its bad framing to label this as "degenerative" and "screwed up" as nowadays we learn that there are probably more age-related. As you say, they correlate very poorly with pain.
Most people don't exercise to preserve muscle mass and function and especially don't do full range of motion resistance training, most of this is probably preventable.
This is well known for spine issues in general: MRI is super unspecific, and the older you get, the more interesting things you can find on the scans. Even if you're fully asymptomatic. So such findings are now better reframed as age-related changed rather than pathologies.
The fact that every radiologist will highlight different things also doesn't help.
This is in fact one reason why you don't want an MRI if the outcome does not change what you do (i.e. sports related injuries or non specific low back pain). You will just nocebo yourself into thinking you have problems that are not real, because the belief in the answer donut is so strong.
One nit: this happened to me maybe 20 years ago. It wasn’t even an age-related change. I think it was more like a changing idea of the range of normal human anatomy.
My understanding is that it doesnt even do that, because it creates false negatives for the so called skinny fat body type: significant visceral fat mass, which is what we are concerned about, but not much muscle or peripheral fat mass, thereby not being flagged by BMI screens, even though they are at risk.
I guess it's technically cool, but one should be aware that there is no such thing as "good posture" or no accepted definition that lends itself to good science.
slouching isnt bad, remaining in the same posture for a long time is, or at least it can lead to discomfort. people that sit up straight all the time still get back pain. i slouch all the time and i don't. The popular attachment to specific configurationa of your joints that look aeathetically acceptable os orthorexia, not science.
Adhesions are not really a thing as far as i know. Biggest priority is strength and cardiovascular training and maintaining a good body composition and stress level. Then I'd think about stretching.
I spend most of my time at work on a medicine ball switching between switching, kneeling and standing. At home I switch between reclined, semi-reclined, upright and standing. I think its been working great.
Does it? I think strength may be related to pain if you're very weak, and statistically there are big confounders (i.e. people who are weak also have other conditions that exacerbate pain experience). But past a certain point I don't think the evidence suggests that strength itself is protective. Otherwise, competitive lifters would never experience back pain for instance, but they still do. Pain is multifactorial, and strength is not the only determinant by far.
Never said it’s the only factor, and we shouldn’t assume all pain is the same pain
The type of pain people weight train suffer tends to be related to muscle or tendon damage. The type of pain that comes from sedentarism tends to be related to overworked (weak) muscles and bad circulation.
Great, your one of the few. Statistics are pretty clear that most people cannot willpower their way out of their food seeking behaviours. They are to a large extent not under your concious control.
correcting satiety signaling on a chemical level more directly addresses the problem in those folks.
yes, the food environment is the main problem, in a way, but only because it punishes having a certain set of chemical and lifestyle parameters and rewards others.
thats a different thing tho. the term "stretch mediated hypertrophy" is used loosely in many places and i think originally refers to really just hypertrophy caused by the stretch. iirc the lengthened partial gains are not thought to be caused by this mechanism.
You are correct. SMH is used incorrectly in most places, but you explained it well.
But after that people started experimenting and researches started publishing a lot of interesting findings. And found a lot of applicable things that are based on the original SMH research and that is partly/fully explaining new findings.
Like is was found that it having only the partial range of motion, training the one when the muscle is lengthened is clearly better than training in a position of a shortened muscle.
Moreover, some research even found that doing such "lengthened partials" is better that doing the full range of motion.
Therefore, people try to utilize more of the lengthened portion of the movements (especially if it is impossible to work the muscle in both the lengthened and shortened positions, so one has to choose anyway), while some go as far as getting rid of the shortened portion altogether.
akshually theres quite some interesting data on this. it has been shown that stretching alone can indeed produce hypertrophy (in birds and humans), but the required protocols are so intense that you wont want to do them (i think its hours in incredibly uncomfortable positions), so dynamic exercise still wins.
One would also expect it not to do as much for strenght, since adaptations are somewhat specific to the training.
its bad framing to label this as "degenerative" and "screwed up" as nowadays we learn that there are probably more age-related. As you say, they correlate very poorly with pain.
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