Tag: exercise

Weak Hips, Anterior Chain & Spinal Flexion

~ cafebedouin

Problems

  • Hip Flexion Range of Motion: capsular mobilization + end-range loading (90/90 stretches, controlled articular rotations)
  • Anterior chain strength in length: exercises that load hip flexors eccentrically or isometrically in lengthened positions (dead bugs, hollow body progressions, leg lowers)
  • Spinal flexion control: segmental articulation drills (cat-cow, pelvic tilts, roll-downs with pauses)

Key consideration: Hip mobility restrictions tend to limit your ability to isolate spinal flexion—if hips won’t flex adequately, you compensate by over-rounding the lumbar spine or can’t achieve the positions at all. This means the protocol needs to address hip capsule first, then layer in strength and control work.

Risk

Prescribing exercises without seeing your movement patterns could reinforce compensation. The items below assume typical presentation, but if something causes pain or feels “wrong,” it likely is.

Proposed Protocol

30-45 minutes, 3-4x/week for skill acquisition

Phase 1: Hip Capsule Mobility (10-12 min)

  • 90/90 Hip Stretch (both sides): 2 min each, focus on keeping torso upright
  • Supine Hip Flexion with Strap: 90 sec each leg, gently pull knee toward chest while keeping opposite leg extended

  • Controlled Articular Rotations (Hip CARs): 8-10 reps each side, slow and controlled through full available range

Phase 2: Anterior Chain Strengthening (12-15 min)

  • Dead Bug Progression: Start with arms/legs at 90°, lower one leg while maintaining lumbar contact with floor. 3 sets of 8-10 reps each side

  • Hollow Body Hold: 3-4 sets of 20-30 sec, focus on posterior pelvic tilt

  • Leg Lowers (bent knee initially): 3 sets of 6-8 reps, only lower as far as you can maintain lumbar floor contact

  • Reverse Crunch: 3 sets of 10-12, lifting hips off floor using lower abs

Phase 3: Spinal Articulation (8-10 min)

  • Cat-Cow with Pauses: 10 reps, hold each segment of spine for 2 sec during flexion

  • Seated Roll-Downs: sit on mat, slowly roll down vertebra by vertebra, use hands on floor behind for support if needed. 8-10 reps

  • Supine Pelvic Tilts: 15-20 reps, focus on segmental movement through lumbar spine

Phase 4: Integration (5-8 min)

  • Modified Rollup Progression: Start lying down, reach arms overhead, lift one vertebra at a time. Use bent knees or resistance band behind back for assistance. 6-8 reps

  • Boat Pose Holds: 3 sets of 15-20 sec, working toward straighter legs as hip flexor strength improves

This protocol prioritizes your actual constraints in logical sequence: create ROM first (capsule work), build strength in new ranges (anterior chain), develop control (spinal articulation), then integrate (rollup progressions). Expect 6-12 weeks of consistent work (3-4x/week) before rollups feel significantly easier. The teasers will lag behind—they’re a higher-level skill that requires all three systems working well.

Track one metric weekly: can you sit on floor with legs extended and touch your toes without rounding your back? That’s your hip flexion ROM indicator.

Iron and Soul by Henry Rollins

~ cafebedouin

“The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.”

-Henry Rollings, “Iron and Soul.” reprinted in oldtimestrongman.com

Longo’s Recipe for Living Longer

~ cafebedouin

Longo and Anderson reviewed hundreds of studies on nutrition, diseases and longevity in laboratory animals and humans and combined them with their own studies on nutrients and aging. The analysis included popular diets such as the restriction of total calories, the high-fat and low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet, vegetarian and vegan diets, and the Mediterranean diet.

The article also included a review of different forms of fasting, including a short-term diet that mimics the body’s fasting response, intermittent fasting (frequent and short-term) and periodic fasting (two or more days of fasting or fasting-mimicking diets more than twice a month). In addition to examining lifespan data from epidemiological studies, the team linked these studies to specific dietary factors affecting several longevity-regulating genetic pathways shared by animals and humans that also affect markers for disease risk, including levels of insulin, C-reactive protein, insulin-like growth factor 1, and cholesterol.

The authors report that the key characteristics of the optimal diet appear to be moderate to high carbohydrate intake from non-refined sources, low but sufficient protein from largely plant-based sources, and enough plant-based fats to provide about 30 percent of energy needs. Ideally, the day’s meals would all occur within a window of 11-12 hours, allowing for a daily period of fasting, and a 5-day cycle of a fasting or fasting-mimicking diet every 3-4 months may also help reduce insulin resistance, blood pressure and other risk factors for individuals with increased disease risks, Longo added.

He described what eating for longevity could look like in real life: “Lots of legumes, whole grains, and vegetables; some fish; no red meat or processed meat and very low white meat; low sugar and refined grains; good levels of nuts and olive oil, and some dark chocolate.”

-“‘Longevity diet’ characteristics: What (and when) to eat for a long life.” University of Southern California. April 28, 2022.

This is a summary of the paper linked in the quote above. If you prefer bullet points:

  • Reduce weight and keep body mass index near 22, see BMI calculator.
  • Eat non-refined complex carbs (45-60%), plant protein (10-15%), and fats (25-35%). Mostly whole grains, legumes (fruits inside a pod), and nuts. Include some fish, but keep meat to a minimum.
  • Stop eating 3 hours before sleeping at night and fast for at least 12 hours.
  • Quarterly, high fat diet for 5 days.
  • Limit alcohol intake.

If you want more detail, the author Valter D. Longo has a book, “The Longevity Diet: Slow Aging, Fight Disease, Optimize Weight.”

[Minimum] Steps to Get There

~ cafebedouin

This is a follow-up on my post, The Maximum Human Life Span and Conjecture on Step Counts to Get There (15,000 Steps a Day). According to this research:

“By analyzing data on tens of thousands of people across four continents compiled between 15 existing studies, a team of researchers has now landed on a more comfortable figure: the optimal number is probably closer to 6,000 steps per day, depending on your age.”

-Mike McRae, “Scientists Identify The Optimal Number of Daily Steps For Longevity, And It’s Not 10,000.” Science Alert. March 4, 2022

This is a meta-analysis, which means it’s probably largely useless. But, it might be a good minimum level of steps to consider. Add in a weighted backpack, or rucksack, and it’s probably good, minimum advice.

Rucking, or Walking with a Weighted Pack on Your Back

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment
A gallon jug of vinegar and two 24 oz salsa jars in an old running day pack makes for a 15 pound pack

“Just add a bit of weight to any old pack you have lying around the house, take a walk, and you’ll open up a whole new world of fitness…For the average guy, a 30-minute walk burns about 125 calories, according to the Compendium of Physical Activities. But throw a weighted backpack on and take that exact same walk, and you burn about 325 calories, also according to the Compendium of Physical Activities…“The cardio benefits of rucking are comparable to those gained from other long, slow distance exercises like jogging,” says Jason Hartman, C.S.C.S. who trains Special Forces soldiers for the US Military.

But unlike jogging—which has an injury rate anywhere from 20 to 79 percent, according to a study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine—rucking actually makes you more injury resilient, says Hartman…

A good place to start for general fitness is to use a weight that’s equal to about 10 percent of your total bodyweight, says Kechijian…Once you’re comfortable, you can progress up to 35 pounds, says John.

“You can go with 35 pounds on your back for days, months, years,” he says. “But once you start to sneak above 35 pounds, it can break down your body.”

-Michael Easter, “The Fitness Trend Men Everywhere Can’t Get Enough Of.” Men’s Health. December 25, 2015

Hal Higdon’s Running Programs

~ cafebedouin

“[Hal Higdon]’s all about the democratization of running,” his daughter, Laura Sandall, said. “He was all about making sure that anyone who wanted to get out and run could have a training program at their fingertips.”

At their fingertips, and at the top of Google search results. His free training plans have remained some of the most frequently used — a rarity in a world where most plans and coaches cater to runners who are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for personalized schedules.

-Talya Minsberg, “The 90-Year-Old King of Training Plans.” The New York Times: Running Newsletter. July 19, 2021

The Hal Higdon website has a variety of plans for various distances. I simply looked at the base plan for intermediate runners, which as you can see below, is a perfectly sane running program. Bookmarking for future reference.

The Maximum Human Life Span and Conjecture on Step Counts to Get There (15,000 Steps a Day)

~ cafebedouin

“For the study, Timothy Pyrkov, a researcher at a Singapore-based company called Gero, and his colleagues looked at this “pace of aging” in three large cohorts in the U.S., the U.K. and Russia. To evaluate deviations from stable health, they assessed changes in blood cell counts and the daily number of steps taken and analyzed them by age groups.

For both blood cell and step counts, the pattern was the same: as age increased, some factor beyond disease drove a predictable and incremental decline in the body’s ability to return blood cells or gait to a stable level after a disruption. When Pyrkov and his colleagues in Moscow and Buffalo, N.Y., used this predictable pace of decline to determine when resilience would disappear entirely, leading to death, they found a range of 120 to 150 years…

The researchers also found that with age, the body’s response to insults could increasingly range far from a stable normal, requiring more time for recovery. Whitson says that this result makes sense: A healthy young person can produce a rapid physiological response to adjust to fluctuations and restore a personal norm. But in an older person, she says, “everything is just a little bit dampened, a little slower to respond, and you can get overshoots,” such as when an illness brings on big swings in blood pressure.”

-Emily Willingham, “The Maximum Human Life Span Is 150 Years, New Research Estimates
A study counts blood cells and footsteps to predict a hard limit to our longevity.” Scientific American. May 25, 2021.

Open Questions: How many steps a day are required for optimum fitness and health? Is there also a strength measurement that can be used to add an additional dimension?

The Nature research article is available online. I think the interesting thing about this study is it is another example where step counts are used as a proxy for health. There are recent studies in JAMA, Journal of Sport and Health Science, and others that suggest that increasing step counts lowers overall morbidity and mortality in older adults.

As an N of 1 thought experiment, I checked my daily step count over the last year. I average just over 10,000 steps a day. There are studies that classify step counts in the following way:

  • sedentary category (<5000 steps/day)
  • low active (5000-7499 steps/day),
  • somewhat active (7500-9999 steps/day)
  • active (≥10,000 steps/day)

The same study also makes the following observation: “We also observed that each 1000 steps/day increase in [physical activity] level over the 6-month follow-up was associated with a 0.26-kg (95% CI −0.29 to −0.23) [or just over 0.5 pounds] decrease in weight.”

The math is pretty easy. Let’s suppose 1,000 steps is about half a mile or a kilometer. That’s about ~60-75 calories, depending on intensity, walking or running. Let’s say 6 months is 182 days. So, 60 calories * 182 days = ~11,000 calories. That’s about 3 pounds or a bit over a kilo. Factor in additional urge to eat, and it sounds about right.

So, as a rule of thumb: Increasing step counts by 1,000 will generally reduce your weight by 1 pound a year, as well as your overall risk of morbidity and mortality. There’s probably some point of negative returns. I’ve seen some reports talking about hunter-gatherer groups walking on average around 7 or 8 miles a day, which would roughly be around 14,000 to 16,000 steps / day, which is probably a good benchmark comparison with humanity over an evolutionary time frame rather than comparing our activity with other people in our historical moment. Which I suppose suggests that I, and practically everyone, have some work to do to get our physical activity to an optimum level.

Minimal Physical Fitness Standard: Four Flights of Stairs in One Minute

~ cafebedouin

“Climbing four flights of stairs in less than a minute indicates good heart health…”The stairs test is an easy way to check your heart health,” said study author Dr. Jesús Peteiro, a cardiologist at University Hospital A Coruña, Spain. “If it takes you more than one-and-a-half minutes to ascend four flights of stairs, your health is suboptimal, and it would be a good idea to consult a doctor.”

—Sophia Antipolis, “Test your heart health by climbing stairs.” EurekaAlert. December 11, 2020.

Add Phone-Free Walking to Your Day

~ cafebedouin

“Find a way to add phone-free walking to your daily schedule. Make it non-negotiable. Make it easy. Skip a bus ride from your house to the station. Get off a station earlier on the way to work. Use 30 minutes of your lunch break to walk to a far-off cafe. The important thing is to leave the phone off the body. It can be in a backpack, that’s fine. Keep it out of easy reach. Even better: keep it at home. I don’t know if the lightness will register for you, but it does for me. Phone, no phone, two entirely separate universes. Like starting the day with the internet on or off. A totally different quality of time and thinking. For me, the phone removed or reduced to a simple tool brings me back to the walks, and in being brought back to the walks I remember the floating consciousness, and from that, if I’m lucky, a dollop of grace.”

—Craig Mod, “Responses to SMSs Part 4.” Ridgeline. January 28, 2020.

Also, “all the best tricks to life seem to sound reductive and dumb when you say them out loud.”