Test For Whether You Will Be Able To Achieve The Splits
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Some people stretch for years without being able to do the splits; others do it easily after a short while. Are there people for whom it is impossible, and is there a way to know in advance whether our efforts will be fruitful? Liv (of “LivInLeggings” fame) has the answer:
One side of the story
There are several factors that affect whether we can do the splits, including:
- arrangement of the joint itself
- length of tendons and muscles
- “stretchiness” of tendons and muscles
The latter two things, we can readily train to improve. Yes, even the basic length can be changed over time, because the body adapts.
The former thing, however (arrangement of the joint itself) is near-impossible, because skeletal changes happen more slowly than any other changes in the body. In a battle of muscle vs bone, muscle will always win eventually, and even the bone itself can be rebuilt (as the body fixes itself, or in the case of some diseases, messes itself up). However, changing the arrangement of your joint itself is far beyond the auspices of “do some stretches each day”. So, for practical purposes, without making it the single most important thing in your life, it’s impossible.
How do we know if the arrangement of our hip joint will accommodate the splits? We can test it, one side at a time. Liv uses the middle splits, also called the side splits or box splits, as an example, but the same science and the same method goes for the front splits.
Stand next to a stable elevated-to-hip-height surface. You want to be able to raise your near-side leg laterally, and rest it on the surface, such that your raised leg is now perfectly perpendicular to your body.
There’s a catch: not only do you need to still be stood straight while your leg is elevated 90° to the side, but also, your hips still need to remain parallel to the floor—not tilted up to one side.
If you can do this (on both sides, even if not both simultaneously right now), then your hip joint itself definitely has the range of motion to allow you to do the side splits; you just need to work up to it. Technically, you could do it right now: if you can do this on both sides, then since there’s no tendon or similar running between your two legs to make it impossible to do both at once, you could do that. But, without training, your nerves will stop you; it’s an in-built self-defense mechanism that’s just firing unnecessarily in this case, and needs training to get past.
If you can’t do this, then there are two main possibilities:
- Your joint is not arranged in a way that facilitates this range of motion, and you will not achieve this without devoting your life to it and still taking a very long time.
- Your tendons and muscles are simply too tight at the moment to allow you even the half-split, so you are getting a false negative.
This means that, despite the slightly clickbaity title on YouTube, this test cannot actually confirm that you can never do the middle splits; it can only confirm that you can. In other words, this test gives two possible results:
- “Yes, you can do it!”
- “We don’t know whether you can do it”
For more on the anatomy of this plus a visual demonstration of the test, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Stretching Scientifically – by Thomas Kurz ← this is our review of the book she’s working from in this video; this book has this test!
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Could not getting enough sleep increase your risk of type 2 diabetes?
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Not getting enough sleep is a common affliction in the modern age. If you don’t always get as many hours of shut-eye as you’d like, perhaps you were concerned by news of a recent study that found people who sleep less than six hours a night are at higher risk of type 2 diabetes.
So what can we make of these findings? It turns out the relationship between sleep and diabetes is complex.
The study
Researchers analysed data from the UK Biobank, a large biomedical database which serves as a global resource for health and medical research. They looked at information from 247,867 adults, following their health outcomes for more than a decade.
The researchers wanted to understand the associations between sleep duration and type 2 diabetes, and whether a healthy diet reduced the effects of short sleep on diabetes risk.
As part of their involvement in the UK Biobank, participants had been asked roughly how much sleep they get in 24 hours. Seven to eight hours was the average and considered normal sleep. Short sleep duration was broken up into three categories: mild (six hours), moderate (five hours) and extreme (three to four hours). The researchers analysed sleep data alongside information about people’s diets.
Some 3.2% of participants were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes during the follow-up period. Although healthy eating habits were associated with a lower overall risk of diabetes, when people ate healthily but slept less than six hours a day, their risk of type 2 diabetes increased compared to people in the normal sleep category.
The researchers found sleep duration of five hours was linked with a 16% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, while the risk for people who slept three to four hours was 41% higher, compared to people who slept seven to eight hours.
One limitation is the study defined a healthy diet based on the number of servings of fruit, vegetables, red meat and fish a person consumed over a day or a week. In doing so, it didn’t consider how dietary patterns such as time-restricted eating or the Mediterranean diet may modify the risk of diabetes among those who slept less.
Also, information on participants’ sleep quantity and diet was only captured at recruitment and may have changed over the course of the study. The authors acknowledge these limitations.
Why might short sleep increase diabetes risk?
In people with type 2 diabetes, the body becomes resistant to the effects of a hormone called insulin, and slowly loses the capacity to produce enough of it in the pancreas. Insulin is important because it regulates glucose (sugar) in our blood that comes from the food we eat by helping move it to cells throughout the body.
We don’t know the precise reasons why people who sleep less may be at higher risk of type 2 diabetes. But previous research has shown sleep-deprived people often have increased inflammatory markers and free fatty acids in their blood, which impair insulin sensitivity, leading to insulin resistance. This means the body struggles to use insulin properly to regulate blood glucose levels, and therefore increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Further, people who don’t sleep enough, as well as people who sleep in irregular patterns (such as shift workers), experience disruptions to their body’s natural rhythm, known as the circadian rhythm.
This can interfere with the release of hormones like cortisol, glucagon and growth hormones. These hormones are released through the day to meet the body’s changing energy needs, and normally keep blood glucose levels nicely balanced. If they’re compromised, this may reduce the body’s ability to handle glucose as the day progresses.
These factors, and others, may contribute to the increased risk of type 2 diabetes seen among people sleeping less than six hours.
Millions of people around the world have diabetes. WESTOCK PRODUCTIONS/Shutterstock While this study primarily focused on people who sleep eight hours or less, it’s possible longer sleepers may also face an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.
Research has previously shown a U-shaped correlation between sleep duration and type 2 diabetes risk. A review of multiple studies found getting between seven to eight hours of sleep daily was associated with the lowest risk. When people got less than seven hours sleep, or more than eight hours, the risk began to increase.
The reason sleeping longer is associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes may be linked to weight gain, which is also correlated with longer sleep. Likewise, people who don’t sleep enough are more likely to be overweight or obese.
Good sleep, healthy diet
Getting enough sleep is an important part of a healthy lifestyle and may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Based on this study and other evidence, it seems that when it comes to diabetes risk, seven to eight hours of sleep may be the sweet spot. However, other factors could influence the relationship between sleep duration and diabetes risk, such as individual differences in sleep quality and lifestyle.
While this study’s findings question whether a healthy diet can mitigate the effects of a lack of sleep on diabetes risk, a wide range of evidence points to the benefits of healthy eating for overall health.
The authors of the study acknowledge it’s not always possible to get enough sleep, and suggest doing high-intensity interval exercise during the day may offset some of the potential effects of short sleep on diabetes risk.
In fact, exercise at any intensity can improve blood glucose levels.
Giuliana Murfet, Casual Academic, Faculty of Health, University of Technology Sydney and ShanShan Lin, Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health, University of Technology Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Water Fluoridation, Atheroma, & More
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small 😎
❝I watched a documentary recently on Fluoride in our drinking water & the dangers of it. Why are we poisoning our water?❞
This is a great question, and it certainly is controversial. It sounds like the documentary you watched was predominantly or entirely negative, but there’s a lot of science to back both sides of this, and it’s not even that the science is contradictory (it’s not). It’s that what differs is people’s opinions about whether benefiting one thing is worth creating a risk to another, and that means looking at:
- What is the risk associated with taking no action (error of omission)?
- What is the risk associated with taking an action (error of commission)?
The whole topic is worth a main feature, but to summarize a few key points:
- Water fluoridation is considered good for the prevention of dental cavities
- Water fluoridation aims to deliver fluoride and doses far below dangerous levels
- This requires working on consumer averages, though
- ”Where do we put the safety margins?” is to some extent a subjective question, in terms of trading off one aspect of health for another
- Too much fluoride can also be bad for the teeth (at least cosmetically, creating little white* spots)
- Detractors of fluoride tend to mostly be worried about neurological harm
- However, the doses in public water supplies are almost certainly far below the levels required to cause this harm.
- That said, again this is working on consumer averages, though.
- However, the doses in public water supplies are almost certainly far below the levels required to cause this harm.
- A good guide is: watch your teeth! Those white* spots will be “the canary in the coal mine” of more serious harm that could potentially come from higher levels due to overconsumption of fluorine.
*Teeth are not supposed to be pure white. The “Hollywood smile” is a lie. Teeth are supposed to be a slightly off-white, ivory color. Anything whiter than that is adding something else that shouldn’t be there, or stripping something off that should be there.
❝How does your diet change clean out your arteries of the bad cholesterol?❞
There’s good news and bad news here, and they can both be delivered with a one-word reply:
Slowly.
Or rather: what’s being cleaned out is mostly not the LDL (bad) cholesterol, but rather, the result of that.
When our diet is bad for cardiovascular health, our arteries get fatty deposits on their walls. Cholesterol gets stuck here too, but that’s not the main physical problem.
Our body’s natural defenses come into action and try to clean it up, but they (for example macrophages, a kind of white blood cell that consumes invaders and then dies, before being recycled by the next part of the system) often get stuck and become part of the buildup (called atheroma), which can lead to atherosclerosis and (if calcium levels are high) hardening of the arteries, which is the worst end of this.
This can then require medical attention, precisely because the body can’t remove it very well—especially if you are still maintaining a heart-unhealthy diet, thus continuing to add to the mess.
However, if it is not too bad yet, yes, a dietary change alone will reverse this process. Without new material being added to the arterial walls, the body’s continual process of rejuvenation will eventually fix it, given time (free from things making it worse) and resources.
In fact, your arteries can be one of the quickest places for your body to make something better or worse, because the blood is the means by which the body moves most things (good or bad) around the body.
All the more reason to take extra care of it, since everything else depends on it!
You might also like our previous main feature:
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Healthy Cook’s Anti-Inflammatory Diet & Cookbook – by Dr. Albert Orbinati
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Chronic inflammation is a root cause of very many illnesses, and exacerbates almost all the ones it doesn’t cause. So, reducing inflammation is a very good way to stay well in general, reducing one’s risk factors for very many other diseases.
Dr. Orbinati starts by giving advice for adjusting to an anti-inflammatory diet, including advice on trying an elimination diet, if you suspect an undiagnosed allergy/intolerance.
Thereafter, he gives guidance on pantry-stocking—not just what anti-inflammatory foods to include and what inflammatory foods to skip, but also, what food and nutrient pairings are particularly beneficial, like how black pepper and turmeric are both anti-inflammatory by themselves, but the former greatly increases the bioavailability of the latter if consumed together.
The rest of the book—aside from assorted appendices, such as 8 pages of scientific references—is given over to the recipes.
The recipes themselves are, obviously, anti-inflammatory in focus. As one might expect, therefore, most are vegetarian and many are vegan, but we do find many recipes with chicken and fish as well; there’s also some use of eggs and fermented dairy in some of the recipes too.
The book certainly does deliver on its promise of flavorful healthy food; that’s what happens when one includes a lot of herbs and spices in one’s cooking, as well as the fact that many other polyphenol-rich foods are, by nature, tasty in and of themselves.
Bottom line: if you’d like to expand your anti-inflammatory culinary repertoire, this book is a top-tier choice for that.
Click here to check out Healthy Cook’s Anti-Inflammatory Diet & Cookbook, and spice up your kitchen!
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Body Image Dissatisfaction/Appreciation Across The Ages
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Every second news article about body image issues is talking about teens and social media use, but science tells a different story.
A large (n=1,327) study of people of mixed genders aged 16–88 examined matters relating to people’s body image, expecting…
❝We hypothesized that body dissatisfaction and importance of appearance would be higher in women than in men, that body dissatisfaction would remain stable across age in women, and that importance of appearance would be lower in older women compared to younger women. Body appreciation was predicted to be higher in men than in women.❞
As they discovered, only half of that turned out to be true:
❝In line with our hypotheses, body dissatisfaction was higher in women than in men and was unaffected by age in women, and importance of appearance was higher in women than in men.
However, only in men did age predict a lower level of the importance of appearance. Compared to men, women stated that they would invest more hours of their lives to achieve their ideal appearance.
Contrary to our assumption, body appreciation improved and was higher in women across all ages than in men.❞
You can read the study in full here:
That’s a lot of information, and we don’t have the space to go into all parts of it here, fascinating as that would be. So we’re going to put two pieces of information (from the above) next to each other:
- body dissatisfaction was higher in women than in men and was unaffected by age in women
- body appreciation improved and was higher in women across all ages than in men
…and resolve this apparent paradox.
Dissatisfied appreciation
How is it that women are both more dissatisfied with, and yet also more appreciative of, their bodies?
The answer is that we can have positive and negative feelings about the same thing, without them cancelling each other out. In short, simply, feeling more feelings about it.
Whether the gender-related disparity in this case comes more from hormones or society could be vigorously debated, but chances are, it’s both. And, for our gentleman-readers, note that the principle still applies to you, even if scaled down on average.
Call to action:
- be aware of the negative feelings of body dissatisfaction
- focus on the positive feelings of body appreciation
While in theory both could motivate us to action, in reality, the former will tend to inform us (about what we might wish to change), while the latter will actually motivate us in a useful way (to do something positive about it).
This is because the negative feelings about body image tend to be largely based in shame, and shame is a useless motivator (i.e., it simply doesn’t work) when it comes to taking positive actions:
Why Shame Only Works Negatively
You can’t hate yourself into a body you love
That may sound like a wishy-washy platitude, but given the evidence on how shame works (and doesn’t), it’s true.
Instead, once you’ve identified the things about your body with which you’re dissatisfied, you can then assess:
- what can reasonably be changed
- whether it is important enough to you to change it
- how to go about usefully changing it
While weight issues are perhaps the most commonly-discussed body image consideration, to the point that often all others get forgotten, let’s look at something that’s generally more specific to adults, and also a very common cause of distress for women and men alike: hair loss/thinning.
If your hair is just starting to thin and fall, then if this bothers you, there’s a lot that can be done about it quite easily, but (and this is important) you have to love yourself enough to actually do it. Merely feeling miserable about it, and perhaps like you don’t deserve better, or that it is somehow a personal failing on your part, will not help.
If your hair has been gone for years, then chances are you’ve made your peace with this by now, and might not even take it back if a fairy godmother came along and offered to restore it magically. On the other hand, let’s say that you’re just coming out the other end of a 10-year-long depression, and perhaps you let a lot of things go that you now wish you hadn’t, and maybe your hair is one of them. In this case, now you need to decide whether getting implants (likely the only solution at this late stage) is worth it.
Note that in both cases, whatever the starting point and whether the path ahead is easy or hard, the person who has dissatisfaction and/but still values themself and their body will get what they need.
In contrast, the person who has dissatisfaction and does not value themself and their body, will languish.
The person without dissatisfaction, of course, probably already has what they need.
In short: identification of dissatisfaction + love and appreciation of oneself and one’s body → motivation to usefully take action (out of love, not hate)
Now, dear reader, apply the same thinking to whatever body image issues you may have, and take it from there!
Embodiment
A quick note in closing: if you are a person with no body dissatisfactions, there are two main possible reasons:
- You are genuinely happy with your body in all respects. Congratulations!
- You have disassociated from your body to such an extent that it’s become a mere vehicle to you and you don’t care about it.
This latter may seem like a Zen-level win, but in fact it’s a warning sign for depression, so please do examine that even if you don’t “feel” depressed (depression is often characterized by a lack of feelings), perhaps by taking the (very quick) free PHQ9 Test ← under 2 minutes; immediate results; industry-standard diagnostic tool
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Walnut, Apricot, & Sage Nut Roast
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It’s important to have at least one good nut roast recipe in your repertoire. It’s something that’s very good for making a good dish out of odds and ends that are in your house, and done well, it’s not only filling and nutritious, but a tasty treat too. Done badly, everyone knows the results can be unfortunate… Making this the perfect way to show off your skills!
You will need
- 1 cup walnuts
- ½ cup almonds
- ¼ cup whole mixed seeds (chia, pumpkin, & poppy are great)
- ¼ cup ground flax (also called flax meal)
- 1 medium onion, finely chopped
- 1 large carrot, grated
- 4 oz dried apricots, chopped
- 3 oz mushrooms, chopped
- 1 oz dried goji berries
- ½ bulb garlic, crushed
- 2 tbsp fresh sage, chopped
- 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 2 tsp dried rosemary
- 2 tsp dried thyme
- 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
- 1 tsp yeast extract (even if you don’t like it; trust us; it will work) dissolved in ¼ cup hot water
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Extra virgin olive oil
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 350℉ / 180℃, and line a 2 lb loaf tin with baking paper.
2) Heat some oil in a skillet over a moderate heat, and fry the onion for a few minutes until translucent. Add the garlic, carrot, and mushrooms, cooking for another 5 minutes, stirring well. Set aside to cool a little once done.
3) Process the nuts in a food processor, pulsing until they are well-chopped but not so much that they turn into flour.
4) Combine the nuts, vegetables, and all the other ingredients in a big bowl, and mix thoroughly. If it doesn’t have enough structural integrity to be thick and sticky and somewhat standing up by itself if you shape it, add more ground flax. If it is too dry, add a little water but be sparing.
5) Spoon the mixture into the loaf tin, press down well (or else it will break upon removal), cover with foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the foil, and bake for a further 15 minutes, until firm and golden. When done, allow it to rest in the tin for a further 15 minutes, before turning it out.
6) Serve, as part of a roast dinner (roast potatoes, vegetables, gravy, etc).
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
- Chia Seeds vs Pumpkin Seeds – Which is Healthier?
- Apricots vs Peaches – Which is Healthier?
- Goji Berries: Which Benefits Do They Really Have?
- Ergothioneine: “The Longevity Vitamin” (That’s Not A Vitamin)
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Make Time – by Jake Knapp and John Zeratzky
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We live in an information-saturated world, and we have done for so long now that it’s easy to forget: we did not evolve for this!
It’s easy to say “unplug”, but the reality is:
We also have to actually function in this fast-paced info-dense world whether we want to or not, and we are expected to be able to handle it.
So… How?
Appropriately enough, authors Knapp and Zeratsky present the answer in a skimmer-friendly fashion, with summaries and bullet points and diagrams and emboldened text forease of speed-reading. Who uses such tricks?!
In short, less living life in “default mode scramble” and more about making an impact in the ways you actually want to, for you.
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