Climbing and yoga for someone with mild hypermobility tendencies

When I warm up on the indoor climbing wall, climbing simple ladder-like structures, I always get a pretty intense feeling in the shoulders. I don't know if it's blood rushing to the area or if it's fascia slowly adapting to my body weight. I feel a stretch all along my side bodies. I try to hang a bit, let my body weight pull open up and warm up my side body. I can do that a bit with my back body as well, rounding my spine a bit to stretch the muscles and the fascia. I can actually simulate the feeling of stretching (not the intensity though) by simply reaching one arm above my head towards the ceiling.

I asked my boyfriend if he also got this intense feeling of stretching when he warms up on the wall, and he said no. The difference between us is that I have to warm up on very simple routes with next to no strains on my muscles; otherwise the first climb would feel extremely difficult. He on the other hand, already wants some difficulty in his warm up climb. It's like his muscles crave stress already while cold, and my muscles are not capable of fully engaging before the fascia are ready. After some stretching and warm up, then I can start to climb harder stuff -- routes that require more muscular activation.

When I practice yoga, there are a lot of moves where everyone else feel a lot: for example my boyfriend feels a lot in any asana that contains a spinal twist, whereas I barely feel anything in twists. In fact, I hate the lying down mild twists at the cool down phase of many yoga classes. I don't feel a stretching sensation at all along the body. I just feel like my vertebrae are crunched and I'm probably overstraining my connective tissues.

I was looking up hypermobility and climbing, and people describe pulley injuries in the hands. I guess I haven't reached high enough difficulty to strain my hands so much to start getting those injuries. My fingers also don't contort into the shapes that I see in the images I google online, so my hypermobility is not severe. I am also too chicken to dare to try as hard as many guys at the gym seem to do. The list below are typical characteristics for joint hypermobility syndrome (JHS), and how I match to these symptoms:

• pain and stiffness in the joints and muscles [sometimes]
• clicking joints [yes]
• joints that dislocate (come out of the correct position) easily . [luckily no]
• fatigue (extreme tiredness) [yes]
• recurrent injuries – such as sprains [luckily no]
• digestive problems – such as constipation and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)  [sort of]
• dizziness and fainting [dizziness yes, fainting no]
• thin or stretchy skin [no.... I think]

There was another list of symptoms that JHS can cause, many of which overlap with the above list. But there are some additional symptoms that I do experience:

• back and neck pain 
• night pains [not really a pain in my case; more like soreness and erratic energy currents flowing through the muscle/fasciae that I overworked during the day's climbing session] 

The fact that I need to strengthen my muscles to protect my joint is the obvious one. Given that I haven't severely injured my body that much given my age, I am probably too careful and never push my body to its limits, which is maybe a good thing for my body. I have a tendency to want to compare myself to others, but given my body composition is so different compared to most people I know, I really shouldn't do it. Currently, my boyfriend notices novel muscular definitions on his body pretty much every week, whereas I only notice muscle tone progressions on a monthly basis. He does not get neck pains nor does he wake up in the night from soreness.

The website suggests that people with JHS should stick to low-impact exercises. Currently I don't feel like climbing is overstraining my joints. I really like how the activity improves my muscle tones. I don't love the imbalance I feel after each climbing session. I have tried doing online yoga classes on my rest days, but felt like it was not a good idea to follow a led class. Instead I should try to stretch and try different asanas on my own, be more mindful how each asana feels in the body, and back off on the asanas that really irritate the specific overworked muscle groups. It is not that easy. For example, back bends feel great after climbing, since climbing involves some haunch forward-type movements. However, urdhva dhanurasana (upward bow pose) can feel great and horrible at the same time). It provides much needed stretches for some parts of the body, but the shoulders and back muscles can feel really overworked. I probably should find some alternative backbends that can accomplish the deep stretching that I crave but not put so much strain on the back muscles.

There is also this electric current issue that is not really addressed by western physiology, not well defined by yoga teachings (in the west), and too esoteric for me to understand in Chinese energy exercise teachings. I really hope that one day I can find a teacher with minimal BS, who has sound knowledge of the body's energy system, who doesn't try to sound like he/she is superior to other people, and who doesn't try to put students down. This energy system is linked to the connective tissues, to mood, to how tired or energized I feel, to the mind, and to the physical health of the body of course. 

Restless in Savasana

I used to be really good at savasana. At the end of every intensive power yoga class, I would happily collapse into my corpse pose and sometimes even fall asleep. It was not a problem for me to stay still for 5-10minutes and observe the trickles of electric energy moving up and down my body.

Not so with Bikram yoga. I'm still not so sure about the savasanas in between each seated postures. I understand what they are meant for theoretically, but practically I don't know if it works as well as they claim (to release the blood flow in the body after each compression posture). In the beginning I really disliked them, since they felt disruptive to the flow of the sequence. Now I have gotten used to them, and welcome the break after each posture. It's not that the seated postures are particularly difficult, just that the heat of the room really gets to me.

It's the savasana at the end of the class that's been particularly challenging for me.  So far I have been feeling totally restless at the end of class 80% of the time, with the desire to get up and run around, do a headstand, wiggle like a worm, go into urdhva dhanurasana. The most I could do though was to wiggle around until the teacher leaves the room. It seems like the 26 posture-sequence, with kabbalah baati breathing exercise at the end, is not an energy grounding practice. I could feel the heat generated by my body from the practice clashing with the heat of the room.

On the other hand, I always sleep very well after a Bikrams class (I practice in the evenings). That's one of the reasons why I keep going back. We'll see if my wiggle problem goes away after a few more weeks of practice.

This energy/emotion business is so interesting. Yoga and the heat really stir up a lot of emotions and thoughts for me, but not in a bad way. I think I'm the type who needs frequent, strong doses of external stimulations in the body in order to drive away the negative, depressing energy within me. The scientist in me wishes I could study this subject scientifically somehow, but I have no idea how this "energy/mood" can be objectively measured and quantitated. Ah well, someone smarter than me will invent the method/instrument some day.

Energy management

I lose energy so easily it's pathetic. At work I can only truly focus for a few hours of productiveness. When I come home I am usually feel drained and exhausted. On Saturdays I sleep in, but sometimes even when I get up I don't feel fully awake. Coffee does not wake me up. Deep breathing helps a bit but I feel like I need more. I can't practice breath of fire when I'm at work because it looks to weird. The cold also really gets to me. I eat fatty food and drink a ton of warm drinks to try to warm myself up from the inside. If I could manage my energy, time and mood better I think I would try to exercise every day, practice pranayama, and socialize more. Instead I struggle to get out of bed every morning, end up being late for work, struggle to focus at work, get distracted and check other websites instead of concentrating on figuring out how to solve my project problems. It's so difficult to get "into the zone". When I succeed, my colleagues call for coffee break and the concentration is broken. I check email 50 times a day, complain about everything, feel anxious about my troubled relationship with my family back home, worry about not forming close friendships in this foreign city, doubt about my abilities to succeed in my job, worry about my career outcome in the future, and go home exhausted. This is for sure not the ideal way to live life.

But right now I feel good though. It's 11pm; I just had a glass of wine , I am breathing deeply and regularly. Actually, 11pm is always one of the more alert hours of the day. I treasure my rare moments of alertness which is why I don't want to go to bed, which is why I am so tired the next day. I really should be an artist instead and work during my alert hours instead of following this 9-5 work hour patterns which does not work for me.

I gotta make more changes in life to find something that works for me.