Skip to main content

Hot Yoga


I did something to my left wrist last Friday - I don't know what, because it didn't hurt at the time. I woke up Saturday with a terrible pain along the pinky edge. It was so severe, I couldn't even hold up a book in that hand, and bending it left was excruciating. My right wrist was hurting, too, but not nearly to the same extent. It all started the previous Monday when I went to my first kobudo class, followed by a very painful karate class. On Saturday I went to bed that night with my brace on and strapped it so tight, the nerves in my palm were pinched for the entire following day.

It's been jacked up since, and only today does it feel a bit better. I've had to skip all my combat classes this week, which has made me feel languid and stifled; but I tried to replace them with other things like biking, pole work, and... hot yoga.

Tiffany from Miss Pole recommended a place in Tosa a while back, and I've been wanting to give it a shot but just haven't been able to fit it in. Well, since I couldn't do anything involving my hands, and my upper body was feeling insanely tight and stiff, I decided this would be the week I try it.

It was just what I needed. I felt so much better afterward. My body wasn't nearly as stiff and my headache had gone away. I was a bit nervous that I would be around people who had been doing yoga for years and were much more flexible and strong that I, but I was actually doing better than most people. My balance wasn't nearly as good as I feel like it normally is; but in terms of strength, I was far succeeding everyone else there.

I was really happy that we worked on hand and headstands because I've been really wanting to learn them for a while now, and I haven't been able to make any strides on my own. I needed an instructor to guide me through it.

I was able to talk with the instructor after class about how to best work on hand/headstands, and she gave me some great tips, which was basically to use your lower abs to pull yourself up. That's not an area I have used much in pole but have been working on in my free time exercises. Last night I practiced doing hand/headstands utilizing her advice, and it made a big difference. Even though this isn't an area of my body that I use very much in other forms of exercise, I think it will eventually have an impact on pole, since a lot of more advanced moves like the Iron X will definitely need it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Running update - 2 miles achieved!

The Monkey Bar Gym has been closed during the week because of Summerfest, which means all my krav and boxing classes have been cancelled. My muay thai instructor and I talked about doing some outdoor exercises in its place; but it was nearly 100 degrees with full sun and incredibly high humidity these past 3 days, so that was out. In fact, I went for a walk on my lunch break on Friday afternoon and felt sick for the rest of the day from the heat. I was hoping then to get some hiking, running, or rocking climbing in on Saturday or Sunday, and to make it to a krav or hot yoga class on Sunday; but none of these things worked out. The heat prevented me from being able to do any outdoor activities, and no one was able to go rock climbing with me. Saturday I went up to Baraboo with Jennifer Koss to do some hiking and swimming at Pewit's Nest, but because it was so hot, we didn't end up doing a lot of the former. But I got home so late and was so exhausted from the heat (also, my shou...

Little writing win at work

I did something I'm really proud of today. At work, I had to break down the science behind the sound, light, and fog of an engine I'm short, one sentence blurbs at a sixth grade reading level. And I also had to write a graphic about rocket engine test fires.  Do you know how complicated those things are? They're literal rocket science. Everything else I've talked about so far has been pretty easy to distill down into simple talking points, but not those things. I spent all day today and half of yesterday researching them, and I could not wrap my head around them. Nothing online broke it down or explained the terminology, and different sources explained it differently, meaning that I had a bunch of unreliable sources. It's not this often that I feel unintelligent, but this did.  Despite this, I somehow managed to break it down and come up with a sentence describing each thing that I thought was pretty good. I shared it with Cole, our resident subject matter expert on...

Pole update: layback achieved!

I finally got my cross-ankle layback tonight! I wore my new Wonder Woman shorts so I'd have more grip in my thighs and followed the advice from a blog I recently read, which said to go into it from a reverse Superwoman. It worked! I was able to get it every time except for once, when I think it wasn't close enough to my crotch. And then because I was able to get the layback, I was able to work on bow and arrow and got it on the first try. After that, it was pretty easy to keep doing it (especially since my leg grip was so good). Also, my flag is looking better. I can raise both legs now pretty horizontally and hold them there for a while on both sides.  BOOYAKASHA!