The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [151]
Reverse hyper(extension) on a bench and Swiss ball. It’s easier than it looks.
A native Amaxhosa12 cleaning woman just stopped to look at me as if I had lobsters crawling out of my ears, so I told her that the waitress had promised me free water, but only if I did the sexy booty dance.
She was not impressed.
3. Keep your hip flexors flexible. The most underrated way to improve stride length and prevent hamstring pulls is to (and this should sound familiar) keep your hip flexors flexible. See the hip flexor stretches in the last chapter.
When your hip flexors are tight, it creates constant tension and a constant pull on the hamstrings, which is a recipe for tears.
Tight hip flexors also prevent you from reaching full stride length. Upon extending your leg back into the turf, the stretch-reflex in your hip flexors causes them to contract prematurely and pull your leg back up. People with tight hip flexors take short, choppy steps when they run. Sometimes they look fast due to a high stride rate, but Joe calls it “going nowhere fast” because they are not covering any real ground.
Stretch those sons-a-bitches.
So what happened with Hannah Montana?
I had used topical arnica before, and it had worked well.
This time, I was taking Boiron Arnica Montana 30C pellets, an oral version that was the only option at the closest GNC. I started at five pellets, six times a day—twice the recommended dose. Risk of overdose? Not likely.
“30C,” which I looked up that evening, tells you all you need to know.
This consumable version of arnica, unlike the creams I’d used in the past, was a homeopathic remedy. Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, pioneered the field of homeopathy in 1796, if the term “pioneer” can be applied to alternative “medicine” founded on concepts like mass dilution and beatings with horse-hair implements:
Homeopaths use a process called “dynamisation” or “potentisation” whereby a substance is diluted with alcohol or distilled water and then vigorously shaken by ten hard strikes against an elastic body in a process called “succussion.” … Hahnemann believed that the process of succussion activated the vital energy of the diluted substance.
Riiiight.
Back to 30C. 30C indicates a 10−60 dilution, the dilution most recommended by Hahnemann. 30C would require giving 2 billion doses per second to 6 billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any one person. Put another way, if I diluted one-third of a drop of liquid into all the water on earth, it would produce a remedy with a concentration of about 13C, more than twice the “strength” of our 30C arnica.
Most homeopathic remedies in liquid are indistinguishable from water and don’t contain a single molecule of active medicine.
I found this particularly bothersome. Bothersome because I appeared to heal faster using oral 30C arnica.
There are a few potential explanations:
HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES WORK AS ADVERTISED
The water actually retains some “essential property” of the original substance because of the beatings and shakings. I give this a 0% probability. It violates the most basic laws of science and makes my head hurt.
THE PLACEBO EFFECT
I didn’t realize it was a homeopathic remedy until after four or five doses, and I had been told it could reduce pain by up to 50% in 24 hours. Placebo is strong stuff. People can become intoxicated from alcohol placebos, and “placebo” knee surgeries for osteoarthritis, where incisions are made but nothing is repaired, can produce results that rival the real deal. This explanation gets my vote. Now, if I could just forget what I read on the label, I could repeat it next time.
REGRESSION TOWARD THE MEAN
Imagine you catch a cold or get the flu. It’s going to get worse and worse, then better and better until you are back to normal. The severity of symptoms, as is true with many injuries, will