2024 Review: Best slant boards to boost your fitness performance and prevent injuries

As fitness enthusiasts, we all strive for progress and peak performance. However, knee injuries, weak balance, leg and calf strength or health issues from achilles tendonitis or plantar fasciitis can be a significant setbacks affecting your health and wellness, training or athletics or overall daily activities.

To prevent such setbacks and improve overall fitness and health performance, it’s crucial to strengthen the muscles around our knees, calves and lower body. 

That’s where slant boards come into the picture. Slant boards or calf stretchers (ex. compare calf stretcher on Amazon) or simple yet powerful every day fitness tools that can weave into your daily routine at home, in the office and and into your workouts.

Revealing the Secrets: The Amazing Benefits of Slant Boards

If you’re wondering what slant boards are and how they work, let me break it down for you in 30 seconds, or get a deeper understanding on what are slant boards good for and the ultimate guide to selecting the right type of slant board for you.

Slant boards are basically angled (or slanted) platforms that position your body in either an inclined or declined position, depending on your orientation. The simple utility of a slant board  can be used for a multiple purposes including pre and post injury recovery from knee, calf or ankle injury, or athletics, sports and fitness to build strength and power in the quads (ex. slant board squats), thighs and calfs, or yoga and health and wellness to build greater flexibility and balance.

To use a slant simply place your feet on the inclined surfaces and create an optimal stretch for key muscle groups such as the knees and calves. A good slant board will have easy-to-use adjustable options to quickly change the angle or slant to multiple degrees, from a light incline to a deep incline and in-between.

The inclined slant board experience not only aids in stretching but also helps to create a more natural squatting motion. Think of the people you’ve seen in the gym or yoga studio or physio clinic performing squats. You don’t need a barbell to over the shoulders or dumbbells in each hand to perform a squat, though athletes will tend to combine the traditional squat with weight using slant board to build muscle size and strength. But for the vast majority of us, no weights required. The slant board squat is particularly beneficial as it allows your knees to track over your toes during squats, which is the optimal posture and position.

Go beyond leg strength. Let’s talk about the health benefits of a slant board

While strengthening your knees is a primary benefit, slant boards offer so, so, so much more.

Sometimes referred to as calf stretcher (which is actually a different exercise tool altogether), slant board are versatile tools that can also help strengthen your calves and Achilles tendon, leading to improved performance, reduced risk of injuries all while improving your balance and flexibility. If you consider owning your own slant board, browse and compare slant boards on Amazon.

Keeping these muscle groups and tendons properly stretched is essential, as injuries tend to occur when a weak link exists in our kinetic chain. With regular slant board training, you can build a stronger foundation, enabling you to perform better during intense activities like sprints, lifts, and jumps. But noted earlier, for those of us simply to improve our health and wellness, a few minutes on the slant board, whether at home or or one under the office desk for work, will offer exceptional benefits as reduced back pain, improved balance, mobility, and overall joint health; think ankle mobility!

One often overlooked advantage of slant boards is their potential to target the vastus medialis oblique (VMO) muscle effectively. The VMO plays a vital role in knee stabilization, especially during movements like squatting and bending over. However, isolating and activating the VMO can be tricky in some exercises, thus slant board exercises come to the rescue, providing a great way to improve the VMO’s stabilizing abilities and ensure your knees function optimally and pain-free.

Why slant boards deserve a place in your home, office and fitness arsenal

One of the fantastic features of slant board exercises is that they don’t require a dedicated trip to the gym. You can perform these exercises just about anywhere, using your body weight as resistance. Whether you’re standing at the sink, hammering away on emails at your desk, sitting or standing watching TV or video games, at the yoga studio, or on a road trip, slant boards can be seamlessly incorporated into your daily routine. Personally, I have two. Once in the living room when I’m on the couch and in-between commercials, and the other in the bedroom and spend 5 minutes each morning to perform a few essential stretches.

Ok, ok, ok… I hear your vibes. You get it and already sold on the advantages and benefits. So how do you pick the right slant board for your needs? Well, let me share some recommendations of the best slant boards of 2023 to help you narrow down your research.