What this site is
Most lower-body rehab advice online is either too vague to act on or too confident to trust. You get a list of exercises with no dosage attached, or a promise that one movement will undo a problem that took eight months to build.
This site tries to sit in between. Plain explanations of why ankle, Achilles, foot, knee and hip problems behave the way they do, and straight reviews of the programs that claim to fix them.
The name is the thesis. Tissue adapts to load. Too little and nothing changes, too much and you're back where you started, and the window between those is narrower than most handouts admit. A lot of rehab that stalls isn't stalled because the diagnosis was wrong. It's stalled because the dose was.
Who writes this
A licensed physical therapist who treats lower-body problems every day.
I write anonymously, and it's fair to weigh that when you decide how much to trust any of it. My reasoning: this site reviews paid programs and earns a commission when people buy them. I'd rather that get judged on whether the thinking holds up than on credentials you couldn't independently verify anyway.
So don't take anything here on authority. Take it because the reasoning makes sense to you, because it matches what your own clinician has told you, or because it names something you'd already noticed and couldn't quite explain. If it doesn't do one of those, ignore it.
How programs get reviewed
Every program reviewed here is one I bought with my own money. Two of the David Grey Rehab programs I went through as a patient rather than a reviewer: the ankle and Achilles one for my own Achilles problem, and the hip program for a separate injury. Working through them from the inside, on my own body, is what changed how I sequence loading with the people I treat. That's a different kind of knowledge than reading a sales page, and it's most of what I have to offer here. No program creator pays me to write a review, reads one before it publishes, or has any say in what it ends up saying.
Four things I'm looking at:
- Does the loading progression actually progress? Tendons need specific load that increases over time. A program that skips stages, or that never really loads at all, won't work regardless of how well it's filmed.
- Does it separate problems that need different handling? Insertional and mid-portion Achilles pain are not the same problem. A program that treats them identically will fail roughly half the people who buy it.
- Is the dose specified? "Do these exercises" isn't a program. Sets, reps, load, frequency, and some criterion for when you move on are what make it one.
- Who is it wrong for? Every program has people it won't help. If the sales page doesn't tell you who those people are, the review will.
Reviews get updated when programs change. If I've got something wrong and you can show me, I'll correct it and note that I did.
What this site isn't
This is education, not treatment. It was written for a general audience rather than for you, and it can't account for your history, your imaging, your training load, or what your symptoms actually look like in person. All of those change the answer.
I'm a licensed physical therapist, but nothing here is provided in that capacity, and reading it doesn't make me yours. Get assessed by someone who can actually examine you, and do it sooner rather than later if your pain is severe, getting worse, or arrived with a specific injury.
How this site makes money
Some links here are affiliate links, including links to David Grey Rehab programs. If you buy through one, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
That's a conflict of interest, so here's how I handle it. The affiliate relationship doesn't decide whether a program gets a good review, and I publish criticism of programs I earn from. A review that never says no isn't a review, it's an ad.
One boundary worth stating plainly, since I'm a clinician as well as a reviewer: I use ideas from these programs to inform how I treat, but I don't sell them to my patients or tell them to buy anything. The commission comes from readers here, not from anyone I treat.
If you'd rather not use an affiliate link, search the program directly. Nothing on this site is gated behind one.
Contact
Corrections, disagreements, and requests for topics are all welcome. Corrections especially. Reach me at contact@loadprogression.com.
I can't answer individual clinical questions by email. Not because I'd rather not, but because doing it properly takes an examination I can't run through a message, and doing it badly would be worse than not answering at all.