Monthly Archives: December 2018

Strengthening Intrinsic Muscles in the Foot

movement

There are a whole bunch of little muscles and bones in the feet. They are marvels of engineering, they can bend and adapt in countless ways. Unfortunately, in our modern world, we spend a lot of time walking on flat surfaces, with our feet locked in place in stiff shoes, and so these muscles are often weaker than they should be. This can make everyday activities more difficult, to say nothing of running long distances.

These exercises aim to help strengthen the little stabilizing muscles in the feet and ankles, and improve balance. Do one or more sets of as many reps as feels comfortable to you.

Calf Raises: Straight Leg

Straight forward – the standard. Raise up on your toes, putting your weight on the balls of your feet, keeping knees and torso straight.

straight knees straight forward

Outward – raise up on your toes, putting your weight on the outside of the balls of your feet.

straight knees straight forward

Inward – raise up on your toes, putting your weight on your big toes.

Onto heels – lift your toes off the ground, putting your weight on your heels.

You can also try these on one leg for more intensity!

Calf Raises: Bent Leg

Keep knees statically bent a little. This uses different muscles than the straight-leg calf raises, and makes it harder.

Straight forward – the standard. Keep weight in the middle of the balls of your feet.

bent knees straight forward

Outward – same as before, but with bent knees.

Inward – same as before, but with bent knees.

Onto heels – same as before, but with bent knees.

Ankle Rolls

Roll out – standing up with straight legs, roll your ankles carefully outward, not going past the limit of your flexibility.

ankle roll out

Roll in – carefully roll your ankles inward. You won’t be able to go as far as outward, be very careful to not push too far. This will help you keep from spraining your ankle in the event that you DO roll your ankle.

Toe Grabbing

Sit on floor and grab coat with toes, flex foot down and inward, let go and repeat. This helps toe dexterity.

grab coat with toes

Spread out coat with toes – the opposite motion to the previous one, push out with your toes and try to spread a coat out on the floor.

Arch Flexes

Arch flexes: put the heel and ball of your foot on the floor, lift your arch and push the ball of the foot into the floor. Your toes can come up off the floor but don’t let them clench. This will help strengthen your arches.

arch flex

Miscellaneous

  • Standing/rolling on styrofoam dome, made from half a styrofoam ball.
  • Japanese kneel with toes bent up
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ASUS Q550LF 15″ laptop SSD upgrade

how-tos

I’ve had this laptop for several years, and it’s started getting sluggish, so I thought I’d upgrade it to an SSD to speed it up. It’s a nice laptop, aluminum body, i7 processor, 8GB RAM (also on the upgrade list), 1TB HDD (which is what I swapped out today).

The biggest issue was it required a #4 torx screwdriver to get the back plate off. These things are tiny!

I had to buy a new set of precision screwdrivers to get a small enough screwdriver.

With the tiny screwdriver I was able to remove the 10 screws holding the back plate on.

The hard drive is in the bottom left. Four small philips screws hold it in.

At this point I realized I had to remove the battery in order to get enough play in the SATA ribbon to disconnect the hard drive. Three Phillips screws hold it in.

It’s kind of small.

With the battery out of the way, I can lift up the hard drive.

After carefully disconnecting it from the SATA ribbon, it will take removing four more Phillips screws to separate the drive from its caddy.

So many tiny screws.

Now I can put the SSD in the caddy and work backwards, attaching it with four screws.

Completing the steps in reverse order puts it back together again. I connect the SATA ribbon, use four screws to secure the drive in its caddy, three to put the battery back in, and finally back to the torx screwdriver to put the back plate back on.

I fire it up, and windows is decidedly much faster to boot up now :). Everything looks good to go!

I had previously cloned my hard drive to the SSD. I used a SATA-to-USB adapter cable and a flash drive with Clonezilla on it to do the clone. Maybe I’ll do a write-up on that process sometime.

To finish off, here’s a picture of my little “helpers” :). Hope that helps!