#new experience for me lolsies

[mothalas]

hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have -but i have it

[peroxideprinces]

who's this doctor guy I'm hearing about

*@#%@#*%()&@#%()*(!&@#%)(!@*@#)%(

infodump under cut SORRY IN ADVANCE

SO THE DOCTOR . the titular doctor who . wooooo boy r they a LOT to explain but i will do my best

the doctor is a time lord from the planet gallifrey !! they did poorly in school, stole a tardis, then came to earth w their granddaughter, pickin up various companions along the way !!!

there r currently fourteen incarnations we have seen of the doctor, plus the timeless children, plus the morbius doctors, plus war + fugitive BUT FOR SIMPLICITY'S SAKE WE WILL ONLY TLAK AB THE FOURTEEN DOCTORS

so ! first doctor !

heres first !!

i have not watched all the series' involvin first but boy do i adore them . well i like their companions a lot lolsies

first had several companions !

susan foreman, their granddaughter

barbara wright, one of susans school teachers

ian chesterton, another one of susans school teachers

vicki pallister, some teenager first picked up after they left susan

steven taylor, some guy ig

dodo chaplet, another teenage girl adopted by first after vicki left

polly wright, light of my life

ben jackson, naval captain of sorts that was in love w polly

i dont remember why the first doctor regenerated but boy do i love second

!! second doctor !!!

they r literally jus a silly little guy .

most of seconds serials have been lost so theyve been recreated w bits n pieces of remainin content from each serial !!! they look like powerpoint presentations but its okay bc they slay hard enough to b enjoyable

polly n ben carried over into some of seconds run, but they got new companions as well !!!

jamie mccrimmon, scotsman from A While Ago that the doctor definitely dated . source: dude trust me

brigadier lethbridge-stewart, leader of this organization called unit that investigates alien shit

victoria waterfield, teenager from A While Ago that feel in love w jamie i think

zoe heriot, from the future n also fell in love w jamie

second was forced to regenerate by the gallifreyan high council after bein a little too goofy . theyre tardis stopped workin n they were stranded on earth as third . speakin of third

third doctor !!!

for thirds first series, they r unable to use their tardis so they stay on earth n work against alien threats w unit !!!!

brig <3

liz shaw, a scientist forced to work w unit bc it was a "good work experience"

after liz left, thirds tardis got fixed i think n they started travellin again !!! this time they were joined by diff companions lols

jo grant, a bit of an airhead but absolutely beloved

sarah jane smith, journalist who was a stowaway that third later loved <3

harry sullivan, Just Some Guy

i . dont remember why third regenerated AUHDSGJKLSDG

fourth doctor !!!

say hello to arguably the most famous doctor . um . ever !!!

sarah stayed w fourth for a bit before she too finally left . i adore all of fourths companions sooo much

leela, some violent lass

romana i, a time lord that tagged along once lol

romana regenerated into romana ii !!!! i love romana ii . she is so dear to me .

series 18 is where things get a little funky okay . in the latter half, fourth n romana get stuck in an alternate version of space known as e-space . its basically negative coordinates . so theres positive space (n-space) and negative space (e-space) . okay . HERE THEY MEET MY FAVE COMPANION !!!

adric, smartass

eventually fourth left e-space w adric but romana stayed behind . anyway . two more companions after that !!

nyssa, the last trakenite

tegan, angry australian that really needs to get to heathrow

fourth eventually fell to their death n regenerated into MY FAVE DOCTOR !!!!

fifth doctor !!

THEY R SO SILLY N DAD SHAPED . OKAY .

adric n tegan n nyssa stayed w them for a while !! adric became the first major companion to die, but the third companion altogether . nyssa eventually left leavin jus tegan . n then there was one more...

turlough, um....

turlough tried to murder fifth w a rock . but thats not important . eventually tegan left too n then turlough n fifth had a beach episode or whatevs n met....

peri brown, THE GIRL EVER

turlough left n peri n fifth were poisoned which is why fifth had to regenerate :pensive:

sixth doctor !!!

i dont like sixth much .

peri was there until she died !! then there was the trial of a timelord thing which i thought was weird but !!

mel bush, nicest gal ever <3

mel was coachin sixth for the thing for a whileeee . we dont actually have a confirmation on how sixth died but every jus agreed it was the carrot juice tbh

seventh doctor !!!

mel stayed for a series longer w seventh before leaving !!!

ace mcshane, second most memorable companion after sarah jane smith (punk rock lesbian lady)

ace was def the best thing for the show since the fourth doctor tbh but the show still did get cancelled .

there was a tv movie though where the seventh doctor died n regenerated !!!

im not even goin to TRY to explain them here .

ninth doctor !!

um...so...the doctor destroyed gallifrey . killed everyone on the planet . destroyed the rest of their species sans the master (who i will NOT get into here) bc of the time war (against the daleks who i will also not get into here) . they r the first doctor in the revival series n arguable as important to the franchise as a whole as the first doctor, considerin they were the first reboot doctor

ninth only got one series, but the companions were vv memorable <3

rose tyler, middle class earth girl infatuated w the doctor

mickey smith, roses (ex ?) boyfriend

jack harkness, the sluttiest alien ever

adam whatever his last name was, completely borin

in their last episode, rose absorbed the energy of the tardis . ninth had to absorb it from her through a kiss n they couldnt handle that much energy soooo they regenerated !!!

tenth doctor

tenth . whooooo boy okay . um . time lord victorious !!! they were definitely still dealin w the destruction of gallifrey but . yeah .

rose stayed !! they were cute for a bit until rose n mickey got locked in an alternate dimension ^-^

martha jones, doctor infatuated w the doctor

martha was in love w the doctor but they didnt love her back . she is one of the only companions to willingly leave the doctor in the modern series . good for her

donna noble, literally the best

i love donna !!! she was snarky n dumb n smart n the most important woman in the universe . she means everythin to me . she did not need to go out the way she did .

tenth 'died' savin donnas grandfather . thats all ill say ab that

eleventh doctor !!!

i dont HATE eleventh i jus dont like them . um . but their companions do absolute WONDERS for their series' tbh .

amy pond, the girl who waited

rory williams, amys husband

the ponds !!! the ponds n the doctor . the doctor n the ponds . they were a family !!! until the ponds died . um lol

river song, the doctors wife

she's a little hard to explain but ill do my best !! basically . so doc travels forward in time right ? river travels backwards . the first time river met the doctor, the doctor was in their twelfth incarnation . the first time the doctor met river, the doctor was in their tenth incarnation . hopefully that gets the point across . anyway .

clara oswald

i dont like clara much . um . but she sticks around !!

idk why eleventh regenerates n i kinda dont care although their regeneration sequence was really sad :[

twelfth doctor !!

EASILY SECOND FAVE MODERN DOCTOR

anyway . clara dies durin their run which leads to the best episode of modern who: heaven sent . its such a good episode . it drives me to tears .

anwyay !! they become a professor n gain two new companiosn !!!

nardole, somethin indescribable

bill potts, super cool tragic lesbian

i love bill . i love nardole . neither of them deserved this . especially not bill . she gets turned into a cyberman . its terrifyin .

um so twelfths death is a little hard to explain but its the masters fault basically

thirteenth doctor

the writin in this era was dogshit im not even goin to lie to you . i love thirteenth . i think there couldve been so much w them . but . man :/

ryan sinclair, some youtuber guy

graham o'brien, ryan's step grandad

yasmin kahn, holy shit...

ryan n graham leave after a bit . yaz stays . she is in love w the doctor btw . that is vv important . it is also semi-canon .

dan lewis, jus a guy

vinder, man...

bel, vinders wife i think idk but she travels across the galaxy to find him

flux was a series that existed . not good . um .

thirteens 'death' was also caused by the master !!

fourteenth doctor

my lawyer said im no longer allowed to make comments regarding the fourteenth doctor.

[humanpursuits]

Spotify Wrapped is our messy soundtrack for a chaotic year

VANCOUVER – “I kinda wish I could see what my listening was like in the last 6 months,” I wrote the group chat. “I feel like it’d be better.”

Last week, my friends and I marked the most solemn of millennial holiday traditions: comparing, and at times commiserating, over Spotify Wrapped. The retrospective feature, which debuted as an email in 2015, and now operates as an in-app story, gives users a data-based snapshot of their audio activity, using brightly coloured graphics to reveal their top songs, artists and genres of the year. Typically, the experience carries the same cache as a high-school yearbook – plenty of nostalgic sparkle, with a couple LOLsy curveballs. In 2020, though, it feels more like a black box, like the record of a crash captured in real time.

While most year-end roundups tend to reflect qualitative critical consensus, Spotify prefers to focus on quantitative data. Play counts are the engine driving Wrapped, but some users question whether the numbers are even accurate. “My ‘top song’ was a song I played five times total, so Spotify tells me” said Hazel Cills, Jezebel’s Senior Pop Culture Reporter. The group chat, too, said they felt their roundups randomly overemphasized certain parts of their library. “According to Spotify I listened to Rain On Me 50 times in one day lmao” wrote Alex as the five of us compared notes, “like was my Spotify playing on repeat?” “I literally think i accidentally left a Beatles playlist on or something lmao” echoed Kate.

As my pals wondered whether the streaming giant had juked their stats, the apparent accuracy of my Spotify Wrapped had me reeling over my frayed relationship with music in 2020. Of my top songs of the year, three are pre-release singles from the 1975, each of which debuted before COVID-19 arrived in North America. Another is from their album, Notes on a Conditional Form, which dropped in May. The only non-1975 song to make the list is from Waxahatchee, whose album dropped in March – just as B.C. went into lockdown. Across 22,370 minutes worth of music, my favourite tunes can be traced almost directly back to pre-pandemic times.

Post-lockdown, my love of music fell into a crevasse that threatened to swallow my fandom whole. With people ordered to stay home and stay apart, the record industry retreated to the fringes. Tours were re-scheduled, albums were shelved (at least temporarily), and venues across North America were forced to shutter. Seemingly overnight, my longest pop-culture relationship ghosted me in a desperate act of self-preservation. All that remained were digital offerings, which felt at best out of step, or at worst irrelevant.

Like so many others, I turned to podcasts to try and fill the void, keeping pace with How Long Gone’s aggressive production schedule just to feel something. For four-hours every week I listened to hosts Chris Black and Jason Stewart talk about everything but the COVID-19 pandemic. The show’s frivolity helped pass the time, but I still felt that familiar itch. For a large part of my life, music has been a mainline to meaning. I wanted to be excited about songs and song-writers, but more often than not, the thought of exploring music felt exhausting. Even the albums that were obviously good  (Phoebe, Fiona) failed to hold my attention.

Publicly I blamed the pandemic, but privately I wondered – had I lost my edge?

In October, I got my answer. One of my most frequented music forums, Chorus.fm, decided to create its own “Definitive Album List”. Inspired by Rolling Stone’s recent 500 Greatest Albums update, the endeavour invited members to rank their 50 favourite releases of all time, with the goal of forging an unofficial ‘master’ list for the website. With nothing on the horizon, I decided to partake, and to scour other people’s posts for recommendations.

What followed was a crash course in some of the most meaningful, and obvious, works ever recorded. In case my 1975 addiction didn’t tip you off – I tend to find things I like and fixate on them, meaning I have a deep knowledge of a handful of bands, and shallow knowledge about everything else. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Elliot Smith’s Either/Or, fell into that latter category until this fall. They were the soundtrack I had spent seven months looking for.

Through no fault of their own, new records reminded me of the pandemic. It lingered in the back of my mind as I tried to listen, and was an unavoidable point of reference in the press. Worse still, the lack of concerts left me with an overwhelming sense that I would never get to see the songs live. Dylan, Mitchell and Smith, however, existed on a different plain. The records were in the pantheon. The songs had been played live. The stories they contained were timeless.

But while those records felt like a rope ladder out of the crevasse, Spotify’s approach to music fails to account for this sort of Q3 breakthrough. The streaming service only considers spins from January 1 to October 31 in its Wrapped analysis, meaning the albums I will likely associate with 2020 for the rest of my life, the albums that cooled my simmering COVID-depression, barely registered. Desperate to get a snapshot of what my list would look like if it only included the past 6-months, I decided to roll the dice on Stats for Spotify. Their charts are plain Jane compared to Spotify’s Gen-Z fare, but the analysis rings true. You can see it here:

And don’t worry, of my top five songs of the year, two are still from the 1975.

[evolutiosportsphysioblog]

Blood Flow Restriction training during this Glittering tropical fuckstorm of Cosmic Proportions

At time of writing the only people who have access to all the gym equipment they need to train with any kind of normalcy are either very lucky, very resourceful or very rich.

Personally, I’m not the kind of person to have a gratitude journal but if I did I’m sure there would be many pages on how grateful I am that my amazing gym loaned me some of their weights, I was able to borrow some from the clinic, and my twin sister has been stockpiling second-hand gym equipment from Gumtree for years (I’m sorry about all the jokes Kel - it wasn’t weird, you are a fkn genius.) 

Everyone else has to be a bit creative with what they can do at home, and it’s great to see the number of home workouts and creative new things being shared around.

A lot of the people putting that content out there are a lot more qualified, original, innovative and fun than I am so far be it from me to to try to add to that pile.

What I would like to bring to the table is the renewed relevance and utility of Blood Flow Restriction training during this glittering tropical fuckstorm of cosmic proportions in which we find ourselves.

BFR training involves applying a device to the arms or legs that partially occludes the blood flow, before performing body-building type exercises. I’ll get into the science-y crap in a bit, but basically what makes it especially useful at the moment is that it allows you to train, very hard, with weights that are only about 20-30% of what you would usually be using. In addition to that, it allows you to place an enormous stressor on the muscles, while taxing the joints and tendons relatively less. Which, certainly for me, neatly ticks both the “I’m using isolation to get totally massif” and the “maybe I should be using this time to let my body recover a bit” boxes.

So how do you do it? Ideally you have a blood pressure cuff for each side but you can also use elastic wraps. These are applied at the top of the arm or leg, or below the knee for calves. Tightly. Well, not to start with but they do get real cozy real fast.

Don’t worry, they mostly occlude venous return rather than arterial supply to the muscle. That means blood is still coming in, but it’s not getting back out of the area. You have to get it pretty wrong to do any damage. We recommend occluding for the time it takes you to do a superset, so probably around five minutes. But I’ve been occluded for up to half an hour and I still have both arms, promise.

It’s really only useful for hypertrophy training, so should be used with high reps. One of the more common BFR rep schemes is 30-15-15-15, but 4 or 5 by 20 is also good and we do 40-30-10-2 because LOLsies. It’s not really that important what rep scheme you choose because they all work fine and you probably won't be able to do the last reps of the sets anyway.

How does it work? Ok here we go. There are a lot of theories and I’ll try to outline the main ones I’ve seen - if you don’t care about the science then you can snooze here for a bit.

As I mentioned just then, BFR allows blood to enter the working muscles, it just blocks the ‘used’ blood from getting back out. This results in a pooling effect where there is physically a higher volume of blood in there than there ‘should be’. AKA the pump is very, very real. One theory suggests that this can lead to cellular-level swelling and muscle growth is an adaptation to try and accommodate the extra blood.

In addition to the sheer volume of blood, the muscles become deprived of oxygen and waste products accumulate, creating a LOT of localised metabolic stress, which is one of the three mechanisms of muscle growth. (The others being mechanical tension and muscle damage.)

On top of that, due to the diminished availability of oxygen, slow-twitch fibres will fatigue much more quickly. Slow twitch fibres are oxygen-dependant and they are the ones we are training with body-building type exercise. BFR allows us to not only create that hypertrophy stimulus for slow-twitch fibres using much smaller weights, but once they spent the fast-twitch fibres will also get called in. Those guys usually only get out of bed for sprints, explosive work and very high weights (aka higher-risk training), but if you can get them working they really come to the party for muscle growth.

If you want to dive down another level, there is also evidence that BFR training elevates hypertrophic signaling, specifically growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor, as much as or possibly more than equivalent but non-occluded resistance training. Hypertrophic signaling is a term for the hormones and substances that are released in response to exercise. They signal to the body that some (good) damage has occured to muscle fibres and that they need to be rebuilt - but a bit bigger and stronger to resist damage in case that activity happens again. This is the adaptation that training is trying to elicit.

In a rehab setting, BFR allows us to perform hypertrophy or strength-endurance training on a muscle group when an associated joint, ligament or tendon is perhaps not ready for loads that those muscles would otherwise need. This allows for low-risk re-introduction of resistance training, and is great for reversing muscle-loss or atrophy after injuries.

OK downsides chat:  as you can see, it’s kind of a way to trick your muscles into growing bigger. However, ya central nervous system isn’t as easily duped. Gains in actual strength come from neurological adaptation to load as well as growth in muscle size. At the end of the day we’re still lifting pretty light weights during BFR training so it doesn’t increase strength as much as it works on muscle size. That said, most strength programs start with a lower-weight hypertrophy phase - so we can transition smoothly into strength gains once quarantraining is over.

Oh also it burns. A lot. In a way that it would be pointless for me to try and describe; you reeeeeally have to experience it yourself. But you can’t say I didn’t warn you. The flipside of this downside is it’s pretty hard to think about COVID-19 when your arms are full of molten lava.

So if you're interested in giving this a go, we would love to hear from you! We have floss bands in stock and all it takes is a virtual appointment to get you started. We will ask for pain face photos afterwards though because that's almost the best part.

Peta is our Remedial massage therapist at Evolutio. She's an elite Surf Boat Rower, holds the 1km Ergo world record (30-39yrs F) has coached CrossFit for several years and is a qualified S&C coach. Peta works Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons at our clinic in Richmond. You can book in with her here

[abellstruckedmoon]

1.0 Hello

i have always thought that having a blog means venting out all the negativity inside you, may it be about your day or the people who angered the shit out of you. tbvh, i don’t really feel good after doing so. 

as i grow up (turning 24 this year), i realized the importance of having positivity especially when i’m feeling down. thus, the birth of this blog! i will write down things that made me happy as a young adult. hehe. 

firstly! my application as a retail assistant is accepted! alhamdulillah! a little anxious and nervous but am totally looking forward to new experiences! oh yes, hello saving up?

secondly! ordered two albums of nct though it has the same CD but not the items included in the albums!!!!! a tad pricey but its okay! i’m still happy that i purchased those! 

thirdly! had the mood to start revising for LNAT. yep, the mood came few days before i start working lolsies. BUT BUT BUT, atleast something right? 

fourthly! i can finally swallow SUSHI?!?!?!?!??!?!!? im totally a sushi addict now. ok, too soon to say that. change it to a makisan addict! hahaha

oh, i have always wanted to go back to my old weight. im struggling real bad cos i ♡ food and forever having a hard time resisting it. nevertheless, STILL WANNA GO BACK TO 59KG me! i can do this right? 

till i found more happy things, i will write more!

signing off,

B.