Hip abductor meltdown

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With all the web chat­ter­ing about how yoga can hurt your body (or not), it was only appro­pri­ate that I get to expe­ri­ence it first hand.

Graphic: hip abductorsOn Mon­day, in Jes­sica Apo’s vinyasa flow class at Thrive Yoga, I was in Extended Side Angle Pose (Utthita Parsvakonasana) with the full bind (under my top hand reach­ing behind my back and graspo­ing my bot­tom hand under my leg). It was the first time I had been able to do the bind since com­ing back from my knee injury (2009). I could clasp my hands with­out strain­ing and fum­bling to con­nect my hands (or using a strap); usu­ally I just stick with half bind. In my mas­sage ther­apy ses­sion with Howard Rontal a few days before, we had been work­ing on loos­en­ing my shoul­ders and arms so that prob­a­bly con­tributed to the change.

Doing the pose on the right side, I dis­cov­ered the free­dom in my shoul­ders, and even tran­si­tioned towards Bird of Par­adise (Svarga Dvi­jasana), but did not come up to the one-​​leg bal­ance because I didn’t want to risk an unsteady pose. On the left side, I decided to keep it sim­ple and really sink into the pose, explor­ing how my body felt with this new range of move­ment. But the suc­cess with the bind that night prob­a­bly took me into uncharted ter­ri­tory for the rest of my body, espe­cially my core and lower back. When I released the bind to exit the pose, I felt a mus­cle spasm in my lower core — lower back (left side), groin, left ham­string. It was as if I had been hit by a stun gun. I rested in child’s pose. I did not feel any last­ing pain so I con­tin­ued with the class, mod­i­fy­ing or skip­ping any pose that might overex­erted my back.

I didn’t feel the injury at all dur­ing the next day or while doing my sim­ple desk yoga. How­ever, I tested my lower back in malasana, going deep into my hips, feet flat on the floor, and releas­ing my lower back. The injury flares up with a vengeance. I had to fall over on my side to get out of the pose because I could not lift up with­out severe pain.

That expe­ri­ence made me can­cel any yoga classes for the rest of the week and call Howard. He man­aged to fit me in on Sat­ur­day for an emer­gency ses­sion. We spent the ses­sion work­ing on the hip flex­ors and lower core. I am really for­tu­nate that I have a ther­a­pist who already knows my  body and where my knots are tied. We had an inter­est­ing exchange in which he would apply some strokes and then I would test out how my body felt, giv­ing him feed­back, and then we’d go back on the table for addi­tional work.

I actu­ally felt more mus­cu­lar aches and fatigue after the ses­sion. Oddly enough, I felt the pain on both sides evenly, as opposed to just the left.

Today I feel fine, a lit­tle stiff, but I will hold off on a class until tomorrow.

Does massage really help heal fatigued muscles?

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The New York Times may be in the dog house for its yoga cov­er­age (How Yoga Can Wreak Your Body), but it just won some points with me because it cov­ered new sci­en­tific research show­ing how mas­sage helps mus­cles heal after exercise.

How Mas­sage Heals Sore Muscles

They found that mas­sage reduced the pro­duc­tion of com­pounds called cytokines, which play a crit­i­cal role in inflam­ma­tion. Mas­sage also stim­u­lated mito­chon­dria, the tiny pow­er­houses inside cells that con­vert glu­cose into the energy essen­tial for cell func­tion and repair. “The bot­tom line is that there appears to be a sup­pres­sion of path­ways in inflam­ma­tion and an increase in mito­chon­dr­ial bio­gen­e­sis,” help­ing the mus­cle adapt to the demands of increased exer­cise, said the senior author, Dr. Mark A. Tarnopolsky.

Of course, the next ques­tion is what about the myofas­cial aspect, because the mus­cles them­selves only do part of the exer­sion. The neuro-​​myofascial web is a big­ger player in deal­ing with sym­toms of fatigue after exercise.

Yoga injuries, bodywork and a media controversy

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I have refrained from com­ment­ing on the most con­tro­ver­sial topic of yoga in Amer­ica this year, but it’s time to break my silence.

I am refer­ring to the William Broad’s arti­cle How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body in the Jan­u­ary 8 issue of New York Times Mag­a­zine. it’s a chap­ter from his book, The Sci­ence of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (Simon and Schus­ter) which came out a few weeks later. It resulted in a mas­sive wave of dis­cus­sion, reac­tion, even hys­te­ria about the pos­si­bil­ity that you could hurt your­self doing yoga. For a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­pling of the web writ­ing on the topic, see Yoga Dork’s Guide. Really, she’s just scratch­ing the sur­face. The reac­tion has been vis­ceral because it also touches on how Amer­i­cans do yoga, which gets into the evo­lu­tion of a trans­planted and trans­fig­ured dis­ci­pline that started in India and ended up in Man­hat­tan, Hol­ly­wood and Dupont Cir­cle.

A per­sonal digression

The short answer is “Yes, of course, you can hurt your­self prac­tic­ing yoga.” I learned it the hard way when I tore my menis­cus in 2008 and under­went surgery to repair the knee. More than the phys­i­cal dam­age and the dis­rup­tion to my prac­tice, the injury shat­tered my own mis­placed faith that yoga was a supe­rior form of mind-​​body prac­tice that could not harm me. I injured myself and I didn’t even feel it at the time. It was only the next day that the pain hit me. But what injured me was actu­ally not the par­tic­u­lar yoga pose that I did in an advanced Anusara work­shop, but the pat­terns of use and abuse that I had locked into my tis­sues over decades of self-​​inflicted stress.

Luck­ily, I did not give up on yoga. As my prac­tice slacked off last year because of the dis­rup­tions of my par­ents’ deaths and my own ill­ness, the expe­ri­ence ended up con­vinc­ing me that I needed to deepen my prac­tice through increased aware­ness and self-​​discovery. It also con­vinced me that I had to enlist addi­tional help to make sure that I did not harm myself. That’s why I have been treated by a mas­sage ther­a­pist since August.

Back to the article

This blog entry got started because I came across an inter­view with Glenn Black, the vet­eran yoga instruc­tor that Broad used in his arti­cle to wage a fin­ger at the excesses of Amer­i­can yogis. Eden G. Fromberg: Yogi Glenn Black Responds to New York Times Arti­cle on Yoga:

EF: What is the best way to over­come injuries from yoga?

GGB: Reme­dial exer­cises that over­come the source of the injuries. And peo­ple need to get body­work. Not just any body­work. They need to look for peo­ple who work on really mov­ing the joints and con­nec­tive tissues.

Well, that just con­firmed what I’ve come to com­pre­hend after prac­tic­ing yoga for nine years. Because my periph­e­r­ial neu­ropa­thy and its reper­cus­sions (sleep depri­va­tion, mainly) threat­ened my liveli­hood, I was pre­pared to spare no expense. I’ve been lucky because I can afford the lux­ury of doing both yoga and bodywork.

And the les­son that we can learn from the “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” con­tro­versy is that yoga mat­ters in Amer­ica. It’s reached a kind of crit­i­cal mass in the Amer­i­can main­stream, and this dis­cus­sion is about how it can con­tribute to Amer­i­cans’  need for whole­ness and wellbeing.

Crunk time in my 40-​​day yoga challenge

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I’ve noticed that it’s get­ting a lot harder to fit in all the com­po­nents of the 40-​​day chal­lenge, espe­cially the 20-​​minute med­i­ta­tion twice a day. It’s just harder to bite off that slice of time and block out all other activ­i­ties until I come out of it. The 20-​​minute length is also pump­ing against the lim­its of my attention span.

The other issue is that I’ve found that I’ve been putting some tasks on the back-​​burner to meet my chal­lenge tar­gets. The first cou­ple of weeks, I let things slide. Now I find that the back­log is demand­ing for my atten­tion. And then, there are the unfore­seen emer­gen­cies that throw every­thing out the win­dow (too many of those have been hap­pen­ing recently) — but that pre­cisely when I need a mind­ful­ness practice.

A serendipitous find about yoga in Cuba

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The yoga craze is reach­ing the shores of Cuba!

Havana Times I’m going to Cuba, are there yoga classes in Havana?

At that time, Pimentel – who is the pres­i­dent of the Cuban Yoga Asso­ci­a­tion – esti­mated that some 12,000 peo­ple in Cuba had taken three-​​month yoga courses, and there have been work­shops, con­fer­ences and numer­ous med­i­ta­tion retreats.

Next thing you know, Yoga Jour­nal will be orga­niz­ing a con­fer­ence in Havana.

Many are called, few are chosen

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Every major yoga cen­ter in the DC area has at least a 200-​​hour teacher train­ing pro­gram, and some even go up to 500 hours.

The Wash­ing­ton Post D.C. yoga lovers train to become teach­ers:

Even con­sid­er­ing the growth of yoga across the coun­try, few places are as con­sumed with yoga as the Wash­ing­ton region. The North Amer­i­can Stu­dio Alliance, a trade group of sorts that is bet­ter known as NAMASTA, esti­mates that the num­ber of yoga pro­fes­sion­als has grown by more than 200 per­cent here in the past five years.

Photo: two yoginis get deeper into a pose

At Desiree Rumbaugh's work­shop at Thrive Yoga in March -- Mary­lou McNa­mara (push­ing on the legs of the other yogini) is one of my favorite teachers

Granted, not all the peo­ple who’ve taken train­ing want to become yoga teach­ers. Instead, they use the courses as a kind of yoga immer­sion to dig deeper into the dis­ci­pline and under­stand the cul­tural and spir­i­tual frame­work, as well as the phys­i­cal impli­ca­tions of yoga poses. Oth­ers are think­ing of just teach­ing in the evenings or week­ends as extra cash or for the sense of fulfillment.

A local yoga stu­dio owner told me once that there are many yoga instruc­tors in the DC job mar­ket, but few good ones, those who can be more than drill sergeants, who can set the right tone in class and sus­tain it for 60-​​90 min­utes. Oth­ers get frus­trated that their stu­dents can’t han­dle the poses (the false goal of per­fect align­ment) and the pace and just alien­ate the clients. At most stu­dios, you have a core of teach­ers plus a con­stantly rotat­ing cast of “try-​​outs.”

I’ve seen how much effort my own daugh­ter puts into her yoga classes, and the pay is not that good when you con­sider travel, prep time and insur­ance costs. The best time slots for classes are given to the vet­eran teach­ers who have earned a fol­low­ing and can put mats in the stu­dio. But there are new options open­ing up, such as teach­ing in cor­po­rate offices, in schools, in senior cen­ters, in pub­lic health pro­grams, so I may be under­es­ti­mat­ing the demand for freshly grad­u­ated yoga instructors.

At dif­fer­ent times, I’ve thought about tak­ing teacher train­ing, but it requires a major com­mit­ment of time, energy and money. Right now I am just com­mited to my 40-​​day chal­lenge to get me back into the flow. The City Paper com­ments on the fluffi­ness of the Post story.

Coda

After I posted this note, I read Carol Horton’s blog entry enti­tled In Praise of the Local Yoga Teacher. She makes a lot of rel­e­vant points about yoga teach­ing in Amer­ica and closed by pay­ing homage to the no-​​big-​​name teach­ers who lead extra­or­di­nary classes in run-​​of-​​the-​​mill studios:  ”Who really want to share the best of what they’ve expe­ri­enced through their own asana prac­tice with oth­ers. Who know that they don’t under­stand what this gift means, but know that they care about shar­ing it. Thank you.”

A new face and name for an online resource

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I tapped into a resource that helped me under­stand my body better.

I’ve been a fan of Yoga Spirit as it pio­neer the use of online audio and webi­nars with lead­ing yoga teach­ers and other experts, like Amy Wein­traub, Leslie Kaminoff and Judy Han­son Lasater. It dis­ap­peared from the web for a while only to come back to life as part of YogaTherapyWeb.com. In Jan­u­ary, the site turned itself into Yoga U. Most con­tent requires pay­ment for down­loads, but there are a lot of free resources that can wet an appetite for the for-​​pay material.

I signed up for Tom Myers‘s two-​​session webi­nar: Fas­cial Fit­ness – An Emerg­ing Rev­o­lu­tion in Move­ment Sci­ence (Jan­u­ary 25 and Feb­ru­ary 1). It also comes with other mate­r­ial, includ­ing some videos of fas­cial fit­ness rou­tines. He wrote Anatomy Trains: Myofas­cial Merid­i­ans for Man­ual and Move­ment Ther­a­pists, 2nd edi­tion and I plan on read­ing it as soon as I get through the dozen other books piled up on my desk. That’s why I signed up for the webi­nar — I can cap­ture the essence of what Myers is teach­ing in a cou­ple of hours. The first ses­sion clar­i­fied in my mind that I am on the right track in try­ing to deal with my periph­eral neu­ropa­thy. He has an ele­gant com­pelling con­cep­tual frame­work for pars­ing the body and its inter­nal matrix, backed up by the lat­est sci­en­tific research on the role of fas­cia. In this webi­nars, he is tai­lor­ing his mes­sage specif­i­cally to yoga instruc­tors and giv­ing sug­ges­tions for opti­miz­ing sequenc­ing to improve fas­cial fitness.

This webi­nar, along with other webi­nars and inter­views, will be recorded and avail­able for pur­chase at a later date at YogaU Online.

Third week of my yoga challenge

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I have not had much free time to post about my progress. That’s what hap­pens when I focus on prac­tic­ing yoga, pranayama, med­i­ta­tion and mind­ful liv­ing, all while hold­ing down a 9-​​5 job and bal­anc­ing fam­ily life. Some things get squeezed off the sched­ule. Or there just is not enough men­tal energy to sit down and digest the whole vinyasa of life. Rather than being some­thing like a retreat (single-​​minded con­cen­tra­tion) or a boot­camp, it’s more a ques­tion of con­sciously inter­weav­ing the yoga-​​plus with my daily routine.

Ice and fire

Last week­end, I did not take any classes. On Sat­ur­day, all class at Thrive Yoga were can­celled because we had our first snow/​ice/​slush/​rain event of the win­ter and no one could make any plans overnight. Then, on Sun­day, I went to class, but we got no fur­ther than the open­ing chants when we smelled burn­ing plas­tic. Out in the hall­way, a can­dle had some­how lit up some per­sonal belong­ings that may have been hung too close (or fallen on the can­dle or what­ever). Flames were climb­ing the walls, and smoke cov­ered the ceil­ing. Fire alarms went off. Luck­ily, there were lots of blan­kets to throw on the fire and it was brought under con­trol quickly. We hauled the smol­der­ing debris out­side. Susan and Dave got to explain to the Fire Depart­ment how it all hap­pened. Iron­i­cally, a hook-​​and-​​ladder truck, plus an ambu­lance, a fire truck and assorted cops, arrived to deal with a fire in a lower level/​basement of a strip mall. I decided to go to the gym to do some aer­o­bic exer­cise. Thrive Yoga reopened later in the after­noon so there was no seri­ous dam­age done. My yoga ses­sions that week­end were all at home, but I did get back to Thrive for a class on Mon­day evening.

Out­side leverage

Photo: hands are placed on the back of a supline yogini

Some­times another per­son can help disi­pate the stress that seaps into the back

It was unfor­tu­nate that I did not get to any classes over the week­end because I had had my first mas­sage ther­apy ses­sion in over a month, and wanted to gauge how my body would respond on the mat. Howard Rontal had been trav­el­ing over the Hol­i­days so we took a break, and I’ve cut back from once a week to twice a month. For the first ses­sion, we started work­ing from the feet up, and made it up to my ham­strings. My tis­sues had tight­ened up sub­stan­tially over the past month, despite my own attempts at self-​​massage, and we needed the full hour to peel away the super­fi­cial lay­ers of ten­sion. I am look­ing for­ward to com­bin­ing the rig­ors of my 40-​​day chal­lenge with body­work. In my classes since the ther­apy, I can tell that there are some sharp con­trast between mus­cles that I have habit­u­ally used (and overused) in my prac­tice and more raw tis­sues that have been opened up by the ther­apy session.

Second week of my 40-​​day yoga challenge

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More pre­cisely, the sec­ond week is draw­ing to a close.

I missed yoga classes on Tues­day and today because of other com­mit­ments. But I did fit in a restora­tive prac­tice on those evenings. The biggest rev­e­la­tion for me was see­ing the accu­mu­la­tive pay­off of reg­u­lar prac­tice. On Sat­ur­day, in Susan Bowen’s 2/​3 vinyasa flow class, she had us do wheel pose five times. I was able to get up for each one. Even more sur­pris­ing, I did not do a pre­lim­i­nary step of going from bridge pose (Setu Bandha Sar­van­gasana)  to wheel sup­port­ing some weight on my head and then in full wheel (Urd­hva Dha­nurasana). I did a bridge in which I made sure that my legs were doing all the work of sus­tain­ing the pose, my back was arched and then I placed my hands on the mat by my ears and pushed straight up. It was a smooth move­ment. In the past, the half-​​way head on the mat mod­i­fi­ca­tion seemed to jam my neck into my shoul­der gir­dle, mak­ing it much harder to push up into full wheel. I could feel the pres­sure on my spine.

I had seen this trick done by Sadie Nar­dini prob­a­bly in a YouTube video. I had been able to do it a cou­ple of times, but then my prac­tice got com­pletely dis­rupted and I lost the strength to push up. Doing it on Sat­ur­day just showed me that I had recov­ered enough to strength and improve my spinal flex­i­bil­ity to han­dle this power move into wheel.

But I’m already there!

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Last night I went to a hot vinyasa class and let the sweat pour. It’s amaz­ing how a phys­i­cal purg­ing can wring out all the emo­tional tox­ins as well. No yoga class today because I couldn’t get home early enough to grab the restora­tive class at Thrive Yoga. I could not get to the gym as planned because of a mix-​​up on the sched­ul­ing of our car.

I’ve come to real­ize that I already have the right mind­set for the 40-​​day chal­lenge; it’s just a mat­ter of mak­ing time to go to as many classes as pos­si­ble. My daily rou­tines include   mind­ful­ness, med­i­ta­tion, breath work, restora­tive yoga and ther­a­peu­tic yoga. Just qui­et­ing my mind enough to pre­pare my body for bed is a kind of stag­gered vinyasa in which I shift into a more rest­ful rhythm. What I will get out of the 40-​​day chal­lenge is the accu­mu­la­tive impact of step­ping up the fre­quency of attend­ing class, which are almost always more phys­i­cally demand­ing than a yoga ses­sion at home.