Science of HIIT – by Ingrid Clay
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We previously reviewed another book in this series, Science of Yoga. This one’s about HIIT: High Intensity Interval Training!
We’ve written about HIIT before too, but our article doesn’t have the same amount of room as a book, so…
This one lays out 90 key HIIT exercises that you can do at home without special equipment. By “without special equipment”, we mean: there are a few exercises that use dumbbells, but if you don’t want to get/use dumbbells, you can improvize (e.g. with water bottles as weights) or skip those. All the rest require just your body!
The illustrations are clear and the explanations excellent. The book also dives into (as the title promises) the science of HIIT, and why it works the way it does to give results that can’t be achieved with other forms of exercise.
Bottom line: if you’ve been wanting to do HIIT but have not yet found a way of doing it that suits your lifestyle, this book gives many excellent options.
Click here to check out Science of HIIT, and level-up yours!
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Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief
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When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might
Maybe you want to avoid painkillers, or maybe you’ve already maxed out what you can have, and want more options as an extra help against the pain.
Today we’ll look at some science-backed alternative pain relief methods:
First: when should we try to relieve pain?
There is no such thing as “this pain is not too much”. The correct amount of pain is zero. Maybe your body won’t let you reach zero, but more than that is “too much” already.
You don’t have to be suffering off the scale to deserve relief from pain!
So: if it hurts, then if you can safely get relief from the pain, it’s already wise to do so.
A couple of things we covered previously
CBD and THC are technically drugs, but are generally considered “alternative” pain relief, so we’ll give a quick mention here:
Short version:
- CBD can treat some kinds of treatment-resistant pain well (others, not so much—try it and find out if it works for you)
- THC can offer some people respite not found from other methods—but beware, because there are many health risks to consider.
Acupuncture
Pain relief appears to be its strongest suit:
Pinpointing The Usefulness Of Acupuncture
Cloves
Yes, just like you can get from the supermarket.
In its medicinal uses, it’s most well-known as a toothache remedy, but it has a local analgesic effect wherever you put it (i.e., apply it topically to where the pain is), thanks to its eugenol content:
Boswellia (frankincense)
The resin of the Boswellia serrata tree, this substance has an assortment of medicinal properties, including pain relief, anti-inflammatory effect, and psychoactive (anxiolytic and antidepressant) effects:
Frankincense is psychoactive: new class of antidepressants might be right under our noses
And as for physical pain? Here’s how it faired against the pain of osteoarthritis (and other OA symptoms, but we’re focusing on pain today), for example:
Here’s an example product on Amazon, but feel free to shop around as there are many options, including for example this handy roll-on
Further reading
Intended for chronic pain, but in large part applicable to acute pain also:
Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
Take care!
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Health & Happiness From Outside & In
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A friend in need…
In a recent large (n=3,486) poll across the US:
- 90% of people aged 50 and older say they have at least one close friend
- 75% say they have enough close friends
- 70% of those with a close friend say they can definitely count on them to provide health-related support
However, those numbers shrink by half when it comes to people whose physical and/or mental health is not so great, resulting in a negative feedback loop of fewer close friends whom one sees less often, and progressively worse physical and/or mental health. In other words, the healthier you are, the more likely you are to have a friend who’ll support you in your health:
Read in full: Friendships promote healthier living in older adults, says new survey
Related: How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation
Kindness makes a difference to healthcare outcomes
Defining kindness as action-oriented, positively focused, and purposeful in nature, this sets kindness apart from compassion and empathy, when it’s otherwise often been conflated with those, and thus overlooked. This also means that kindness can still be effected when clinicians are too burned-out to be compassionate, and/or when patients are not in a state of mind where empathy is useful.
Furthermore, unkindness (again, as defined by this review) was found in large studies to be the root cause of ¾ of patient harm events in hospital settings. This means that far from being a wishy-washy abstraction, kindness/unkindness can be a very serious factor when it comes to healthcare outcomes:
Read in full: Review suggests kindness could make for better health care
Related: The Human Touch vs AI, The Doctor That Never Tires
The gift of health?
🎵 Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
Which turned out to be a silly idea
This year, to save me from tears
I’ll just get you a Fitbit or something🎵Health & happiness go hand in hand, so does that make health stuff a good gift? It can do! But there are also plenty of opportunities for misfires.
For example, getting someone a gym membership when they don’t have time for that may not help them at all, and sports equipment that they’ll use once and then leave to gather dust might not be great either. In contrast, the American Heart Association recommends to first consider what they enjoy doing, and work with that, and ideally make it something versatile and/or portable. Wearable gadgets are a fine option for many, but a gift doesn’t have to be fancy to be good—with a blood pressure monitoring cuff being a suggestion from Dr. Sperling (a professor of preventative cardiology):
Read in full: Oh, there’s no gift like health for the holidays
Related: Here’s Where Activity Trackers Help (And Also Where They Don’t)
How you use social media matters more than how much
A study commissioned by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre found that while the quantity of time one spends on social media is not associated (positively or negatively) with loneliness, they did find a correlation between passive (as opposed to engaged) use of social media, and loneliness. In other words, people who were chatting with friends less, were more lonely! Shocking news.
While the findings may seem obvious, it does present a call-to-action for anyone who is feeling lonely: to use social media not just to see what everyone else is up to, but also, to reach out to people.
Read in full: Unpacking the link between social media and loneliness
Related: Make Social Media Work For Your Mental Health Rather Than Against It
Gut-only antidepressants
Many antidepressants work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain; a new study suggests that targeting antidepressants to work only in the gut (which is where serotonin is made, not the brain) could not only be an effective treatment for mood disorders, but also cause fewer adverse side-effects:
Read in full: Antidepressants may act in gut to reduce depression and anxiety
Related: Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!
Take care!
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It Didn’t Start with You – by Mark Wolynn
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There is a trend in psychology to “blame the parents” for “childhood trauma” that can result in problems later in life. Sometimes fairly, sometimes not. This book’s mostly not about that.
It does touch on our own childhood trauma, if applicable. But mostly, it’s about epigenetic trauma inheritance. In other words, not just trauma that’s passed on in terms of “the cycle of abuse”, but trauma that’s passed on in terms of “this generation experienced trauma x, developed trauma response y, encoded it epigenetically, and passed it on to their offspring”.
So, how does one heal from a trauma one never directly experienced, and just inherited the response to it? That’s what most of this book is about, after establishing how epigenetic trauma inheritance works.
The author, a therapist, provides practical advice for how to do the things that can be done to rewrite the epigenetic code we inherited. Better late than never!
Bottom line: it is well-established that trauma is inheritable. But unlike one’s eye color or the ability to smell asparagus metabolites in urine, we can rewrite epigenetic things, to a degree. This book explains how.
Click here to check out It Didn’t Start With You, and put things to rest!
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How To Reduce Knee Pain After Sitting
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Sitting is bad for the health, and doubly so if you have arthritis, as a lack of regular movement can cause joints to “seize up”. So, what to do about it if you have to sit for an extended time?
Dr. Alyssa Kuhn, arthritis specialist, explains:
Movement remains key
The trick is to continue periodically moving, notwithstanding that you may need to remain seated. So…
- Heel slides
- Straighten and bend your leg by sliding or lifting your heel.
- Promotes blood flow and reduces fluid buildup in the knee.
- Helps lubricate the joint, making standing up easier.
- Heel lifts
- Lift your heels up and down while keeping feet on the ground.
- This one’s ideal for tight spaces, such as when riding in a car or airplane.
- Improves blood circulation and can reduce ankle swelling and leg heaviness.
Do 20–30 repetitions every now and again, to keep your joints moving.
Note: if you are a wheelchair user whose legs lack the strength and/or motor function to do this, in this case it’s the movement of the leg that counts, not where that movement originated from. So, if you use one hand to lift your leg slightly and the other to push it like a swing, that will also be sufficient to give the joint the periodic movement it needs.
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 to read:
Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t) ← our main feature on this also includes more things you can do if you must sit, to make sitting less bad!
Take care!
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- Heel slides
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The Daily Stoic – by Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman
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What’s this, a philosophy book in a health and productivity newsletter? Well, look at it this way: Aristotle basically wrote the “How To Win Friends And Influence People” of his day, and Plato before him wrote a book about management.
In this (chiefly modern!) book, we see what the later Stoic philosophers had to say about getting the most out of life—which is also what we’re about, here at 10almonds!
We tend to use the word “stoic” in modern English to refer to a person who is resolute in the face of hardship. The traditional meaning does encompass that, but also means a lot more: a whole, rounded, philosophy of life.
Philosophy in general is not an easy thing into which to “dip one’s toe”. No matter where we try to start, it seems, it turns out there were a thousand other things we needed to read first!
This book really gets around that. The format is:
- There’s a theme for each month
- Each month has one lesson per day
- Each daily lesson starts with some words from a renowned stoic philosopher, and then provides commentary on such
- The commentary provides a jumping-off point and serves as a prompt to actually, genuinely, reflect and apply the ideas.
Unlike a lot of “a year of…” day-by-day books, this is not light reading, by the way, and you are getting a weighty tome for your money.
But, the page-length daily lessons are indeed digestible—which, again, is what we like at 10almonds!
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Valentine’s Day & Your Heart
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We’re not talking metaphorically; this is about your “beating wet pumpy thing” as a friend of this writer once put it!
Heart to heart
A dietician calls for us to take care of our hearts this Valentine’s Day, with ideas such as:
- Teamwork makes the dream work: support your partner’s health objectives by choosing gifts or activities that align with their goals, such as opting for new running shoes instead of candy if they aim to exercise more.
- Split up… Dinner: instead of consuming large portions individually, consider sharing a decadent meal to reduce metabolic load while still enjoying the experience together.
- A moving experience: plan active dates like hiking, dancing, or taking a walk, which promote both bonding and cardiovascular health. And if you can think of other perhaps “vigorous activities” you might enjoy doing together on Valentine’s Day, then that’s great for your heart too!
- Be aware of mutual health influences: recognize that partners can impact each other’s health behaviors and risks; making healthy choices together can strengthen both the relationship and individual well-being.
- No date, no problem: if you’re single this Valentine’s Day, consider connecting with friends, of if that’s not for you, perhaps treating yourself to a “self-care day” at home.
Read in full: Celebrate Valentine’s Day with actual hearts in mind, says dietitian
Related: Only One Kind Of Relationship Promotes Longevity This Much!
Playing the hand you’re dealt
We can make many choices in life that affect our health one way or the other, but there are some things we can’t control, and that includes a family history of some disease or other. In the case of a family history of heart conditions, all is not lost, and you can still play the odds:
- Diet: rich in fiber, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, and whole grains. Go easy on sugary, salty, and/or processed foods. Yes, sugary too! Sugary foods can increase blood pressure in the same way that salt does, by forcing the same homeostatic response.
- Exercise: prioritize movement, as in those “active minutes” that your smartwatch tracks. That famous “150 minutes per week” is great; more is better.
- Sleep: get up regularly around the same time each morning, preferably early. You should get to the point whereby you wake up shortly before the time your alarm would go off, each morning.
- Avoid: smoking and alcohol. They are both terrible for heart health.
- Teamwork: work with healthcare professionals to manage your heart health; a personalized plan is best, and they are there to help.
Remember, genes predispose; they don’t predetermine:
Read in full: Expert explains how to improve heart health, even if your family has history of heart conditions
Related: The Whole Heart Solution: Halt Heart Disease Now With the Best Alternatives and Traditional Medicine
Not so sweet?
Chocolate is famously high in antioxidants, but that must be weighed against other factors, if for example you’re eating a product that, when all’s said and done and the ingredients list is read, is mostly sugar.
That can be avoided, though! If you do like chocolate, we recommend getting dark chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa; 90% is great if you can find it!
Even so, the saturated fat content means you still might want to make it a moment for intentional “mindful eating” of a square or two, before setting it aside for another day:
Read in full: Valentine’s Day and chocolate are a perfect match, but is it a healthy relationship?
Related: 10 “Healthy” Foods That Are Often Worse Than You Think
Take care!
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