How Useful Is Hydrotherapy?
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Hyyyyyyydromatic…
Hydrotherapy is a very broad term, and refers to any (external) use of water as part of a physical therapy. Today we’re going to look at some of the top ways this can be beneficial—maybe you’ll know them all already, but maybe there’s something you hadn’t thought about or done decently; let’s find out!
Notwithstanding the vague nature of the umbrella term, some brave researchers have done a lot of work to bring us lots of information about what works and what doesn’t, so we’ll be using this to guide us today. For example:
Scientific Evidence-Based Effects of Hydrotherapy on Various Systems of the Body
Swimming (and similar)
An obvious one, this can for most people be a very good full-body exercise, that’s exactly as strenuous (or not) as you want/need it to be.
It can be cardio, it can be resistance, it can be endurance, it can be high-intensity interval training, it can be mobility work, it can be just support for an aching body that gets to enjoy being in the closest to zero-gravity we can get without being in freefall or in space.
See also: How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
Depending on what’s available for you locally (pool with a shallow area, for example), it can also be a place to do some exercises normally performed on land, but with your weight being partially supported (and as a counterpoint, a little resistance added to movement), and no meaningful risk of falling.
Tip: check out your local facilities, to see if they offer water aerobics classes; because the water necessitates slow movement, this can look a lot like tai chi to watch, but it’s great for mobility and balance.
Water circuit therapy
This isn’t circuit training! Rather, it’s a mixture of thermo- and cryotherapy, that is to say, alternating warm and cold water immersion. This can also be interspersed with the use of a sauna, of course.
See also:
- Ice Baths: To Dip Or Not To Dip?
- Saunas: Health Benefits (& Caveats)
- The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
this last one is about thermal shock-mediated hormesis, which sounds drastic, but it’s what we’re doing here with the hot and cold, and it’s good for most people!
Pain relief
Most of the research for this has to do with childbirth pain rather than, for example, back pain, but the science is promising:
Post-exercise recovery
It can be tempting to sink into a hot bath, or at least enjoy a good hot shower, after strenuous exercise. But does it help recovery too? The answer is probably yes:
Effect of hot water immersion on acute physiological responses following resistance exercise
For more on that (and other means of improving post-exercise recovery), check out our previous main feature:
How To Speed Up Recovery After A Workout (According To Actual Science)
Take care!
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Cabbage vs Cauliflower – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing cabbage to cauliflower, we picked the cauliflower.
Why?
First, let’s note: these are two different cultivars of the same species (Brassica oleracea) and/but as usual (we say, as there are a lot of cultivars of Brassica oleracea, and we’ve done a fair few pairings of them before) there are still nutritional differences to consider, such as…
In terms of macros, cabbage has very slightly more carbs and fiber, while cauliflower has very slightly more protein. However, the numbers are all so close (and the glycemic index equal), such that we’re going to call the macros category a tie.
In the category of vitamins, cabbage has more of vitamins A, B1, E, and K, while cauliflower has more of vitamins B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, and choline. Superficially, this is a clear 8:4 win for cauliflower; it’s worth noting though that the differences in amounts are mostly small, so this isn’t as big a win as it looks like. Still a win for cauliflower, though.
When it comes to minerals, it’s a similar story: cabbage has a little more calcium, iron, and manganese, while cauliflower has a little more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. This time a 6:3 win for cauliflower, and again, the margins are small so there’s really not as much between them as it looks like. Still a win for cauliflower, though.
In short: enjoy either or both (diversity is good), but the most nutritionally dense is cauliflower, even if cabbage isn’t far behind it.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Take care!
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This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism – by Ashton Applewhite
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It’s easy to think of ageism as being 80% “nobody will hire me because I am three years away from standard retirement age”, but it’s a lot more pervasive than that. And some of it, perhaps the most insidious, is the ageism that we can sometimes internalize without thinking it through.
10almonds readers love to avoid/reverse aging (and this reviewer is no different!), but it’s good once in a while to consider our priorities and motivations, for example:
- There is merit in being able to live without disability or discomfort
- There is harm in feeling a need to pass for younger than we are
And yet, even things such as disabilities are, Applewhite fairly argues, not to be feared. Absolutely avoided if reasonably possible of course, yes, but if they happen they happen and it’s good that we be able to make our peace with that, because most people have at least some kind of disability before the end, and can still strive to make the most of the precious gift that is life. The goal can and should be to play the hand we’re dealt and to live as well as we can—whatever that latter means for us personally.
Many people’s life satisfaction goes up in later years, and Applewhite hypothesizes that while some of that can be put down to circumstances (often no longer overwhelmed with work etc, often more financially stable), a lot is a matter of having come to terms with “losing” youth and no longer having that fear. Thus, a new, freer age of life begins.
The book does cover many other areas too, more than we can list here (but for example: ranging from pro/con brain differences to sex and intimacy), and the idea that long life is a team sport, and that we should not fall into the all-American trap of putting independence on a pedestal. Reports of how aging works with close-knit communities in the supercentenarian Blue Zones can be considered to quash this quite nicely, for instance.
The style is casual and entertaining, and yet peppered with scholarly citations, which stack up to 30 pages of references at the back.
Bottom line: getting older is a privilege that not everyone gets to have, so who are we to squander it? This book shares a vital sense of perspective, and is a call-to-arms for us all to do better, together.
Click here to check out This Chair Rocks, and indeed rock it!
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The Collagen Cure – by Dr. James DiNicolantonio
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Collagen is vital for, well, most of our bodies, really. Where me most tend to feel its deficiency is in our joints and skin, but it’s critical for bones and many other tissues too.
You may be wondering: why a 572-page book to say what surely must amount to “take collagen, duh”?
Dr. DiNicolantonio has a lot more of value to offer us than that. In this book, we learn about not just collagen synthesis and usage, different types of collagen, the metabolism of it in our diet (if we get it—vegans and vegetarians won’t). We also learn about the building blocks of collagen (vegans and vegetarians do get these, assuming a healthy balanced diet), with a special focus on glycine, the smallest amino acid which makes up about a third of the mass of collagen (a protein).
Not stopping there, we also learn about the interplay of other nutrients with our metabolism of glycine and, if applicable, collagen. Vitamin C and copper are star features, but there’s a lot more going on with other nutrients too, down to the level of “So take this 75 minutes before this but after that and/but definitely not with the other”, etc.
The style is incredibly clear and readable for something that’s also quite scientifically dense (over 1000 references and many diagrams).
Bottom line: if you’re serious about maintaining your body as you get older, and you’d like a book about collagen that’s a lot more helpful than “take collagen, duh”, then this is the book for you.
Click here to check out The Collagen Cure, and take care of yours!
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How Does Alcohol Cause Blackouts?
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Sometimes people who have never experienced an alcoholic blackout wonder “is it real, or is it just a convenient excuse to avoid responsibility/embarrassment with regard to things done while drunk?”
In 1969 (so, still in the era of incredibly unethical psychological experiments that ranged from the 50s into the 70s), Dr. Donald Goodwin conducted a study in which intoxicated participants were asked to recall an object they had just seen. Most succeeded initially, but half were unable to remember the object just 30 minutes later, demonstrating alcohol-induced memory blackouts.
But, is it any different from regular forgetting? And the answer is: yes, it is indeed different.
The memories that never got stored
Ethanol, the active compound in alcohol, is lipophilic, enabling it to cross the blood-brain barrier and disrupt brain function. It impairs all kinds of things, including decision-making, impulse control, motor skills, and, notably, memory networks—which is what we’re looking at today.
Memory formation (beyond “working memory”, which is the kind that enables you to have an idea of what you were just doing, and carry out simple plans like “pick up this cup, raise it to my mouth, and take a sip”, without forgetting partway through) relies on a process called long-term potentiation (LTP), which strengthens neural connections to store information. Ethanol disrupts this process, preventing memory storage and causing blackouts.
In effect, this means you didn’t just forget a memory; you never stored it in the first place. For this reason, experiences from during an alcoholic blackout cannot be retrieved in the same ways we might retrieve other memories (e.g. in regular forgetting, it’s possible that a context clue jogs our memory and then we remember the experience—because in regular forgetting, the memory was in there; we just didn’t recall it until we were reminded).
Blackouts (in which the memory is never stored in the first place) typically occur when blood alcohol concentration (BAC) exceeds 0.16, while lower levels can result in partial memory loss (brownouts) in which some things may be recalled, but not others. Factors such as dehydration, genetics, medications, food consumption, and age influence the likelihood of complete blackouts.
While alcohol’s residual effects typically subside within a day, repeated over-drinking can cause permanent neuron damage, as well as of course plenty of damage to other organs in the body (especially the liver and gut).
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
What Happens To Your Body When You Stop Drinking Alcohol
Take care!
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Random Acts of Medicine – by Dr. Anupam Jena & Dr. Christopher Worsham
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We talked recently of small things that can change how productive your doctor’s appointment is, and this book is a more scientific version of that, and on a grander scale.
The author use what they call “natural experiments”, essentially observational studies, to determine what factors beyond the obvious affect health outcomes. With this approach, they address such questions as why kids with summer birthdays are more likely to get the flu, and why heart attack outcomes improve when there’s a cardiologists’ convention elsewhere. And many more such things that can seem like non-causal correlation, until one examines the causative factors, and controls (in the statistical analysis; remember this is still entirely observational, so no interventions are made) for other potential confounding factors.
They also look at what factors influence doctors’ decisions in ways they certainly shouldn’t, but they do, because doctors are as prone to biases as everyone else. And, for that matter, what factors influence patients’ decisions in ways they certainly shouldn’t—for the same reason. The authors acknowledge that they themselves are not immune, and you, dear reader, are not immune either.
Nevertheless, the practical value in this book comes from trying to at least be more aware of such things, the better to either leverage them, or at least ensure you don’t fall foul of them.
The style is conversational pop-science, making for quite light reading, albeit with many footnotes and a respectable bibliography.
Bottom line: if you’d like to understand more about the machinations that decide who lives and who dies (especially when sometimes it will be you or a loved one who lives or dies), then this is a fascinating book that that delves deeply into that.
Click here to check out Random Acts Of Medicine, and be aware!
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Escape Self-Sabotage
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Stop Making The Same Mistakes
It’s easy to think that a self-destructive cycle is easy to avoid if you have no special will to self-destruction. However, the cycle is sneaky.
It’s sneaky because it can be passive, and/or omissions rather than actions, procrastinations rather than obvious acts of impulse, and so forth.
So, they’re often things that specifically aren’t there to see.
How to catch them
How often do you think “I wish I had [done xyz]” or “I wish I had [done yxz] sooner”?
Now, how often have you thought that about the same thing more than once? For example, “I should have kept up my exercise”.
For things like this, habit-trackers are a great way to, well, keep track of habits. If for example you planned to do a 10-minute exercise session daily but you’ve been postponing it since you got distracted on January the 2nd, then it’ll highlight that. See also:
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
Speaking of habits, this goes for other forms of procrastination, too. For example, if you are always slow to get medical check-ups, or renew your prescriptions, or get ready for some regularly-occurring thing in your schedule, then set a reminder in your preferred way (phone app, calendar on the wall, whatever) and when the appointed time arrives (to book the check-up, renew the prescription, do your taxes, whatever), do it on the day you set your reminder for, as a personal rule for you that you keep to, barring extreme calamity.
By “extreme calamity” we mean less “running late today” and more “house burned down”.
Digital traps
Bad habits can be insidious in other ways too, like getting sucked into social media scrolling (it is literally designed to do that to you; you are not immune modern programming hijacking evolutionary dopamine responses).
Setting a screentime limit (you can specify “just these apps” if you like) will help with this. On most devices, this feature includes a sticky notification in the notification bar, that’ll remind you “27 out of 30 minutes remaining” or whatever you set it for. That’ll remind you to do what you went there to do, instead of getting caught in the endless scroll (and if you went there to just browse, to do so briefly).
Here’s how to set that:
Instructions for iOS devices | Instructions for Android devices
Oh, and on the topic of social media? If you find yourself getting caught up in unproductive arguments on the Internet, try the three-response rule:
- You reply; they reply (no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still no progress made)
- You reply; they reply (still yet no progress made)
You reply just one more time: “I have a personal rule that if I’m arguing on the Internet and no progress has been made after three replies, I don’t reply further—I find this is helpful to avoid a lot of time lost to pointless arguing that isn’t going anywhere. Best wishes.”
(and then stick to it, no matter how they try to provoke you; best is to just not look until at least the next day)
When “swept up in love” gets to one of those little whirlpools…
The same works in personal relationships, by the way. If for example you are arguing with a loved one and not making progress, it can be good if you both have a pre-arranged agreement that either of you can, up to once on any given day, invoke a “time-out” (e.g. 30 minutes, but you agree the time between you when you first make this standing policy) during which you will both keep out of the other’s way, and come back with a more productive head on (remembering that things go best when it’s you both vs the problem, rather than vs each other).
See also:
Seriously Useful Communication Skills: Conflict Resolution
What if the self-sabotaging cycle is active and apparent?
Well, that is less sneaky, but certainly no less serious, and sometimes moreso. An obvious example is drinking too much; this is often cyclical in nature. We wrote about this one previously:
That article’s alcohol-specific, but the same advices go for other harmful activities, including other substance abuse (which in turn includes binge-eating), as well psychological addictions (such as gambling, for example).
Finally…
If your destructive cycle is more of a rut you’ve got stuck in, a common advice is to change something, anything, to get out of the rut.
That can be very bad advice! Because sometimes the change you go for is absolutely not the change that was needed, and is rather just cracking under pressure and doing something impulsive.
Here’s one way to actively get out of a slump:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
Note: you do not have to be depressed or anxious to do this. But the point is, it’s a tool you can use even if you are depressed and/or anxious, so it’s a good thing to try for getting out of most kinds of slumps.
And really finally, here’s a resource for, well, the title speaks for itself:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
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