5 Movements You’ll Wish You’d Known Sooner
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Alisa Zuravskaja, mobility coach, shows us why:
Best for mobility, best against pain
These movements are what’s needed for good mobility (range of motion, flexibility, strength, stability) while also being a top-tier way of combatting pain, due to what they do for the body’s natural functions.
Specifically, the exercises are intended to build on one another, beginning with neck stability, then restoring upper-back rotation, activating your glutes, improving hip control, and finally reducing hamstring and posterior-chain tightness:
- Chin tucks: stand tall, bring your chin slightly forwards, then push it straight back to create a double chin while keeping your head level, and follow with slow shoulder shrugs by lifting your shoulders towards your ears and lowering them under control.
- Quadruped thoracic rotations: start on all fours with one hand on the floor and the other extended to the side, rotate through your upper back to lift the arm towards the ceiling while following it with your eyes, then return to the start position.
- Glute bridges: lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat, squeeze your glutes before lifting your hips, hold briefly at the top, then lower slowly while keeping the effort in your glutes rather than your lower back.
- Hip CARs (controlled articular rotations): stand or kneel, lift one knee and slowly move your hip through its fullest circular range while keeping your spine and upper body still, then repeat in both directions on each side.
- Sciatic nerve flossing: lie on your back with one knee bent and your foot flat on the floor, raise the other leg towards the ceiling, then gently flex and point your foot or make slow ankle circles, to glide the sciatic nerve through its range of motion.
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Best Mobility Drills For Posture & Pain Relief
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This Mobility Test Is Linked To How Long You’ll Live
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Can you do it?
Sit-to-rise
The sit-to-rise (STR) or sitting-rising test (SRT) is a quick mobility assessment where you sit down on the floor and stand back up again using as little support as possible, measuring how well your strength, mobility, balance, coordination, and control work together.
- How the test works: start with 10 points total—5 points for sitting down and 5 for standing up.
- How points are deducted: lose 1 point every time you use a hand, knee, elbow, or another support, and lose 0.5 points for wobbling or losing your balance.
- What higher scores suggest: scores between 8 and 10 are associated with strong physical capability, good overall function, and the lowest mortality risk in research studies.
- What mid-range scores suggest: scores between 5 and 7.5 may indicate emerging physical limitations or reduced movement quality.
- What lower scores suggest: scores below 5 are linked with reduced physical resilience and substantially higher mortality risk in long-term studies.
What the science says: studies involving thousands of adults over 40 found that lower SRT scores were consistently associated with higher mortality risk over subsequent years. Indeed, each additional point on the SRT was associated with roughly a 21% improvement in life expectancy in the cited research.
In terms of expectations, you should know that perfect scores are common in people aged 16 to 25, but fewer than 8% of adults over 55 achieve a perfect 10.
However! The good news is that if you don’t score well, you can practice and then score better.
You may be thinking: but I use a wheelchair and physically cannot stand at all, what does this mean for me? And the answer is: nothing, really. The research wasn’t done with your body in mind, and therefore the results may not reflect your healthy longevity. Likely a different test is needed, and the grip strength test is generally considered a good one that has similar associations (due to being inversely associated with frailty, and therefore positively associated with healthy longevity).
For more on all of this plus demonstrations of the incorrect ways of doing it and suspiciously no demonstration of the correct way, just a slightly edited bit where she sort of teleports from sitting to standing (we suspect she cannot do it and was embarrassed to admit it and hoped nobody would notice), enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
4 Tips To Stand Without Using Hands
Take care!
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Injured your ACL? It’s more than just a knee injury
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It’s an athlete’s worst fear. Hearing a loud “pop” and feeling severe pain are usually the first signs you’ve torn your anterior cruciate ligament, also known as the ACL.
The ACL connects your shin and thigh bones, and is one of the key ligaments that help stabilise your knee joint.
Research suggests ACL injuries are becoming increasingly common across all age groups. Children as young as ten are rupturing their ACLs, with many never regaining their pre-injury strength or ability.
So how do ACL injuries happen? And what makes them so serious?
Paul Kane/Getty Why the ACL matters
The ACL is an indispensable part of your knee joint. Its main job is to keep your knee stable by stopping it from rotating or extending too much. This is especially important if you regularly twist, pivot or land on your knee joint.
ACL injuries are most often a result of the fatigue-failure process. This is the idea that repeatedly using and putting strain on the ACL, without proper training, makes it significantly weaker over time.
Doing specific strength exercises and regular physical activity can help slow this process. But if you don’t do these activities, even minor movements can gradually weaken your ACL.
Importantly, ACL injuries don’t just affect elite athletes. Injury rates are just as high in amateur and community sport, where access to athletic rehabilitation is typically more limited. This means people playing at amateur levels can face longer, more uncertain paths to recovery compared to professional athletes who have a specialist team of medical and performance staff. As a result, many amateur athletes stop playing sport altogether.
Why are ACL injuries so severe?
Unlike many other tissues in the body, the ACL has a very limited capacity to heal. Once torn or damaged, it can’t regenerate in a way that restores its original structure or function.
The ACL is a crucial ligament in the knee joint. blueringmedia/Getty ACL injuries impact the stability of the knee, often causing the joint to “give way”. This leads to physical symptoms such as pain and swelling. But ACL injuries can also damage other parts of the leg including the meniscus, cartilage and other ligaments.
Over time, a person with an ACL injury may develop osteoarthritis, a painful condition where the cartilage in your knee breaks down and causes the bones to rub together. Even with appropriate medical care, one in two people who tear their ACL will have knee osteoarthritis.
The road to recovery
Recovering from an ACL injury can be a long, and at times painful, process that typically lasts between nine and 12 months. Any attempt to speed this up increases the risk of re-injury. And subsequent ACL injuries often have more severe consequences than the initial rupture.
The recovery process starts with diagnosis. This usually involves seeing a medical professional, such as a GP or physiotherapist, in a clinic. They often use MRI imaging to assess the damage to your ligaments and knee joint.
Many people will then have surgery to reconstruct their torn ACL. This requires the surgeon to take a piece of suitable tissue, known as a graft, from another part of the body to put it where the torn ligament was. Using special screws, they then secure the replacement tissue to the bone.
No matter how you treat an ACL injury, rehabilitation is key. An exercise physiologist or physiotherapist can help you rebuild the strength and flexibility of your knee joint through exercises focused on reducing swelling and restoring your range of motion.
Rehabilitation is particularly important if you’re planning to return to sport. As you heal and recover, you’ll go through several phases of exercises. By taking this gradual approach, you’ll be better prepared to perform more high-risk movements, such as pivoting or jumping.
Increasingly, ACL rehabilitation prioritises psychological health. This has given rise to a biopsychosocial approach to recovery, where recovery relies on physical healing as well as a positive mindset. Athletes can use strategies such as goal setting to manage the emotional ups-and-downs of sustaining a serious injury. This approach also recognises how crucial an athlete’s support network, which may include coaches, teammates and family, is to their recovery.
Injuring your ACL can take an immense physical and psychological toll. That’s why getting support from qualified medical professionals, as well as a close social network, is vital.
Daniel Kadlec, Researcher, Athlete Health and Performance, School of Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University and Caitlin Fox-Harding, Senior Lecturer/Researcher in Exercise and Sports Science, Edith Cowan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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How Strong Is Your Heart?
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First, let’s take a moment to remember that the heart is a muscular organ, which is why exercise strengthens it, whereas for many organs, pushing them to their limits does not improve their performance (think of your liver, kidneys, pancreas, etc, all of which should be given as easy a time of it as reasonably possible, for best performance).
When it comes to our muscles in general, we can be genetically predisposed to stronger or weaker muscles, often manifesting as denser (or less dense) muscle fibers. Which way your genes predispose you can be found by genetic testing (personal genomics).
For reference, see: Genetic Testing: Health Benefits & Methods
Muscle = muscle
Ok, there are many different types of muscle, and within muscles there are different types of muscle fiber. But there are some things that are true of muscle in general, and for these purposes, “muscle = muscle”.
One of them, it seems, is that if we have a genetic predisposition for stronger muscles, then this also holds true for our heart.
Most recently, a Finnish team of researchers, Dr. Katja Waller et al., looked at many (n=8,815) people’s data, and most specifically, the association between the polygenic score for handgrip strength, on cardiovascular disease mortality and all-cause mortality.
What they found is that those with a genetic predisposition for higher muscle strength had a lower risk of cardiovascular death, regardless of their physical activity or lifestyle habits. This association remained even after accounting for factors like smoking, alcohol use, and BMI.
You may be thinking: but what if the predisposed-to-be-stronger people were simply more active as a result?
That’s a fair question, because indeed people with genetic predispositions to be good at something (in this case, physical activity) may indeed do more of it.
However, the data showed that genetically stronger individuals were not, on average, any more active than others.
You can read the paper in full, here:
Wait, what’s that about “in men”?
So, the study participants were 53% women, however, the association which was strong for men, was not so strong for women. The researchers hypothesized that this may have had to do with differing biological and environmental influences, especially the potentially confounding effects of the cardioprotective role of estrogen premenopause, and of course postmenopause in those taking menopausal hormone replacement therapy—something the researchers didn’t control for.
However, previous work by another (well, some team members were the same) Finnish team of researchers, Dr. Kaisa Koivunen et al., found it was indeed predictive for women as well as men, and that the impact was significant but modest.
In case you’re wondering how the impact can be described simultaneously as “significant” and “modest”…
Since “significantly” tends to get used colloquially to mean “a lot”, let’s recap that in science, “significant” means “the probability of getting these results randomly is less than 0.05”. It does not mean that the difference is necessarily large—merely that it is improbable by random chance, and therefore it suggests that one thing is associated with another (specifically, at least one input variable is affecting at least one output variable; in this case, genetic predisposition to greater muscular strength predicts lower cardiovascular disease mortality).
You can read this paper in full, here:
And another one, this time still with Dr. Elina Sillanpää who contributed in the other two studies also, to keep it company:
So, how do I make use of this kind of information?
Firstly, know that your genetic predispositions of many kinds (not just this one) can not only predict your health risks, but also highlight what areas of your health you might need to pay particular attention to, as well as in some cases, what treatments are more or less likely to work well for you—which in turn, is information that can making life-changing differences to your treatment plan when one day something comes up (and rest assured, unless you die early by some accident/incident, something will come up at some point).
Next, check out: Do You Have A Personalized Health Plan? (Here’s How)
…for how to proceed 😎
Take care!
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How The Arts Slow Biological Aging
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
We’ve previous discussed some specific health benefits (especially brain health) of some specific arts, for example:
- The Music That Keeps Dementia At Bay
- Dancing vs Parkinson’s Depression ← this article is about a rather fun study, and the results were very predictable (i.e: it helps), and/but the mechanism of action is not necessarily something that people might think of in advance!
- How To Engage Your Whole Brain
…as well as occasional guest articles, such as: Lost for words? Research shows art therapy brings benefits for mental health
But what of the arts in general, as a category, and healthy aging beyond “just” brain health?
Artfully dodging aging
Researchers (Dr. Daisy Fancourt et al.) analyzed data from 3,556 UK adults and found that more frequent and more diverse arts and cultural engagement—such as reading, listening to music, or visiting museums—was associated with slower biological aging based on DNA methylation markers.
And yes, Dr. Fancourt and her team did control for such things as wealth, income, educational level, and other potential confounding variables that may have otherwise caused misleading results of the kind that lead to headlines such as “Horse-riding found to be the sport that most extends longevity”. Should we all take up horse-riding to increase our lifespans? Probably not; the reality is that people who can afford horses can probably afford better than average healthcare, and lead easier, less stressful lives overall. The fact that people with horses typically have wealthier lifestyles than those without, is the confounding variable here.
You can learn more about this sort of thing here: How Science News Outlets Can Lie To You (Yes, Even If They Cite Studies!)
Back to Dr. Fancourt’s study that did better than that and did control for the confounding variables (and yes, in this case, the associations held regardless of those other factors, indicating it really was the arts engagement that made a difference), she and her team found the following outcomes:
- Those who engaged in arts activities at least weekly appeared to age4% more slowly (a benefit comparable to exercising at least weekly versus doing no exercise).
- On the PhenoAge clock (see link below for more on that),weekly arts engagement was associated with being biologically about one year younger on average than rare engagement, while weekly exercise was linked to being just over half a year younger.
- These associations were most pronounced in people aged 40 and older, suggesting arts engagement becomes especially relevant in midlife and later years.
As for how it works, it’s not known for sure, but hypotheses so far include that arts engagement, especially if varied, combines cognitive, emotional, social, and sometimes physical stimulation, reducing stress, inflammation, and cardiovascular risk—all of which have big implications for health and healthy aging, of course.
You can read this paper in full, here: Does leisure activity matter for epigenetic ageing? Analyses of arts engagement and physical activity in the UK Household Longitudinal Study
Want to learn more?
You might like this book we reviewed a while back:
This Is Your Brain on Music – by Dr. Daniel Levitin
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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Fast Diet, Fast Exercise, Fast Improvements
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Diet & Exercise, Optimized
This is Dr. Michael Mosley. He originally trained in medicine with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist, but he grew disillusioned with psychiatry as it was practised, and ended up pivoting completely into being a health educator, in which field he won the British Medical Association’s Medical Journalist of the Year Award.
He also died under tragic circumstances very recently (he and his wife were vacationing in Greece, he went missing while out for a short walk on the 5th of June, appears to have got lost, and his body was found 100 yards from a restaurant on the 9th). All strength and comfort to his family; we offer our small tribute here today in his honor.
The “weekend warrior” of fasting
Dr. Mosley was an enjoyer (and proponent) of intermittent fasting, which we’ve written about before:
Fasting Without Crashing? We Sort The Science From The Hype
However, while most attention is generally given to the 16:8 method of intermittent fasting (fast for 16 hours, eat during an 8 hour window, repeat), Dr. Mosley preferred the 5:2 method (which generally means: eat at will for 5 days, then eat a reduced calorie diet for the other 2 days).
Specifically, he advocated putting that cap at 800 kcal for each of the weekend days (doesn’t have to be specifically the weekend).
He also tweaked the “eat at will for 5 days” part, to “eat as much as you like of a low-carb Mediterranean diet for 5 days”:
❝The “New 5:2” approach involves restricting calories to 800 on fasting days, then eating a healthy lower carb, Mediterranean-style diet for the rest of the week.
The beauty of intermittent fasting means that as your insulin sensitivity returns, you will feel fuller for longer on smaller portions. This is why, on non-fasting days, you do not have to count calories, just eat sensible portions. By maintaining a Mediterranean-style diet, you will consume all of the healthy fats, protein, fibre and fresh plant-based food that your body needs.❞
Read more: The Fast 800 | The New 5:2
And about that tweaked Mediterranean Diet? You might also want to check out:
Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet
Knowledge is power
Dr. Mosley encouraged the use of genotyping tests for personal health, not just to know about risk factors, but also to know about things such as, for example, whether you have the gene that makes you unable to gain significant improvements in aerobic fitness by following endurance training programs:
The Real Benefit Of Genetic Testing
On which note, he himself was not a fan of exercise, but recognised its importance, and instead sought to minimize the amount of exercise he needed to do, by practising High Intensity Interval Training. We reviewed a book of his (teamed up with a sports scientist) not long back; here it is:
Fast Exercise: The Simple Secret of High Intensity Training – by Dr. Michael Mosley & Peta Bee
You can also read our own article on the topic, here:
How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
Just One Thing…
As well as his many educational TV shows, Dr. Mosley was also known for his radio show, “Just One Thing”, and a little while ago we reviewed his book, effectively a compilation of these:
Just One Thing: How Simple Changes Can Transform Your Life – by Dr. Michael Mosley
Enjoy!
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Artichoke vs Cauliflower – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing artichoke to cauliflower, we picked the artichoke.
Why?
It takes an impressive vegetable to beat a Brassica oleracea cultivar, but here we are:
In terms of macros, artichoke has nearly 3x the fiber, as well as 2x the carbs and nearly 2x the protein. The fiber is the biggest difference (in total amount, not just in multiples) and easily wins it for artichoke here.
In the category of vitamins, artichoke has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B9, and E, while cauliflower has more of vitamins B5, B6, C, and K. Thus, a 6:4 victory for artichoke on this one.
When it comes to minerals, artichoke has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while cauliflower has more selenium. An easy win for artichoke.
Adding up the sections makes for a very convincing overall win for artichoke, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
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