Kate Crawford says, "You've mentioned in the past about using an elliptical
exercise machine to release shoulder tension. Can you give us some more
details about this? How often do you use the elliptical machine for this purpose?" Yeah.
I have very high neck and shoulder tension, and I think that there is more than one reason for that
and so I don't think it's all about movement. I think part of it is high baseline anxiety levels,
over-excitation, probably something related to glutamate-GABA balance,
and so I'm sure that it is very much related to other reasons why I have a history of anxiety
disorders. I think it also relates to the type of life that I live,
so I run a business, which is inherently more stressful than having stable income.
So I think those are contributors to muscular tension, and I think maybe I have something
genetic along the lines of my mother having had fibromyalgia, I might share some of the
genes that contributed to that, that might independently be contributing to muscle tension.
However, I also think that movement is just a basic regulator of muscle tension. Oh,
and of course I work on the computer all the time and so having... just the
simple fact that... Could you imagine if you were a hunter-gatherer,
think about the number of times you would turn your neck this way, this way, this way,
this way, this way, over the course of the day. I'm trying to snowboard more, and I'm realizing,
just as a matter of not wanting to get run over by someone behind me, very frequently looking back
a lot more than I would in a car. In a car you've got mirrors,
and you do want to actually look out your window when you change lanes,
but when I'm snowboarding down a mountain, I actually want to look behind me very frequently
and I might be angled in different ways. You can imagine if you were a hunter-gatherer,
you might have to run some times and you might have to duck below branches, jump over one thing,
look that way for the thing you're chasing after, look that way for the thing that's chasing you,
just sort of normal natural life I think involves a lot of movement through full range of motion
of the neck and shoulders in a way that sitting and typing in front of a computer puts your head
motionless forward, keeping your full attention directly in front of you for hours on end,
which I think is extremely unnatural. And so my line of work also biases me towards head
and neck tension on that basis alone. So what the elliptical does is, it doesn't do a whole lot for
moving my neck one way or another, but it does a lot for moving my thoracic spine and my shoulders
through a pretty defined range of motion, not full range of motion going like this is,
but it's a lot of movement through a considerable amount of that range of motion,
and I think it's sufficient to give my thoracic spine and my shoulders
a lot of circulation of fluid that nourishes the joints and keeps things moving.
I think the movement is both a matter of directly infusing the joint with fluid, because your joints
are not like your muscles. Your muscles are very metabolically active with transporters that will
take up what they need from the blood on an as-needed basis but your joints are much more
passively regulated. It's not that they're not metabolically active at all, but they're much more
than most other tissues, especially the muscle... ...They're much more at the mercy of
the physical fluid diffusion into the joint. So when you move more, more fluids
perfuse the joint, and I think that's very helpful for the joint. And then also, I just
think that if you don't move, you tend to support not moving and things freeze up. And if you are
not moving in a position that is not good, then you will need extra muscular tension to fortify
those joints and to keep things stable. So for example, if your head is very well
positioned over your torso, then there's not a lot of muscular work that has to be done because one
small thing is balancing on top of a larger thing that is balancing on top of an even
larger thing in your hips which is balancing on top of even larger things in your legs.
But if your head is like this stretching forward, then suddenly gravity is trying to pull it down,
and these muscles in the base of your skull, especially the occipitals,
have to go into overdrive because they are very tiny muscles that should not have to do that work,
doing work that should not have to be done. That is, holding this much larger thing of your head
compared to those occipital muscles, holding them up.
So a tiny muscle doing huge work of holding something 50 times its size up from gravity
compared to a large thing like your torso just sitting there having a much smaller thing,
your head, rest on top of it. You're just having those muscles go a thousand times into overdrive.
So all of these factors are colliding to make not movement in a bad position, make those muscles
that are in that area very, very tense. So what the elliptical does is just gets regular movement
in those joints, you increase the fluid there. You might be immobilized in a terrible position
later, and you could try to work on that separately, but at least
now you also have movement. I feel like as long as the movement isn't too demanding,
like certainly you can do bad movements that involve lifting something the wrong way and
can throw out your back. Sure. But gentle movement on an elliptical is not that strenuous, and if the
movement is gentle enough, then I think it almost doesn't matter that you might be in a bad position
because you're not staying in it. So even if it's just 30 minutes of time not staying immobilized in
a bad position is itself a tremendous improvement over constant immobilization of one bad posture.
But anyway, my experience with this is that 30 minutes on an elliptical
three to five days a week, cause improvement. Five days or more cause very marked improvement,
three days a week is more like maintenance, and below three days a week... If I had to simplify
it, five days a week, 30 minutes a day on the elliptical causes improvement that just gets
better week, after week, after week. Three days of 30 minutes on the elliptical per week will
maintain whatever improvement I've gotten from doing five days a week, and less than three days
a week will cause a regression. So, that's that. I hope that helps Kate, thank you for your question.