From a Biomechanics Perspective to Long-Term Evidence (No.1788, 9/11/2026)

From a Biomechanics Perspective to Long-Term Evidence (No.1788, 9/11/2026) Gerald C. Hsu EclaireMD Foundation Category: Biomechanics / Research Reflection A Special Note Due to my poor eyesight caused by age-related macular degeneration (AMD), my writing may contain occasional typos or minor mistakes. Please forgive these imperfections. Preface After completing six research papers covering my six physical strength-building exercise routines, I recognized an important weakness. I use the word “weakness” to express my own personal and perhaps biased view of their limitations. These papers contain considerable information about biomechanics, muscles, joints, balance, breathing, internal organs, blood circulation, blood pressure, and the possible benefits of each exercise. They explain many possible mechanisms, but they do not yet provide strong quantitative proof that these mechanisms will produce the functional improvement I hope to achieve. This reminded me of one of my long-standing concerns about traditional medical research methodology, which relies heavily on statistics. Researchers may study large groups of patients and obtain useful statistical results, but often over relatively short observation periods. There may be many people, but not much time. In my simple terminology, N may be large while T remains small. My own research usually moves in the opposite direction. I place great value on following changes within the same human body over a long period while observing the major factors that may be producing those changes. Therefore, I now consider my six biomechanics papers only the beginning of this investigation. They describe the architecture and establish the hypotheses. The quantitative proof is not here yet. If it eventually appears, it must come later. 2. Explanation Is Not the Same as Proof This is where I became uncomfortable with my own six papers. In some ways, they resemble the kind of medical research writing I have criticized for years. They explain how muscles, joints, the nervous system, balance, breathing, and circulation may work together during exercise. Most of these explanations are scientifically reasonable and supported by established knowledge. However, being scientifically reasonable is not the same as quantitatively proving the question I actually care about. My real question is not simply whether heel raises activate my calf muscles, single-leg standing challenges my balance, or sitting and standing uses my leg and hip muscles. My larger question is whether repeatedly performing these six exercise routines and gradually increasing my useful physical strength will actually produce a measurable improvement in my real-life walking capacity after my stroke. At this stage, my six papers cannot answer that question. 1. What the Six Exercise Papers Actually Accomplished On August 22, 2026, I began a physical strength-building program to rebuild some of the capacity I lost after my hemorrhagic stroke on June 21, 2025. Before my stroke, I usually walked about 15,000–18,000 steps per day. Afterward, my walking dropped to around 5,000–6,000 steps. One major limitation I physically experienced was exhaustion. My body simply could not sustain its previous level of activity. This observation gave me a hypothesis, or perhaps only a hint: if I could gradually rebuild useful physical strength, perhaps I could improve my walking capacity. I therefore designed several simple exercises to train physical functions connected with walking and daily movement, and then wrote six biomechanics papers examining these routines. Writing them forced me to study the movements more carefully, including the muscles, joints, balance, nervous system, breathing, circulation, and especially their possible effects on my systolic blood pressure, or SBP. I would characterize these six papers this way: the architecture is scientifically grounded, many individual mechanisms are established, and my starting physical loss is quantitatively documented. However, the central relationship between strength recovery and walking recovery remains a hypothesis awaiting long-term quantitative evidence. I am a trained mathematician, physicist, and engineer. Anything without quantitative proof—not merely statistics-based evidence—does not pass my own threshold. Therefore, after completing these six papers, I had to ask myself a more difficult question: How much of what I wrote is actually proven, both scientifically and quantitatively?