E-shoes
Do you like walking on airport treadmills? I like that you can walk with normal effort and watch the world speed by at twice the normal speed. That’s the idea behind some new technology that straps smart wheels to the bottom of your shoes. They’re like a portable treadmill, and promise to increase your walking speed by up to 250%. Check it out in the video below:
Here's an interesting question about the shoes (assuming they ever make it to market): will they encourage people to engage in more physical activity or less? On one hand, the shoes reduce the effort required to walk to your destination. On the other hand, they might encourage you to walk to more destinations, and further ones as well.
There's research on e-bikes addressing similar questions, and at least some of find that because biking becomes easier and more pleasurable, people do a whole lot more of it. My hope is that if this technology becomes practical, it will encourage people to start walking more and driving less.
An interesting study on knee pain
There is a popular theory that correcting faulty movement patterns of the knee is a good treatment for patellofemoral knee pain. The idea is that:
the knee is poorly equipped to handle stress when the femurs are internally rotated and adducted;
these positions can be avoided more often if the external rotators and abductors of the hip perform better; and
therefore strengthening these muscles is a good way to treat knee pain.
Advocates of this theory point to research showing that resistance training programs for knee pain work better when they include exercises to strengthen the external rotators and abductors. But others argue that these exercises create better results simply because of the generally beneficial effects of exercise, and not by making any specific changes to biomechanics.
A new study (h/t Adam Meakins) provides a creative way to test some of the claims related to this debate. It compares the effects of exercises strengthening the external rotators and abductors to exercises strengthening the internal rotators and adductors. If you believe the biomechanical dysfunction theory of knee pain, you would predict that the group doing the external rotation and abduction exercises would do better, and maybe even that the group doing the internal rotation and adduction exercises would get worse. But that is not with the study found. Instead, both groups got better, by the same amount, and neither showed any significant changes to movement patterns at the knee.
the two groups showed improvement in pain intensity, function, GPE, and muscle strength; however, there were no differences between groups. The two proposed interventions did not change the dynamic knee valgus assessed by FPPA.
The results of the study are in line with a pattern I have seen in many other studies examining the effects of interventions designed to change supposedly dysfunctional movement patterns. Which is that such interventions (1 )tend to work even when they do not correct the supposed dysfunction, or (2) do not work better than exercises which would not be expected to change movement patterns.
One way to integrate the meaning of this information is to think of exercise as being more like a general analgesic medicine, and less like a tool that fixes specific mechanical problems.
Exercise versus NSAIDs for knee pain
Speaking of exercise as medicine, here's a recent meta analysis with 152 studies comparing the effects of exercise to NSAIDs for treatment of pain from knee osteoarthritis. The conclusion:
Exercise has similar effects on pain and function to that of oral NSAIDs and paracetamol.
Polar bear commando crawl thin-ice technique
Is post-exercise stretching good for something?
Does it help with DOMS, range of motion or strength? My interpretation of a new systematic review and meta-analysis addressing this question is that we don't have any evidence that it does, and therefore it probably doesn’t.
The review included 11 RCTs comparing the effects of active stretching, passive stretching, or PNF to passive recovery (i.e. just doing nothing). Some conclusions:
There was no evidence that stretching enhanced recovery in comparison to passive recovery ... There was no evidence to the contrary, i.e., that stretching impaired recovery. …
data is scarce, heterogenous, and overall confidence in cumulative evidence is very low. …
Until more (and better) data is collected, no case should be built for (or against) post-exercise stretching with the goal of improving recovery.
My recommendation based on this evidence is quite similar to my recommendation in regard to many other popular interventions with a questionable evidence base:
If it feels good do it.
You probably don’t need to do it, so don’t feel obligated.
More evidence that air pollution is bad
Walking for generating ideas
A Friedrich Nietzsche quote:
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
Another from Henry David Thoreau:
Methinks that the moment my legs began to move, my thoughts began to flow.
My personal experience is that I get a lot of good ideas when I walk, even if I'm not really thinking. For example, I might be sitting on the couch and struggling with some kind of writers block, or confusion about how to explain a particular topic. I get frustrated, go for a walk, forget about the writing, and then after a few minutes a good solution presents itself spontaneously. This happens frequently. It's almost as if my subconscious mind continues to work on a problem even when my conscious mind has given up and gone offline. My subconscious seems to have creative talents that my conscious mind lacks, and it seems to work better when I'm walking as opposed to just sitting around.
I recently found a paper discussing some evidence from four different studies showing that walking does seem to improve creativity. This effect seems to be slightly different from the general benefits of aerobic exercise on cognition, and the general health benefits associated with being outside in nature. In other words, it has something to do with the movement of walking, but the connection between walking and creativity is still unclear.
Good sciatica resource
Tom Jesson recently came out with a new zine on differential diagnosis for radicular pain.
Tom is a very good at explaining this topic and was a guest on my podcast in August. Here’s the link.
Do bumble Bees play?
According to this newly released study, the answer is yes. And the way they like to play is by rolling around little wooden balls.
Here, we show that rolling of wooden balls by bumble bees, Bombus terrestris, fulfils behavioural criteria for animal play and is akin to play in other animals. We found that ball rolling (1) did not contribute to immediate survival strategies, (2) was intrinsically rewarding, (3) differed from functional behaviour in form, (4) was repeated but not stereotyped, and (5) was initiated under stress-free conditions.
For more on the nature of play and why its interesting and good, check out my book Playing With Movement.
Hey Todd do you have any DIY book or video recommendations for fixing mild scoliosis?