowledge > “Everything I Know About Knees.”), so you NEVER lack the right solution, at the right level, for anyone you seek to help.

And it goes the other way, too: your system can’t have “end” — which stops the elite athlete from continuing to improve…

(Each exercise has a Standard, which puts you in the upper 1% compared to society’s norm, and a World-Class Number, which literally puts you among the best on earth for your specific goals!)

…with 5: Elasticity

We touched on TENDONS above, but let’s define them exactly, starting with reiterating 2 key truths about them:

YOUR TENDONS ARE STRONGER THAN YOUR MUSCLES!

YOUR TENDON SIZE IS INVERSELY PROPORTIONATE TO YOUR MUSCLE SIZE!

So if you aren’t strength training from the ground up, you’re leaving your tendons vulnerable.

And if you are, then you’re already off on the right foot (no pun intended)!

But you cannot expect to maximally improve your jumping, without jumping.

Jumping, however, is a subject within itself! Read this full article just on the subject of jumping, as this was part of my 19 to 42 inch vertical jump transformation, and would be missing data if I did not educate you on it.

…and 6: Technique

Technique would then go more into the subject of the specific sport itself, but I can give you an example from basketball. Training proper defense/lateral technique DIRECTLY leads to more athletic and PROTECTED knees in the sport itself (membership site > Knowledge > “Lateral Knee Ability”).

Sport coaches will vary in their approaches and accuracy. In most sports I’ve found, sport coaches are actually missing out on key basics that will save so many athletes from injury, while giving them ever more athleticism.

The jumping article linked a few paragraphs earlier is an example of this, as it addresses both your Elasticity and Technique.

And maybe this analogy can explain it better: no matter how high I ever jump, I will NOT land a triple axel if I never learn to skate! So you can see: Elasticity and Technique are two different qualities.

…all influenced by 7: Body Composition

Body Composition essentially means: how much muscle vs. how much fat, and WHERE?

I see a popular phrase these days: “Fat Don’t Fly” — but Weak Don’t Fly Either!

Just being skinny does not make you jump high. I went into high school weighing 92 pounds, and I was also made fun of incessantly for my pathetic 19 inch vertical jump. It’s muscle VS. fat — not just having low body fat that makes you able to fight gravity.

In 2 weeks we are doing a dedicated week JUST on the Equator Diet, which has been my overall diet philosophy for the past 3 years, and it’s how I’ve assisted my pro athletes from a diet perspective. But Body Composition is not just about total muscle vs. fat, either. It’s also about…

WHERE you have your muscle.

For everyone who thinks Lebron James has a big, strong, upper body, I have to point you to the fact that he still PROPORTIONATELY has ideal muscle mass from the ground up. His calves and thighs are MASSIVE and thus can easily handle the weight of his upper body.

Here’s a clip of Lebron working on his Patrick Step Up (quite a few NBA strength coaches are ATG online members). Notice the ideal body proportions from the ground up. You’re looking at statistically the most durable NBA body of all time:

Being built from the ground up has been a common theme among sports legends, long before weight training entered the game.

Let’s look at the physique of the “Lebron” BEFORE Lebron: Oscar Robertson, the first NBA player to average a triple-double. If you don’t know basketball, that essentially means he did more on the court per game than anyone in basketball history up to that point. Did he have a super strong upper body? Yes he did! But look at the leg proportion!

Meanwhile, Michael Jordan had a leaner frame, but still the SAME proportions. Keep in mind this picture below is before he started weight training. In fact, he was the NBA Slam Dunk Champion of 1987 and 1988, BEFORE Tim Grover famously began training him. The subsequent book: Jump Attack, has become the number one selling jump book of all time, with Michael Jordan on the cover, even though it factually did not make Jordan jump even 1 inch higher. That is observable fact, not opinion — but misleading marketing like this causes all sorts of confusion in the subject of jumping training.

Now look below at a close-up of Jordan’s lower leg. This, too, was BEFORE weight training, and these lower leg muscles (not to mention ankle range: WOW!) are factually DISCOURAGED from being addressed, because they actually get emphasized, by science, when your knees go over your toes.

In the ATG system, these qualities have measurable accuracy of both range and strength.

Also notice Jordan’s pronounced LOWER quad muscle: the VMO (Vastus Medialis Oblique) which is also scientifically emphasized most when your knees are over your toes — yet again DISCOURAGED by modern exercise science! And again, this picture was BEFORE Michael Jordan began weight training. So if you don’t have Jordan’s genetics (his 5'8" brother could 360 dunk!), you’re actually heading further away from being like Mike, if you follow these non-evidence-based conclusions of “no knees over toes,” etc., which are still rampant all over the United States and the world at large.

The VMO is the first quad muscle that contracts to stabilize your knee when it is stressed, and it is also the most fast-twitch of your 4 quad muscles. Hm…

During my 19 to 42 inch vertical transformation, I did more dedicated work for this muscle — and the other closest muscle to your knee: the Tibialis — than any other trainer on earth.

Is this coincidence that the greatest devotion to the two muscles closest to the knee, has lead to the world’s greatest known knee pain success stories for myself and others?

(Tibialis)

…and all ultimately powered by 8: YOUR INTENTION.

Michael Jordan’s body can be explained by Pillars 1 through 7, but his success is not fully explained by those alone. As a spiritual being, he controlled his mind to control his body.

If we overlook this factor, we don’t see the whole picture. And this even affects your biology itself. Let’s take a look…

A study of sprinters was done where one group was lied to thinking they were getting slower, and the other group was lied to thinking they were getting faster.

All that happened is one group ran a little LESS far (thus appearing faster), while the other group ran a little farther (thus appearing slower!) — all without realizing it!

At the end of the study, the group that THOUGHT they were getting faster… ACTUALLY GOT FASTER! Their muscle mass was UP, body fat was DOWN, and testosterone was through the roof! They were exhibiting the hormones of “genetic freaks.”

Meanwhile, the group that thought it was getting slower, ACTUALLY GOT SLOWER! Their muscle mass was DOWN, body fat was UP, and testosterone was sunk, at the levels of the genetically-weak.

What does this mean?

My interpretation is to take pride when I make even 1% improvement on a quality that I know puts money in the bank towards my long-term goals. And like magic, I notice even more improvement the next week! It snowballs!

So how much was my 19 to 42 inch vertical transformation affected by my INTENTION? We will never fully know.

But if I took a loss every time my vertical didn’t go up, I never would have gotten here. I simply gained about 3 inches per YEAR… for 8 years!

Yet no Vertical Jump Program in history has ever advertised “You can gain 3 inches in 1 year!” Yet that’s exactly how the world’s best got there, and the short-term think leads to the mental anguish that shuts down your hormones and really doesaffect your gains.

But every day I get DMs like, “How much vertical can I gain in a month?”

“One month? 1/4 of an inch would be great!”

“What! My measurement only goes by half-inches?!”

And so you see the barrier to true success.

My “secret” was following the 8 Pillars. And I just never stopped gaining! I’m still going up!

And you can see these same patterns in the majority of the most successful people in the world: the common denominator is the ability to keep getting 1% better, 1% better, until you wake up one day and you’re in the upper 1% of the world.

Well, we have that route if anti-gravity and bulletproofing are among your goals.

Conclusion

I hope this article makes you more optimistic — not less — that you can achieve your goals. I never even expected to dunk. I had given up on dunking, and just wanted to be able to play without more pain and surgery. And so I stopped lying to myself, stopped listening to everything that led me to my present state even though it was “common knowledge,” and I just started observing physics with no ego or bias. And boy am I glad I did!

But my wish for you is not to think of these 8 Pillars as mine.

They are yours.

They are for the world.

They are for you to change more lives than I can alone!

No one owns knowledge, and it’s no good sitting around not helping people.

Let me know what you learn about your own body, and please consider giving me the chance to coach you on the ATG journey of self-discovery and improvement! (atgonlinecoaching.com)

As always, I do my best to answer DMs under 24 hours if you have any questions before starting!

Yours in Truth,
Ben