Best Mobility Drills For Posture & Pain Relief
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Dr. Jenny Ochoa shows us how to feel better and stay better:
Ease your spine
The problem is that things such as prolonged sitting, desk work, scrolling, and time spent becoming one with the couch, all train your back into flexion, and thus stiffen your thoracic spine. This means that your neck and lower back often compensate, contributing more pain, poor posture, breathing restriction, and, as a special encore, inefficient movement that keeps the vicious cycle going.
The solution is simple: since daily life already overloads spinal flexion, intentionally train thoracic extension and rotation to restore balance.
Here are some exercises to do just that:
- Elevated elbow thoracic stretch: put your elbows on a bench, box, bed, or wall, sit your hips back, and drop your chest and head down while breathing deeply through your nose and out your mouth; use each exhale to sink deeper, prioritizing breath cycles over time.
- Foam roller thoracic extensions: put a foam roller under your upper back, cross a leg to help stabilize your lower back, keep your ribs down with abdominal tension, and extend segment by segment over the roller without flaring your ribs; reposition yourself gradually up and down your thoracic spine to target stiff areas.
- Larger roller or wheel extension: use a larger roller against your middle back, while sitting your hips back to lock your lower back, then move from flexion into extension with coordinated breathing, to isolate your thoracic movement.
- Foam roller thread-the-needle: from all fours, rotate one arm underneath your body while keeping the opposite hand planted on the floor, dropping your shoulder towards the ground; a resistance band can be used to increase the stretch and rotational demand, as soon as you feel ready for that.
- Quadruped rotation: place one hand behind your head, rotate your elbow from your opposite wrist towards the ceiling while keeping your support arm straight, and actively push through your grounded hand, prioritizing range of movement.
- Prone floor rotation: lie on the floor with your arms in a Y position, keep your hips grounded, and rotate your thumbs upwards towards the ceiling (while focusing motion through your thoracic spine rather than your lower back).
Bonus:
Partner-assisted extension: maintain locked hips and lower back, while a partner guides your arms and chest into deeper thoracic extension, for a stronger passive stretch.
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Stop Pain Spreading ← our main feature on the topic of “referred pain”, i.e. when the consequences of one set of pain gives us extra pain somewhere else, which then gives us extra pain somewhere else, which then… You get the idea. Check out the article to see how to stop it 😎
Take care!
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Laugh Often, To Laugh Longest!
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Putting The Abs Into Absurdity
We’ve talked before about the health benefits of a broadly positive outlook on life:
Optimism Seriously Increases Longevity!
…and we’re very serious about it, but that’s about optimistic life views in general, and today we’re about not just keeping good humor in questionable circumstances, but actively finding good humor in the those moments—even when the moments in question might not be generally described as good!
After all, laughter really can be the best medicine, for example:
From the roots
First a quick recap on de-toothing the psychological aspect of threats, no matter how menacing they may be:
Hello, Emotions: Time For Radical Acceptance!
…which we can then take a step further:
What’s The Worst That Could Happen?
Choose your frame
Do you remember when that hacker hacked and publicized the US Federal no-fly list, after already hacking a nationwide cloud-based security camera company, getting access to more than 150,000 companies’ and private individuals’ security cameras, amongst various other cyber crimes, mostly various kinds of fraud and data theft?
Imagine how she (age 21) must have felt, when being indicted. What do you suppose this hacker had to say for itself under such circumstances?
❝congress is investigating now 🙂
but i stay silly :3 ❞
…the latter half of which, usually rendered “but I stay silly” or “but we stay silly” has since entered popular Gen-Z parlance, usually after expressing some negative thing, often in a state of powerlessness.
Which is an important life skill if powerlessness is something that is often likely.
It’s important for many Gen-Zs with negligible life prospects economically; it’s equally important for 60-somethings getting cancer diagnoses (statistically the most likely decade to find out one has cancer, by the way), and many other kinds of people younger, older, and in between.
Because at the end of the day, we all start powerless and we all end powerless.
Learned helplessness (two kinds)
In psychology, “learned helplessness” occurs when a person or creature gives up after learning that all and any attempts to resist a Bad Thing™ fail, perhaps even badly. A lab rat may just shut down and sit there getting electroshocked, for example. A person subjected to abuse may stop trying to improve their situation, and just go with the path of least resistance.
But, there’s another kind, wherein someone in a position of absolute powerlessness not only makes their peace with that, but also, decides that the one thing the outside world can’t control, is how they take it. Like the hacker we mentioned earlier.
Sometimes the gallows humor is even more literal, laughing at one’s own impending death. Not as a matter of bravado, but genuinely seeing the funny side.
But how?
Unfortunately, fortunately
The trick here is to “find a silver lining” that is nowhere near enough to compensate for the bad thing—and it may even be worse! But that’s fine:
“Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do the dishes before leaving for my vacation. Fortunately, I also forgot to turn the oven off, so the house burning down covered up my messy kitchen”
Writer’s personal less drastic example: today I set my espresso machine to press me an espresso; it doesn’t have an auto-off and I got distracted and it overflowed everywhere; my immediate reaction was “Oh! I have been blessed with an abundance of coffee!”
This kind of silly little thing, on a daily basis, builds a very solid habit for life that allows one to see the funny side in even the most absurd situations, even matters of life and death (can confirm: been there enough times personally—so far so good, still alive to find the remembered absurdity silly).
The point is not to genuinely value the “silver lining”, because half the time it isn’t even one, really, and it is useless to pretend, in seriousness.
But to pretend in silliness? Now we’re onto something, and the real benefit is in the laughs we had along the way.
Because those worst moments? Are probably when we need it the most, so it’s good to get some practice in!
Want more ways to find the funny and make it a life habit?
We reviewed a good book recently:
The Humor Habit: Rewire Your Brain To Stress Less, Laugh More, And Achieve More’er – by Paul Osincup
Stay silly!
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Why Is Sitting So Bad For Us?
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.
Dr. Murat Dalkilinç walks us through it:
Don’t take it sitting down
The human body has evolved for movement, and prolonged sitting—a very recent innovation on the evolutionary timescale—places physical stresses on multiple body systems that can affect both short-term function and long-term health.
In fact, with over 360 joints, about 700 skeletal muscles, an upright posture, circulation that benefits from movement, responsive nerve cells, and elastic skin, we’re build of almost nothing but features that reflect a body well adapted for frequent motion.
So, what happens if we sit too much?
- Effects on the spine: sitting with a curved back and slumped shoulders places uneven pressure on the spinal discs, overworks certain ligaments and joints, and strains muscles that then must try (and generally fail) to adapt to the hunched position.
- Effects on nerves: compressed nerves can impair nerve signaling and cause numbness, while restricted blood flow through compressed vessels can contribute to swelling in the limbs.
- Effects on breathing: a hunched posture reduces the size of the chest cavity, giving the lungs less room to expand, and reducing the amount of oxygen entering the blood.
- Effects on fat metabolism: prolonged sitting reduces the activity of lipoprotein lipase, an enzyme that helps break down fats in the bloodstream, making fat metabolism less efficient.
- Effects on the brain: reduced movement can decrease blood flow and oxygen delivery, which can lower alertness, concentration, and cognitive performance.
No surprise, then, that extended periods of sitting have been associated with increased risks of various cancers, heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, and more.
Indeed, research cited in the video estimates that this kind of physical inactivity contributes to about 9% of premature deaths worldwide, representing more than 5 million deaths annually.
For more on all of this plus visual illustrations, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← this is about reducing the damage done by sitting, including if for whatever reason you have to spend a lot of time sitting, including if you physically cannot stand and/or cannot walk.
Take care!
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Magnesium Glycinate vs Magnesium Citrate – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing magnesium glycinate to magnesium citrate, we picked the citrate.
Why?
Both are fine sources of magnesium, a nutrient in which it’s very common to be deficient—a lot of people don’t eat many leafy greens, beans, nuts, and so forth that contain it.
A quick word on a third contender we didn’t include here: magnesium oxide is probably the most widely-sold magnesium supplement because it’s cheapest to make. It also has woeful bioavailability, to the point that there seems to be negligible benefit to taking it. So we don’t recommend that.
Magnesium glycinate and magnesium citrate are both absorbed well, but magnesium citrate is the most well-absorbed form of magnesium supplement.
In terms of the relative merits of the glycine or the citric acid (the “other part” of magnesium glycinate and magnesium citrate, respectively), both are also great nutrients, but the amount delivered with the magnesium is quite small in each case, and so there’s nothing here to swing it one way or the other.
For this reason, we went with the magnesium citrate, as the most readily bioavailable!
Want to try them out?
Here they are on Amazon:
Magnesium glycinate | Magnesium citrate
Enjoy!
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“Bulletproof” Your Knees With This Routine
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.
Knees are the most injury-prone joint in sports (41% of injuries), due to their structural instability compared to the hip (surrounded by strong muscles) and ankle (supported by bones), while also bearing full body weight. For the same reasons, they can become quite a liability as we get older. But, we can improve our odds a lot:
For reliable knees…
While this routine won’t make your knees literally invulnerable (alas), it will increase the strength, resilience, and mobility around the knee joint to facilitate pain-free movement and avoid injuries:
- Poliquin step-up: targets the vastus medialis oblique (VMO), a key quad muscle for knee stability; done on a 6-inch elevated surface with heel raised, focusing on alignment and pelvic control to correct inner-outer knee strength imbalance.
- Quad stretch: stretches tight quads that can misalign the kneecap and cause pain; done using a bench while tucking the pelvis to intensify the stretch—hold for 30 seconds, ideally repeating 3 times per leg.
- Hamstring curls with resistance band: strengthens hamstrings, which stabilize the knee during flexion; resistance band adds tension where the knee is most vulnerable—aim for 8–12 reps, 3 sets (machine alternative is fine too).
- Hip mobility drill: enhances hip mobility to prevent stress from transferring to the knee; involves seated leg rotations and contract-relax stretching of outer glutes—more mobile hips reduce injury risk overall.
Limitation: if you have a connective tissue disorder such as some kind of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (there are many kinds; it’s an umbrella term), there’s a good chance that no matter how much you strengthen it, your associated nerves aren’t going to believe it, so every now and again your legs will still fold like laundry no matter how strong they are. These exercises still have merit though, as they will help avoid exactly the kind of injury that the “oh no, collapse immediately!” response in EDS is also trying to help you avoid.
For more on these exercises, plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
The Best Exercise to Stop Your Legs From Giving Out
Take care!
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These 5 Medications Quietly Destroy Your Bone Density
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Do you take any of these?
Watch out for…
In a healthy body, bone is constantly being broken down and rebuilt, and these medications disrupt that balance in favour of loss rather than formation:
- Thyroid medications: too much thyroxine (T4) increases bone turnover (loss and formation), but still increases the former more quickly than the latter
- Anti-seizure medications: drugs like phenytoin increase liver enzyme activity that accelerates vitamin D breakdown, which reduces calcium absorption and thus weakens bone over time
- Aromatase inhibitors: these breast cancer treatments lower estrogen levels, effectively inducing a menopause-like state that significantly accelerates bone loss
- Proton pump inhibitors: long-term acid suppression reduces calcium absorption, making bones weaker, with calcium citrate suggested as a better supplement option in this case
- Glucocorticoids: steroids like prednisone are the most damaging, decreasing bone-building cells, increasing bone breakdown, and impairing calcium absorption—and it gets even worse after the first month or two
For more on all of this plus advice on how to manage bone density even if you have to take one or more of the above, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Which Osteoporosis Medication, If Any, Is Right For You?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Bamboo Shoots vs Cabbage – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing bamboo to cabbage, we picked the bamboo.
Why?
Bamboo shoots… And scores!
In terms of macros, bamboo has 2x the protein for the same fiber and carbs; an easy first-round win for bamboo.
In the category of vitamins, bamboo has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, and E, while cabbage has more of vitamins A, B5, B9, C, and K, for a 5:5 tie in this round.
Looking at minerals, bamboo has more copper, iron, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while cabbage has more calcium and magnesium, adding up to a tidy 7:2 win for bamboo here.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for bamboo, but by all means enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Don’t Be Bamboozled By Bamboo! ← including how to eat bamboo, for those unfamiliar with such, as we have been asked about it 🙂
Enjoy!
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