What Nobody Teaches You About Strengthening Your Knees

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.

Strengthening unhappy knees can seem difficult, because many obvious exercises like squats may hurt, and can feel like they are doing harm (and if your knees are bad enough, maybe they are; it depends on many factors). Here’s a way to improve things:

The muscle nobody talks about

Well, not nobody. But, it’s a muscle that’s rarely talked about; namely, the tibialis anterior.

It plays a key role in decelerating knee motion—in other words, the movement that hurts if you have bad knees. It’s essential for absorbing shock during activities like walking, climbing stairs, and stepping off curbs

So, of course, strengthening this muscle supports knee health.

The exercise this video recommends for strengthening it involves leaning against a wall with feet about a foot away (closer feet make it easier, further makes it harder). Note, this is a lean, not a “Roman chair”.

The exercise involves squeezing the quadriceps, lifting toes toward the nose, and engaging the tibialis anterior muscle. If you’re wondering what to do with your hands, they can be held out with palms open to work on posture, or hanging by the sides. Do this for about 1½–2 minutes.

For more on all this, plus a visual demonstration, enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

When Bad Joints Stop You From Exercising (5 Things To Change)

Take care!

Don’t Forget…

Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

Recommended

  • The Pains That Good Posture Now Can Help You Avoid Later
  • Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Emotional Eating – by Allen Carr
    Is emotional eating really that different from quitting drinking? Allen Carr’s book reframes quitting as self-liberation, offering a new perspective on finding happiness beyond junk food.

Learn to Age Gracefully

Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • How Much Can Hypnotherapy Really Do?

    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.

    Sit Back, Relax, And…

    In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you for your opinions of hypnotherapy, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:

    • About 58% said “It is a good, evidenced-based practice that can help alleviate many conditions”
    • Exactly 25% said “It is a scam and sham and/or wishful thinking at best, and should be avoided by all”
    • About 13% said “It works only for those who are particularly suggestible—but it does work for them”
    • One (1) person said “It is useful only for brain-centric conditions e.g. addictions, anxiety, phobias, etc”

    So what does the science say?

    Hypnotherapy is all in the patient’s head: True or False?

    True! But guess which part of your body controls much of the rest of it.

    So while hypnotherapy may be “all in the head”, its effects are not.

    Since placebo effect, nocebo effect, and psychosomatic effect in general are well-documented, it’s quite safe to say at the very least that hypnotherapy thus “may be useful”.

    Which prompts the question…

    Hypnotherapy is just placebo: True or False?

    False, probably. At the very least, if it’s placebo, it’s an unusually effective placebo.

    And yes, even though testing against placebo is considered a good method of doing randomized controlled trials, some placebos are definitely better than others. If a placebo starts giving results much better than other placebos, is it still a placebo? Possibly a philosophical question whose answer may be rooted in semantics, but happily we do have a more useful answer…

    Here’s an interesting paper which: a) begins its abstract with the strong, unequivocal statement “Hypnosis has proven clinical utility”, and b) goes on to examine the changes in neural activity during hypnosis:

    Brain Activity and Functional Connectivity Associated with Hypnosis

    It works only for the very suggestible: True or False?

    False, broadly. As with any medical and/or therapeutic procedure, a patient’s expectations can affect the treatment outcome.

    And, especially worthy of note, a patient’s level of engagement will vastly affect it treatment that has patient involvement. So for example, if a doctor prescribes a patient pills, which the patient does not think will work, so the patient takes them intermittently, because they’re slow to get the prescription refilled, etc, then surprise, the pills won’t get as good results (since they’re often not being taken).

    How this plays out in hypnotherapy: because hypnotherapy is a guided process, part of its efficacy relies on the patient following instructions. If the hypnotherapist guides the patient’s mind, and internally the patient is just going “nope nope nope, what a lot of rubbish” then of course it will not work, just like if you ask for directions in the street and then ignore them, you won’t get to where you want to be.

    For those who didn’t click on the above link by the way, you might want to go back and have a look at it, because it included groups of individuals with “high/low hypnotizability” per several ways of scoring such.

    It works only for brain-centric things, e.g. addictions, anxieties, phobias, etc: True or False?

    False—but it is better at those. Here for example is the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists’ information page, and if you go to “What conditions can hypnotherapy help to treat”, you’ll see two broad categories; the first is almost entirely brain-stuff; the second is more varied, and includes pain relief of various kinds, burn care, cancer treatment side effects, and even menopause symptoms. Finally, warts and other various skin conditions get their own (positive) mention, per “this is possible through the positive effects hypnosis has on the immune system”:

    RCPsych | Hypnosis And Hypnotherapy

    Wondering how much psychosomatic effect can do?

    You might like this previous article; it’s not about hypnotherapy, but it is about the difference the mind can make on physical markers of aging:

    Aging, Counterclockwise: When Age Is A Flexible Number

    Take care!

    Share This Post

  • Shoulders Range – by Elia Bartolini

    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.

    Shoulder flexibility and mobility can be a big deal, especially when it starts to decline—more so than other kinds of flexibility. Most seniors can get through the day without doing the splits against a wall, for example, but shoulder tightness can be more of a problem if you can’t easily get into or out of your clothes.

    If you think it couldn’t happen to you: the great Jane Fonda has a now-famous photoset of her looking glamorous in a dress at a red carpet event, and then looking frazzled making breakfast in the same dress in her kitchen the next morning, because, as she wrote, “I couldn’t get my dress unzipped so I slept in it”.

    Now, “to avoid ending up like Jane Fonda” is not a series of words that usually precedes advice, but in this case: this book delves into the science of one of the most quirky joints of the human body, and how to leverage this to maximize shoulder mobility, while maintaining adequate strength (because flexibility without strength is just asking for a dislocation) without doing anything that would actually bulk up our shoulders, because it’s just about progressing through passive, active, and tensed stretching, static, dynamic, and loaded stretching, as well as PNF stretching and antagonist stretching.

    If that seems like a lot of stretching, don’t worry; the author presents a series of workouts that will take us through these stretches in a very small amount of time each day.

    The style is instructional like a textbook, with clear diagrams where appropriate, and lots of callout boxes, bullet points, emboldening for key points, etc. It all makes for every easy learning.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to improve and maintain your shoulder mobility, this is an excellent book for that.

    Click here to check out Shoulders Range, and perfect your shoulders and upper body flexibility!

    Share This Post

  • Triple Life Threat – by Donald R. Lyman

    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.

    This book takes a similar approach to “How Not To Die” (which we featured previously), but focussed specifically on three things, per the title: chronic pulmonary obstructive disease (CPOD), diabetes (type 2), and Alzheimer’s disease.

    Lyman strikes a great balance of being both information-dense and accessible; there’s a lot of reference material in here, and the reader is not assumed to have a lot of medical knowledge—but we’re not patronized either, and this is an informative manual, not a sensationalized scaremongering piece.

    All in all… if you have known risk factors for one or more of three diseases this book covers, the information within could well be a lifesaver.

    Get Your Copy Of “Triple Life Threat” On Amazon Today!

    Share This Post

Related Posts

  • The Pains That Good Posture Now Can Help You Avoid Later
  • Awakening Your Ikigai – by Dr. Ken Mogi

    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.

    It’s been well-established in supercentenarian studies that one of the key factors beyond diet or exercise or suchlike (important as those things definitely are), is having a purpose to one’s life.

    Neuroscientist Dr. Ken Mogi explains in this very easy-to-read book, how we can bring ikigai into our lives.

    From noticing the details of the small things in life, to reorienting one’s life around what’s most truly most important to us, Dr. Mogi gives us not just a “this is ikigai” exposé, but rather, a practical and readily applicable how-to guide.

    Bottom line: if you’ve so far been putting off ikigai as “I’ll get to that”, the time to start is today.

    Click here to check out Awakening Your Ikigai, and actually awaken yours!

    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

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Chili Chestnut, Sweet Apricot, & Whipped Feta Toasts

    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.

    This is a delightful breakfast or light lunch option, full of gut-healthy ingredients and a fair list of healthy polyphenols too.

    You will need

    • ½ baguette, sliced into ½” slices; if making your own, feel free to use our Delicious Quinoa Avocado Bread recipe. If buying shop-bought, a sourdough baguette will likely be the healthiest option, and tasty too.
    • 4 oz feta cheese; if you are vegan, a plant-based version will work in culinary terms, but will have a different (less gut-healthy) nutritional profile, as plant-based cheeses generally use a lot of coconut oil and potato starch, and are not actually fermented.
    • 1 tbsp yogurt; your preference what kind; live-cultured with minimal additives is of course best—and this time, plant-based is also just as good, healthwise, since they are fermented and contain more or less the same beneficial bacteria, and have a good macro profile too.
    • 4 oz precooked chestnuts, finely chopped
    • 6 dried apricots, finely chopped
    • ¼ bulb garlic, grated
    • 2 tsp harissa paste
    • 1 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
    • ¼ tsp MSG or ½ tsp low-sodium salt
    • Extra virgin olive oil, for frying
    • Optional garnish: finely chopped chives

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Combine the feta and yogurt in a small, high-speed blender and process into a smooth purée. If it isn’t working, add 1 tbsp kettle-hot water and try again.

    2) Heat the oil in a skillet over a medium heat; add the garlic and when it starts to turn golden, add the chestnuts and harissa, as well as the black pepper and MSG/salt. Stir for about 2 minutes, and then stir in the apricots and take it off the heat.

    3) Toast the baguette slices under the grill. If you’re feeling bold about the multitasking, you can start this while still doing the previous step, for optimal timing. If not, simply doing it in the order presented is fine.

    4) Assemble: spread the whipped feta over the toast; add the apricot-chestnut mixture, followed by the finely chopped chives if using, and serve immediately:

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    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

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • How (And Why) To Train Your Pre-Frontal Cortex

    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. Chapman’s Keys For Mental Focus

    This is Dr. Sandra Chapman; she’s a cognitive neuroscientist, on a mission to, in her words, further our understanding of:

    • what makes the brain stronger, faster and last longer
    • what enhances human cognitive capacity, and
    • what enhances the underlying brain systems across the lifespan.

    To this end, she’s also the founder and Chief Director of the Center For Brain Health, where she has worked on her mission for the past 25 years (clocking up hundreds of peer-reviewed publications to her name), as well as being a professor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT Dallas.

    What does she want us to know?

    Get your brain into gear

    When it comes to your brainpower, it is “use it or lose it”, but it is also perfectly possible to use it and lose it.

    Why?

    Very often, what we are using our brains for is high-strain, low-yield stuff, such as multitasking, overthinking, or overthinking while multitasking. And to make it worse, we often do it without sufficient rest.

    This is the equivalent of owning a Ferrari but trying to drive it in second and third gear at once by switching between the two as rapidly as possible. And doing that for 18 hours each day.

    Suffice it to say, you’ll be going nowhere quickly.

    An alternative “use” of brainpower is low-strain, low-yield stuff, such as having to pay close attention to a boring conversation. It’s enough to stop your mind from doing anything else, but not enough to actually stimulate you.

    This is the equivalent of owning a Ferrari but keeping it idling. The wear and tear is minimal this time, but you’re not actually going anywhere either.

    Better, of course, are the other two quadrants:

    • low-strain, high-yield: consistently using our brain in relatively non-taxing ways that encourage its development
    • high-strain, high-yield: here the Ferrari metaphor definitely fails, because unlike cars, our bodies (including our brains) are machines that benefit from judicious regular progressive overloading (but just by a bit, and with adequate recovery time between overloads).

    See also: 12 Weeks To Measurably Boost Your Brain

    How to do the “low-strain, low-yield” part

    When it comes to “what’s the most important part of the brain to help in the face of cognitive decline?” the usual answer is either to focus on memory (hippocampi) or language (various parts, but for example Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area), since people most fear losing memory, and language is very important both socially and practically.

    Those are indeed critical, and we at 10almonds stand by them, but Dr. Chapman (herself having originally trained as speech and language pathologist!) makes a strong case for adding a third brain part to the list.

    Specifically, she advocates for strengthening the pre-frontal cortex, which is responsible for inhibition, task-switching, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. If that seems like a lot, do remember it’s a whole cortex and not one of the assorted important-but-small brain bits we mentioned above.

    How? She has developed training programs for this, based on what she calls Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART), to support support attention, planning, judgment and emotional management.

    You can read more about those programs here:

    Center For Brain Health | Our Programs

    Participation in those is mostly not free, however, if you join their…

    Center For Brain Health | BrainHealth Project

    …then they will periodically invite you to join pilot programs, research programs, and the like, which will either be free or they-pay-you affairs—because this is how science is done, and you can read about yourself (anonymized, of course) later in peer-reviewed papers of the kind we often cite here.

    If you’re not interested in any of that though, we will say that according to Dr. Chapman, the keys are:

    Inhibition: be conscious of this function of your brain, and develop it. This is the function of your brain that stops you from making mistakes—or put differently: stops you from saying/doing something stupid.

    Switching: do this consciously; per “I am now doing this task, now I am switching to this other task”, rather than doing the gear-grinding thing we discussed earlier

    Working memory: this is effectively your brain’s RAM. Unlike the RAM of a computer (can be enhanced by adding another chip or replacing with a bigger chip), our brain’s RAM can be increased by frequent use, and especially by judicious use of progressive overloading (with rests between!) which we’ll discuss in the high-strain, high-yield section.

    Flexibility: this is about creative problem-solving, openness to new ideas, and curiosity

    See also: Curiosity Kills The Neurodegeneration

    How to do the “high-strain, high-yield” part

    Delighting this chess-playing writer, Dr. Chapman recommends chess. Although, similar games such as go (a Chinese game that looks simpler than chess but actually requires more calculation) work equally well too.

    Why?

    Games like chess and go cause structural changes that are particularly helpful, in terms of engaging in such foundational tasks as learning, abstract reasoning, problem-solving and self-control:

    Chess Practice as a Protective Factor in Dementia

    Basically, it checks (so to speak) a lot of boxes, especially for the pre-frontal cortex. Some notes:

    • Focusing on the game is required for brain improvement; simply pushing wood casually will not do it. Ideally, calculating several moves ahead will allow for strong working memory use (because to calculate several moves ahead, one will have to hold increasingly many possible positions in the mind while doing so).
    • The speed of play must be sufficiently slow as to allow not only for thinking, but also for what in chess is called “blunder-checking”, in other words, having decided on one’s move, pausing to consider whether it is a mistake, and actively trying to find evidence that it is. This is the crucial “inhibition habit”, and when one does it reflexively, one will make fewer mistakes. Tying this to dementia, see for example how one of the common symptoms of dementia is falling for scams that one wouldn’t have previously. How did cognitive decline make someone naïve? It didn’t, per se; it just took away their ability to, having decided what to do, pause to consider whether it was a mistake, and actively trying to find evidence that it is.
    • That “conscious switching” that we talked about, rather than multitasking? In chess, there is a difference between strategy and tactics. Don’t worry about what that difference is for now (learn it if you want to take up chess), but know that strong players will only strategize while it is their opponent’s turn, and only calculate (tactics) while it is their own turn. It’s very tempting to flit constantly between one and the other, but chess requires players to have the mental discipline be able to focus on one task or the other and stick with that task until it’s the appointed time to switch.

    If you feel like taking up chess, this site (and related app, if you want it) is free (it’s been funded by voluntary donations for a long time now) and good and even comes with free tuition and training tools: LiChess.org

    Here’s another site that this writer (hi, it’s me) personally uses—it has great features too, but many are paywalled (I’m mostly there just because I’ve been there nearly since its inception, so I’m baked into the community now): Chess.com

    Want to know more?

    You might like this book by Dr. Chapman, which we haven’t reviewed yet but it did inform large parts of today’s article:

    Make Your Brain Smarter: Increase Your Brain’s Creativity, Energy, and Focus – by Dr. Sandra Chapman

    Enjoy!

    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

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: