Tag Archives: hips

No yoga class in a month — bummer

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I have not taken a class since April 7. That day, I was in Susan Bowen’s 2/​3 hot vinyasa class. She led an upbeat ses­sion that had us mov­ing through sun salu­ta­tions and mod­i­fi­ca­tions. I noticed some­thing was wrong: I began feel­ing pain and dis­com­fort in prac­ti­cally every pose and tran­si­tion of the vinyasa, deep in my core and focused on my left psoas and radi­at­ing down by leg, up towards my hip and kid­neys and across my hips. In the ear­lier stages of the injury, it was hap­pened only in cer­tain poses, and I would avoid them or get into them very mind­fully. Now there was no avoid­ing the pain and mus­cle spasms.

In the mid­dle of the class, I shut myself down. I did poses to soothe my core mus­cles, hip abductors/​flexors and lower spin, lay­ing or seated on the mat. I rested on my back with my knees propped on blan­kets. All the while my friends were sweat­ing away in an active class.

For two month, since the first instance of the injury, I had rested the injury, mak­ing reg­u­lar vis­its to my body worker, Howard Rontal, and then started tak­ing yoga class after two weeks being very mind­ful in my poses and flows. Dur­ing my daily rou­tine, I was not con­scious of any dif­fi­cul­ties. At the gym, I did not feel any prob­lem doing aer­o­bic exercises.

Obvi­ously, that approach did not work, because the injury (?) has flared up in a more gen­er­al­ized pat­tern. I decided to stop yoga classes again, see a chi­ro­prac­tor and check in with my acupunc­tur­ist, Kelly Welch, who had helped me in the past. More in future entries.

What I learned from my hip abductor meltdown

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It’s been a while, hasn’t it.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a chance to extract some lessons from the pain and dis­com­fort from the melt­down on the mat. I am even hes­i­tant to call it an injury because there was no vis­i­ble dam­age or impair­ment, except that in a few poses it would flare up again:

  1. After my injury, I actu­ally had an increased sense of feel­ing in my left foot (numb­ness caused by periph­eral neu­ropa­thy has a prob­lem for me). Of course, with time, the symp­tom came back because my mus­cles and tis­sues tight­ened up again; in fact, the symp­toms have evened out between my two feet.
  2. I also had more feel­ing in my lower core, which may just be a con­se­quence of focus­ing more on that part of my body because of the injury.  I am also aware that I pay more atten­tion to the pitch (tilt) of my pelvis.
  3. A few years ago, I would have freaked out that I had hurt myself doing yoga; I would have taken it as a sign that I was not prop­erly aligned, a “bad” practitioner, and had bro­ken the rules. But injuries some­times are caused not by what we are doing, but what we did in the past, the accu­mu­la­tion of ingrained neuro-​​myofascial pat­terns acquired over a life­time, and when we may break through some of those pat­terns, it may leave us “flap­ping in the wind” because the old rigid­ity was also a sup­port struc­ture; my mus­cle and tis­sues did not know what to do with the new free­dom so they went into spasms. I now see that as I loosen up my hips, it’s going to affect other parts of my body so I have to remain alert, aware and sen­si­tive to what my body is telling me. And even then I may not avoid injury.
  4. With an injury to some­thing like the hip abduc­tors, it’s really hard to reach down through sev­eral lay­ers of mus­cle and tis­sue. I am lucky to have a vet­eran mas­sage ther­a­pist (Howard Rontal) to do that for me.
  5. It’s really touch and go to get back into a vinyasa prac­tice because I did not want to start too soon, but prob­a­bly waited too long, even though the injury was still sen­si­tive,  and I’m not the kind of guy who believes in prac­tic­ing through the pain. How’s that for string­ing together four con­tra­dic­tions in one sen­tence. But once I started return­ing to class, I became less pre­oc­cu­pied and more aware.
  6. When I had this inter­rup­tion to the inten­sity of my yoga prac­tice, plus other dis­trac­tion, I notice that the drop-​​off in phys­i­cal exer­cise had a rip­ple effect through my body and mind.
  7. Restart­ing is always dis­agree­able because I am con­stantly reminded about how far I have back­slid (“Oh, God, I’m going to have sore mus­cles tomor­row, and I can’t do the jump-​​backs as well as before, and — this is an order, punk, drop into child’s pose, and give me 20 breaths!” ).
  8. Don’t stop doing yoga even when injured (give it a cou­ple days rest, of course); just mod­ify poses and pick sequences that won’t stress out the prob­lem area.

Well, you get the point. I’ve made it to about five classes in eight days so I am grad­u­ally get back to “normal.”

Tying a bow on my birthday present

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I’ve now been tak­ing treat­ment from Howard Rontal for a month now, cur­rently with a fre­quency of once a week for 60 min­utes. As a birth­day present to myself (turned 62 yes­ter­day), I took an 90-​​minute ses­sion in which Howard gave me his “lig­a­ment treatment” — basically going pro­gres­sively from soles to neck and stretch­ing out all the mus­cles and assorted fas­cia, with spe­cial atten­tion to places that were seri­ously com­pro­mised (in my case, hips, sacrum, lower back, neck — Howard was much more spe­cific in nam­ing mus­cles and ligaments).

A full 48 hours later, I am still feel­ing the impact of this body read­just­ment, a dif­fer­ent kind of expe­ri­ence than what I had expe­ri­enced in pre­vi­ous ses­sions. Rather than just reliev­ing symp­toms like numb­ness, ten­sion, or pain (which I did on Tues­day), I’ve felt as if I’ve been put thor­ough boot camp. I’ve gone to bed feel­ing exhausted and sore, and woken up feel­ing fatigued and sore, espe­cially in my hips, thighs, shoul­ders, arms, fore­arms. I almost felt as if I had flu symp­toms — or some­thing had gone wrong with the treat­ment. Obvi­ously, some­thing dif­fer­ent is hap­pen­ing; it’s no longer just the “happy talk” of reliev­ing ten­sion and pain. Because of the work done on my core, I am using mus­cles dif­fer­ently, in new ways, with new lines of ten­sile stress. I’ve only done one Hatha yoga class (Tues­day evening) and my evening yin yoga ses­sions, so I’ve not be overex­ert­ing myself in a more tra­di­tional way (as if I’d gone to the gym for weight lift­ing for the first time in years). Rather, I am car­ry­ing myself (body frame and mus­cles) in a dif­fer­ent way. So the very process of hold­ing myself upright, walk­ing, bend­ing over is more phys­i­cal exer­tion for me.

Howard told me that giv­ing me a mas­sage is like stroking a tree trunk: my mus­cles and fibers are thick, dense, hard­ened, inelas­tic, stiff, some more than oth­ers.  It takes an enor­mous amount of energy on his part to get a response, but even­tu­ally my body does respond. There’s not a lot of give in my fibers.

I don’t look like some­one wound too tightly. I’ve always been slen­der, un-​​athletic, and rel­a­tively lightly built. At around 40, I put on 25 pounds; when I quit smok­ing the first time, I added another 10 pounds; and by the time I fin­ished my MS degree, I had added another 15 pounds, push­ing me over 210 pounds. So I’ve bulked up over a rel­a­tively wiry, tight frame, adding layer over layer.  And for the past seven years, I’ve been try­ing to reverse that tight­ness while reduc­ing my weight, with mod­er­ate suc­cess since I can do a yoga class with­out look­ing like a com­plete klutz. I half joked with Howard that he’s lucky he did not have to work with me when I started yoga.

So what Howard did on Tues­day (and prob­a­bly in a less con­cen­trated form pre­vi­ously) is to start stretch­ing out some of those sinews, free­ing them to move­ment. Which means that instead of rely­ing on rigid­ity to hold together and mobi­lize my body, my mus­cles are hav­ing to work. To use a metaphor, instead of using wooden struts to prop myself up, I am using the ten­sile strength of wire that has to be adjusted con­tin­u­ously to keep me upright. I may have felt it less before because we’ve tended to focus on a sin­gle area (feet and calves, core, shoul­ders and chest, neck and back). This time we were more ambi­tious in treat­ment scope.

Howard explained to me that the model for under­stand­ing the body is based on geo­met­ric prin­ci­ples — called Tenseg­rity:  rather than think­ing of “flesh hang­ing off of bones,” it’s bet­ter to think in terms of a dynamic ten­sion in which the bones are sus­pended by the fas­cia much like a sus­pen­sion bridge. The con­cept is fas­ci­nat­ing, but right now I am deal­ing with the dis­com­fort of the tran­si­tion to being a more embod­ied form of plas­tic­ity from a wooden prototype.

Happy birth­day to me

I see the time and money that I now am invest­ing in this treat­ment as more than just pain relief or injury repair, but as a down pay­ment on future well being in my “senior­hood.” This past year, with my par­ents’ deaths and all the upheaval and dis­rup­tion in my per­sonal life, I let my per­sonal care slip and saw a dra­matic drop-​​off in my well-​​being as my periph­eral neu­ropa­thy and other symp­toms wors­ened dra­mat­i­cally. With the myofas­cial release mas­sage, I feel a renewed inter­est in my yoga practice.

What is really sur­pris­ing is that the ther­apy seems to have more than tran­si­tory effect (reliev­ing pain or loos­en­ing up mus­cles). You would think that “mov­ing around mus­cles and lig­a­ments” would even­tu­ally mean that they fall back in place. I sus­pect that if I might slip back into old pat­terns if I did not do yoga (or exer­cise or stretch­ing) to lock in the new range of movement.

Restarting a yoga practice can mean breakthroughs, too

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Photo: yogi folds forward over leg

Janu Sir­sasana at Bryan Kest's mas­ter class at Thrive Yoga

As I men­tioned yes­ter­day, I have gone into beginner’s mode again, after a long lapse in my vinyasa prac­tice due long work hours and fam­ily tragedies. I took Mary­lou McNamara’s hatha yoga class at Thrive Yoga as my reme­dial course in yoga basics so that I can start rebuild­ing from the ground up as I regain strength and sta­mina for a more vig­or­ous practice.

When I got up this morn­ing, I knew that I would be bet­ter served by a slower class because I was still feel­ing the after­ef­fects of yesterday’s class — sore thigh, hips, and chest, a crick in my lower back, and gen­eral fatigue. I grabbed an extra hour a sleep.

My biggest sur­prise was that in Head-​​to-​​Knee For­ward Bend pose (I know, there’s no good name for it in Eng­lish, that’s why every­one calls it Janu Sir­sasana), I was able to get my folded right leg firmly down on the ground, with the aid of a blan­ket under my sit bones. For the past seven years, my right knee always popped up, and I had to put a blan­ket or a block under it so that it had some sup­port. When I reverse the pose (right leg out­stretched, my left left folded back), my left leg rests on the ground.

Over the past year, my empha­sis on loos­en­ing up hips has meant that my leg has slowly been com­ing closer to rest­ing on the floor, but this was the first time that I did not need to use as much as a towel to sup­port my leg. Admit­tedly, I still need a blan­ket under my sit bones, but I am cer­tainly headed in the right direction.

Anatomical scepticism

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I put in a weekend’s stan­dard dose of yoga (two classes); plus, I man­aged to turn the tor­ture of watch­ing the Red­skins los­ing to the Lions by rolling out my mat and get­ting into frog pose for a full quar­ter [This par­tic­u­lar post stayed in my Black­berry for two weeks before I finally pub­lished it. That explains the time frame: I'm refer­ring to a game two weeks ago. ]. My hip joints are slowly, grad­u­ally open­ing and frog pos­ture really gets into the most hard­ened fas­cia. If I did not know bet­ter, I would have said that break­ing through this appar­ent bar­rier was impos­si­ble because I was bump­ing up against the anatom­i­cal lim­its on my range of move­ments. It seemed that solid.

The next step is notic­ing how this slight vari­ance can rip­ple through the rest of my prac­tice — in lotus pose, in stand­ing pos­tures. I’ve devel­oped a kind of anatom­i­cal skep­ti­cism: my body feed­back says that I can’t get deeply into this or that pose, but that judg­ment may just the false tes­ti­mony of being locked in a cer­tain set­ting for 30 years.

This process is dif­fer­ent from just start­ing yoga or learn­ing a new pose when you’re explor­ing the pos­tures. No, I’ve tried frog or reclined bada konasana 50, 100 times and my body always wim­pers it can’t go any fur­ther. But I per­sist patiently at the edge and the bar­rier grad­u­ally gives way.

How the World Cup improved my yoga

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Photo: forward fold at Thrive Yoga

For­ward fold

I went to Thrive Yoga for the third day in a row, a vinyasa flow with Jes­sica Apo. When­ever the stars align and nei­ther whims or cir­cum­stances pre­vent me from tak­ing class, I notice that my prac­tice tends to be bet­ter, more flow­ing, build­ing on the con­ti­nu­ity of prac­tice, and even with sur­prises that make me pay atten­tion to how I am respond­ing to each cue. It always helps when I’ve taken one of Susan Bowen’s 2-​​3 vinyasa flow classes that pushes me hard, fol­lowed by a Hatha yoga class with Mary­lou McNa­mara that makes me focus on the fundamentals

But this time, there was some­thing spe­cial. When I went into Stand­ing For­ward Bend (Uttanasana), I noticed that I was get­ting in much deeper than pre­vi­ously. I could place my hands flat on the floor while keep­ing my knees straight, and that made the jump back to plank or chatarunga much more con­trolled. I also felt the dif­fer­ence in Intense Side Stretch Pose (Parsvot­tanasana).

One of my obsta­cles in yoga could be sim­plis­ti­caly called “tight hips,” which most men would rec­og­nize as a com­bi­na­tion of tight ham­strings, hip flex­ors mis­aligned by years sit­ting in chairs, rel­a­tively dis­en­gaged quads, and a stiff spine. The end result is that when I am seated on the floor and want to move into Seated For­ward Bend (Paschi­mot­tanasana), I would ended up in a fairly upright, L-​​shaped posi­tion. I sim­ply did not seem to have the means to get passed a lim­ited range of flex­i­bil­ity. I would take hip-​​opener work­shops and they did not seem to have any last­ing effect.

What hap­pened to allow me to make this break­through? The World Cup soc­cer (foot­ball to the rest of the world) matches over the past six weeks, but most notably in the past two weeks. For the games that I watched at home, I sat on the floor and held yoga poses for as long as I could tol­er­ate: Seated For­ward Bend, Wide-​​Angle Seated For­ward Bend (Upavistha Konasana), Head-​​to-​​Knee For­ward Bend (Janu Sir­sasana), and espe­cially Bound Angle (Bad­dha Konasana), some­times with my feet up on blocks so that I was not crank­ing my neck to watch the game.

It took me ages to grad­u­ally break through the bar­ri­ers of these poses. Look­ing back, I can see that most yoga classes don’t have that much time time to spend in one sequence of poses. They are excru­ci­at­ingly bor­ing when held for that long — unless you’re watch­ing a soc­cer match on TV or a movie or what­ever enter­tains you. Even from one sit­ting to the next, I did not notice any sub­stan­tial change, just sub­tle shifts that kept up my nerve to keep going. But this past week­end, I pushed past an edge. The full real­iza­tion of how far I had come appeared in tonight’s class. In a vig­or­ous vinyasa class in which I was juiced up and sweat­ing, I could feel that some­thing was dif­fer­ent in my practice.

I should note that it was not just the soccer-​​cum-​​yoga ses­sions. At bed time, I do a yin yoga sequence, ini­tially spinal twists, but now with for­ward bends, and that rou­tine helps me release mus­cu­lar ten­sion. It is a daily reminder to my body of the new edge that I had been creating.

Everything Yoga gives some advice on avoiding injuries

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Every­thing Yoga: “As a yoga ther­a­pist in train­ing, it pains me to see peo­ple get­ting injured by what’s sup­posed to be a heal­ing prac­tice. The goal of yoga is not to force your body, but to get in touch with your body and honor it.” Diane Cesa’s Every­thing Yoga has been nice enough to link to this blog despite the lim­ited amount of blog­ging that I’ve been doing lately, so I am return­ing the favor. But the quote is actu­ally rel­e­vant to my practice.

In yesterday’s yoga ses­sion at Thrive, I tweaked some­thing in my lower back. I did not notice it until I had cooled off and gone home so I can­not iden­tify which asana or move­ment might have over­taxed my mus­cles. I think that the ses­sion was not par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult or stren­u­ous, and I’ve been focus­ing on body aware­ness dur­ing my ses­sion, both in terms of breath and align­ment. Kim Del­laroca, the instruc­tor, had just been at a hip opener work­shop so she empha­sized that in the class so my ache might be sim­ple mus­cle fatigue.

I had a far more seri­ous prob­lem with lower back pain about two years ago so I am con­cerned about how seri­ous this might be.

In the Sun­day class with Kim Groak, I men­tioned my prob­lem to Kim. She did a class that was strong on hip open­ers as well. I felt much bet­ter after the class than before so she must have done some­thing right. I was able to do Half Moon pose with my arms spread wide. It had always been hard for me because my hips tended to be unsta­ble, throw­ing me out of align­ment, not to men­tion my gen­eral bal­ance deficiency.

Hip openers and lower back pain

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Over the week­end, I took a Hip Opener work­shop at Tran­quil­Space. It was a two-​​hour work­out, dou­ble what I nor­mally take. The instruc­tor was Kevin Waldorf-​​Cruz, and we had a nice chat before class, when I told him of my his­tory of lower back pain and what I had been doing to treat it. I was fear­ful that I might over­load my lower back because of the inten­sive nature of the ses­sion, but it was the oppo­site. I came out really tired, pushed to my extreme, but my back felt fine. I don’t think I “cured” my lower back pain, but I did come to release into it and accept it as a given in my prac­tice. I learned I had to lis­ten to it atten­tively and patiently — and apply that les­son to the rest of my body.

Getting hip — and showing my age

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I am not a flex­i­ble yogi. If I had to make a list of areas I need to work on, I would end up with all the major joints in the body — from ankles to shoul­ders. But hips are up at the top of the list. I chanced across Hips Too Tight? If you’re hav­ing dif­fi­culty with for­ward bends, don’t assume it’s your ham­strings. Inflex­i­ble rota­tor mus­cles may be to blame. by Judith Han­son Lasiter. The arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared in the January/​February 2000 iss­sue of Yoga Jour­nal, but this ver­sion also includes the photographs.