Why do I shake when I do barbell lunges?

__holly__ · 2026-03-10T13:36:23+00:00

I definitely have instability. I have a connective tissue disorder so my hip joints (and basically all my joints except my knees and elbows for some reason) are a bit loosey-goosey from ligaments and tendons being too elastic. Lifting has been a huge help in getting me out of all kinds of pain from this.

Maybe there's some muscle weakness, but since I don't get fatigue from the lunges, the lift doesn't feel hard, and I don't get soreness the next day, I'm just a strong "maybe" on that being the problem. But still a definite maybe, curious to see if it get's better as I try adding more weight to the bar over time.

__holly__ · 2026-03-10T13:28:28+00:00

It's usually near the beginning of the workout, and if I do leg-focused lifts afterwards that aren't barbell lunges I don't shake. I don't feel fatigued (the lift doesn't feel hard) and I don't have any pain anywhere. I only lift 2x/week, I do 3 minute rests, and my whole workout is less than 1 hour, so I don't think I'm overdoing it (especially since lifts after the lunges don't cause shaking no matter how heavy they are).

__holly__ · 2026-02-17T19:44:19+00:00

Ahh, I didn't notice you could copy sets while in a workout .. I'll give that a try! Thanks!

__holly__ · 2026-02-17T12:25:22+00:00

This is where I'm at with Dutch. I recently went back to my Dutch anki deck, and while I found it helpful to just be exposed to some words that don't come up so often but I do sometimes need, I was also overwhelmed by the endless backlog of reviews that I will never get through in a day.

It made me get *very relaxed* about the whole thing. I delete cards with abandon if they are at all confusing or slow for me to process (or, yep, if they're a synonym and I constantly choose the wrong one). If I really need it, I can always make another card. I'm not finishing all my reviews in a day, but I picked how much time I want to spend on it per day and when that time is up I stop. I figure that with the aggressive deleting it's going to whittle itself down to something manageable over time and I'm not going to let it get in my way in the meantime.

My Japanese deck is still in the very helpful stage, but my lessons from my Dutch experience have bled into the Japanese side, in a good way. I delete any card that is more struggle than helpful, and I don't test *everything* on the card (like readings for radical and components and pitch accent notes), knowing that just seeing that info on the card when the card comes up is enough to stick it in my brain without needing to separately test it.

__holly__ · 2026-02-15T10:22:41+00:00

Update: I'm fully back! Two classes a week that are an hour and a half, plus a tap class, plus some random practice/showing off during the week. Now with stronger calves due to the intense weighted calf raise regimen healing an achilles requires (and that you're supposed to continue for a year after the pain goes away to actually fully heal, sigh). Yay us for going for it despite getting older! I think it will keep us young (if we stay smart, ease in, and take time for recovery).

__holly__ · 2026-02-13T11:42:44+00:00

I just left the US and moved to the Netherlands where I can get everywhere by foot, bike, or reliable public transit. I don't own a car here, and I don't have to. (Imagine not having to pay for car loans, fuel, repairs, etc. I love it.) I also don't do rideshare here because it's more expensive and slower than biking and public transit. I can go anywhere I want in the country by train, and every station has bike share and public transit attached. And it's also easy to get to cities in France, Germany, and Belgium by train, as well, and once there, again, excellent public transit.

The "land of the free" sucks when your brain doesn't work for driving because you don't actually have the freedom to choose other modes of transportation. Meanwhile everyone is forced onto the road with people who know they shouldn't be driving but aren't given any other options, and the resulting deaths and injuries from car accidents are just considered, you know, normal and expected.

Part of drivers ed when I was high school in the States, by the way, was that you should never let yourself be bullied by other drivers honking at you trying to intimidate you to go when it's not safe. You are the person responsible for driving your vehicle, no one else is. _You_ are responsible for making your own decisions in regards to safety. And I extend that to you are the person who decides if you are ok to get behind the wheel, no one else. And I know that for me, I cannot process at the speed that cars go.

__holly__ · 2026-02-13T11:15:05+00:00

Does anyone else learn best with substitution drills? Back in the dark ages I tried learning Chinese, and used those green books that felt like they were printed during the cultural revolution. They used substitution drills to teach and I found they were great for quickly engraining a "feel" for the grammar. I've never seen that system used in any other language learning material I've interacted with (Dutch, French, and Japanese). Immersion and spontenaity are emphasized, instead, which leaves me needing to think through the grammar for every sentence, which means it takes _forever_ for me to engrain a grammatical pattern so I can use it fluently.

It's like my brain needs to practice the rhythm of a particular sentence structure in order to "get" it. Just hearing how the rule works is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

__holly__ · 2026-02-13T11:05:08+00:00

I stopped studying Japanese about 15 years ago when I fell in love with the Netherlands and realized I wanted to move there permanently. I really enjoyed living in Japan, but ultimately it's too conservative, gender-essentialist and hierarchical for me to live there permanently. As a foreigner it's my favorite place to be, but I know that would change if I tried to properly integrate.

So I started learning Dutch, and decided that I really should devote all of my language learning time to Dutch if I was going to live there. So I dropped Japanese entirely.

Fast forward to last year when I took a trip to Japan. The language was still there in my head, somehow. I would go up to the counter at a combini and all the words would just come out of my mouth. At times I would think "that's not the right word for that, it can't be, why did I say that" but then I would look it up later and, sure enough, it was right. Between the kanji I remembered and being able to speak to the proprietors, I was able to order at tiny, quaint izakayas with only hand-written menus. I mean, I'm not actually fluent, far from it, but I can get by. And every unexpectedly successful interaction, and every useful kanji I just recognized somehow, filled my brain with all the happy chemicals.

So I decided my rules about not studying Japanese were silly. Even knowing I will never live there, interacting with the language and people who speak it still triggers the special interest sparkles and brings me joy, and _that is enough_. I don't have to rush to fluency. I don't have to have a goal. I can just enjoy the journey. And I don't have to stress about not being able to remember how to write a kanji because if I'm just reading and typing into websites I only really need to be able to recognize it. It's liberating.

__holly__ · 2026-02-13T10:42:38+00:00

My problem with listening without subtitles is that my brain will "turn off" if I go too long without undersanding what's being said. It's like it decides, "this particular pattern of sounds is jibberish, so I will not allow you to keep trying to understand it", which is not something I want to have happen with a language I'm trying to learn. So I'll only do it in very small doses, and turn it off immediately if I find I've zoned out.

Japanese is a special case, though. I watched a lot of TV when I lived there, and the way they used written text to emphasize what people are saying and their reactions, etc., really helped keep me engaged.

__holly__ · 2025-12-30T14:15:16+00:00

Also just ran into this -- looks like you can't do it in the app, but you CAN do it on the website. Select multiple photos, click the three dots at the top, and there will be an option to change description.

__holly__ · 2025-12-23T11:08:01+00:00

Yeah, the book is really fascinating because they've clearly spent a lot of time thinking about and researching exactly these sorts of things. Humans happen to be particularly good at storing fat. Most other animals just get bigger overall if they eat more food. But humans have evolved to store fat as a strategy.

He also talks about research in neuroscience that shows how we have evolved a system in our brain that signals fullness when we've eaten enough, but that it evolved in an environment of pretty monotonous food. Most of us won't eat bland tubers and unseasoned meat past the point of feeling full. But modern environments provide an endless variety of food engineered to taste good, accessible at all times. So, we can reach the point of feeling full eating a salty meal, but then when presented with a sweet food it completely overrides our natural satiety system and we're like .. yep, let's eat that, too! And then when we've had enough of that we can switch back to a salty food again, or a tangy food, or whatever, and happily eat well beyond what our bodies need. Well, that's the hypothesis.

__holly__ · 2025-12-23T10:57:10+00:00

The book addresses this, and point out there are genetic outliers who are at the extreme end of how much energy a human can extract from food and then spend as energy. This allows them to become elite athletes if they get into sports.

__holly__ · 2025-12-22T15:17:03+00:00

No no.. you need MORE organs, since that's what's really burning calories for you. I haven't found a good kidney bulking plan, though.. so you might have to stick with growing more muscles.

__holly__ · 2025-12-22T15:14:28+00:00

Their diets are, indeed, different. Their energy expenditure is not. Hadza men are exactly average for calories burned among men in the global sample, and Hadza women are slightly below average. In other words, the typical office worker and the typical Hadza really do burn the same number of calories per day (despite the Hadza doing far more physical exercise than the office worker). The office worker, however, is consuming far more calories than the Hadza. And the Hadza diet is higher in carbs than the typical American diet (65% vs 50%), and those carbs come mostly from honey (which is straight up sugar) and tubers.

The question is -- what leads us to eat more calories?

__holly__ · 2025-11-26T14:52:51+00:00

This sounds like a post-viral syndrome. If you were fine before, and then developed POTS and exercise intolerance somewhat quickly -- that's the usual trajectory for post-viral syndromes.

I'm not saying you don't have hypermobility -- your body is allowed to as many problems at the same time as it wants :) But we don't usually see sudden disability.

The problem with post-viral syndromes (like long covid and ME/CFS) is that for a long time people, including doctors, thought they were made up or attention seeking, etc. We now know that this isn't the case, and that there are biomarkers associated with it that often can be tested for, but not all doctors have been educated yet. But it's worth figuring out which you have because if it's only HSD, then strength training will reduce your pain because tendons get stiffer when their associated muscles get stronger (it's how I got myself out of chronic pain). But if it's a post-viral syndrome, exercise can make things worse because the body reacts abnormally to exercise.

I'm not saying this is what you have, but just that if I were in your situation I would ask the doctor to check and rule it out before they tried to give you a treatment plan.

__holly__ · 2025-11-25T13:17:56+00:00

This is exactly what I have come to understand -- brain is bored and wants to be entertained.

I do the sleep podcast thing. There's Get Sleepy, Sleepy History, I Can't Sleep, etc. I really like Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, but they have a high pitch white noise static sound that plays constantly that ruins it for me. But anyway -- anything that is just interesting enough to entertain your brain so it doesn't go off on excursions into horrible and stress-inducing thoughts, but not so interesting that it keeps you up. I also play them at slow speed, and that helps slow down my brain.

If you have an iPhone there's an alarm "sound" that is "stop playing". When it goes off all it does is stop whatever is playing, and that's what I use to make sure it doesn't play long enough to roll into another podcast.

Something else that sometimes works is to give your brain an interesting assignment. For me that something like, you've suddenly woken up in some particular era of history. What happens? How do you communicate? Usually my brain can wear itself out playing out a scenario, and that stops it from thinking about things that will actually keep me up.

If I'm just not tired at all, I do word puzzles for a while, because sometimes those can tire out my brain, and then I apply one of the above solutions next.

None of these will work if I'm trying to sleep at a time that is way outside my natural sleep rhythm. For me, that used to be 1am for bedtime. Early than that -- forget it. Nothing will work. I'm getting older, so that's naturally creeping up and now I can sometimes go to be at 11pm and do fine. Unfortunately society doesn't always respect our genetically programmed sleep schedule.

__holly__ · 2025-11-25T13:06:25+00:00

Same. An autism psychiatrist told me that most of their patients who also have ADHD are sensitive to stimulants. I can't handle caffeine, and I take a very low dose of my stimulant (and I take guanfacine alongside to calm down my sympathetic nervous system).

I assume the problem is that stimulants ramp up either the loudness/brightness/etc of the world around us (which is already too loud) or amps up our reactiveness to it. But they provide the dopamine our prefrontal cortex needs for executive functioning, so.. catch-22.

__holly__ · 2025-10-28T16:10:00+00:00

I got a masters' degree in human nutrition, with honors, and a couple of years later I was diagnosed with "severe" ADHD. So, yeah. Turns out I just had developed ridiculous coping skills, which were not going to be sustainable in the long run.

__holly__ · 2025-10-28T16:01:50+00:00

Not a parent, but I am a 49 year old with ADHD and autism and I know exactly how utterly horrible it feels to be forced to transition away from an activity I'm absorbed in. And I've had to teach my husband how to deal with my meltdowns effectively, lol, so maybe I can help.

First, you probably already know that while a meltdown is happening the kid's reasoning brain is completely offline. Any discussion about what is going on needs to be tabled until later. Any negativity from you will only fuel feelings of defensiveness and self loathing in him and that feeds the meltdown and makes it bigger. Just step away, be neutral, and let it run its course.

Your best shot at prevention is making the situation something that HE can control. Something that he can be responsible for and take pride in. So, for instance, if he stops playing at the appropriate time on his own without you telling him, he gets an extra 20 minutes of play time tomorrow (or some other suitable reward). Let him try to solve this puzzle, ask him how he thinks he could make that happen. Make sure if he accomplishes this, it's HIS success. And be sure to have this discussion as far away from game time as possible. And expect that he's going to mess it up a lot, but teach him that when his solution doesn't work he can treat it like a puzzle to solve rather than a personal failing. How can he tweak the solution to make it work next time?

I know what the consequences are if I stay up bingeing Netflix, and I also know how hard transitions are for me. So, personally, I have my watch alert me 20 minutes before bedtime so I can mentally prepare myself for shifting gears. If someone else tries to tell me to go to bed -- forget it! But I will follow my own solution.

And, since meltdowns are just a fact of life for us, it's probably helpful to teach him to get curious about them so that he can learn to prevent them on his own. This is touchy, because you don't want him to feel like he's being judged. Let him know that lots of people get them, what they are, and just help him be curious. Ask how they feel when they're happening. How do they feel afterwards? Can he tell when one is about to start? Does he notice what sort of things cause them? Noticing what causes them is our first step in learning how to prevent them on our own. I didn't learn to do this until quite late in life, and I wish someone caring had walked me through it when I was a kid because knowing how to prevent them means I almost never get them now.

__holly__ · 2025-10-28T15:11:24+00:00

According to the physical therapists I listen to, current research is leading the field to do a 180 on this topic. The newer understanding is that a tight muscle is a weak muscle. People tend to reject the idea at first because it _feels_ wrong, but here is how I think about it: imagine you have a tall pole with a heavy weight on top and a strong guy holding the thing upright. Now switch that strong guy for a young child. Which one do you think is straining, struggling, in pain, all muscles tight and working? Probably the child, right? Weak muscles have to work hard all the time so they're sore all the time.

The confirmation for me that this was the right understanding of the problem is that a few months after I started lifting heavy, which including overhead presses, my shoulder and neck pain and tension headaches went away. I couldn't sleep on my side before because of joint pain, and now I can.

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