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. 

Yoga vs. Chinese energy practices

I felt triggered by an article written on Facebook by a Chinese osteopath master, shared by my cousin. He mentioned he is a practitioner of several Chinese kung fu / taichi / qigong practices, and he has treated many Chinese yoga teachers who got injured from over-stretching in yoga. He asked some of his yoga teacher patients why they hurt themselves over-stretching, and the yoga teachers replied that when they saw that some of their students could do certain asanas better than they can, they felt the pressure to "keep up with the students".  He explicitly declared he didn't know so much about yoga, but he felt that it is a dangerous practice, because the emphasis of the current yoga teachings seem to be on pushing students to get into the pretzel asanas whether their bodies are ready or not.

The osteopath went in-depth talking about the tendon, ligament, and fascia system, noting that a lot of his yoga practitioner patients had some body parts that are loose, say: hips, or hamstrings, but the ends of the bodies, such as attachment around the hands and feet, were very tight. This is because the whole connected fascia system needs some tension, so when we over-loosen some parts, other parts of the body would tighten up to compensate.

He feels yoga is a very advanced study, but not all students should practice the same asanas, because different bodies have different needs. He is also concerned that the teachers don't adequately teach how people should breath in each asana, for example, breathing from the chest or breathing from the abdomen. He feels that people could serious hurt themselves if they breath wrongly while going into these advanced asanas.

What he says about the connective tissues is fine, and his advice that people should not push to their absolute edge when they do an asana is also fine. What I have a problem is that he says "yoga is very dangerous" based on his patients. I guess his addressing women who turn off their common sense and decide to push their bodies to an extreme in order to look like "advanced yoga teachers".  Shouldn't it be that "lack of common sense" is dangerous? If you are hypermobile, please focus on the strengthening rather than the stretching aspects of asana. Even better, add some other exercises to your life, such as long walks, jogging, resistance exercises (lifting weights etc) or even dancing.

Secondly, a large part of his article is focused on his theories about connective tissues. This section sounded very complicated. I am not really sure if it applies to everyone or just "bendy people". As far as I know, my fellow yogis who constantly complain they feel stiff, even a decade later when their flexibility in the area they work on (say, hamstrings or hips) has gradually improved, still claim they are stiff. Having overly lax connective tissues just doesn't seem to be a problem for people whose bodies do not have hypermobile tendencies.  Even when they overstretch and pull a muscle, it seems to be quite local. However, this article was shared by hundreds of this master's fans, many of which are yoga teachers. I guess it's not a problem to tell everyone to be more careful when practicing yoga, but I just feel like people without hypermobile tendencies should have trouble truly understanding what he wrote, since they have never felt like their bodies are "too loose" while tight near the muscle attachments. But it seems like he got a ton of comments saying "So true!!" "Such a well written article!" "I learned so much from this article!" It left me seriously scratching my head.

Regarding breathing, he made it sound super complicated. People's natural reaction when they do a new, uncomfortable pose, is to hold their breaths. Or they can only do very shallow chest breathing initially. I feel like this naturally protects the body so people don't push past their range of joint motion on their first attempt. The solution is simply to back off from the full posture, and try to breath more deeply. Interestingly, he mentioned something about how good breathing should work based on his qigong knowledge, which basically describes mula bandha. I think what he means by yoga being very advanced, is when one grasps how mula and the other bandhas work, combined with correct methods of breathing, the nadis, the fascia system will be fully activated. Now, I have felt electricity running through my body sometimes during and after yoga practice, but sometimes I don't. I know some people who don't really feel the electricity at all. I'm not sure about other yoga styles, but for Ashtanga, the closing postures are quite important for containing all these activated prana/chi energy, so his worries are taken care of by the ancient wisdom of yoga.

I guess my annoyance comes from the fact that the Chinese way of teaching energy work is that "the body is very dangerous! Only move it in the way I, as a master, tell you to do so, and don't you dare to play with your body or your breath on your own! You will hurt yourself!" The thing is, in the beginning, the students feel nothing, because as beginners, we are not moving or breathing in the "right" way that facilitate the chi flow. The teacher then goes on and on about how powerful the practice is. While it is true when the students eventually do it correctly, it is sort of untrue for the first months, or even years. What ends up happening is a ton of people bragging about all the miracles of  Chinese energy practices before actually experiencing anything real. For the beginners, the movements are so mild that they don't really get a work out for the muscles.

With yoga, initially people only experience the superficial stretching, and balancing, and muscular work.  The movements are more dramatic. I sincerely believe that while most people get a workout while others increase their range of motion, many never experience the deeper work on the subtle body, at least not consciously. To them, yoga is an exercise routine. As for those who are hyper-focused on the human-pretzel aspect of yoga and who end up screwing up their connective tissues, well, I can only say I hope they realize one day that hyper-flexibility certainly does not equal health. I wouldn't say "yoga is dangerous!!" For me, that warning implies that everyone should stop practicing yoga immediately.

To summarize, I guess I have a problem with the Chinese way of viewing health and life. The west generally promotes that exercising is healthy (based on many many scientific studies). Yes, there are people who over do it and need joint replacement surgeries much too early in their lives. As long as  these people enjoy what their bodies can accomplish in marathons, skiing, cycling etc, I think the purpose is justified. This thinking of "don't breath or move the wrong way or you will hurt yourself" applies to people without basic fitness. The idea of training baseline cardiovascular and muscular fitness is good for you is just not fundamental in the Chinese culture. You can build some chi in the dan-tien (diaphragm) area, and/or you can also just build some core muscles. Both protects the body. I wish that in addition to warning which exercises or movements can hurt people, these kung fu / qigong masters could also warn people the danger of inactivity, which can be just as bad for people. The masters also need to realize that some people will claim they understand and can access the chi, but they never actually get it. Getting people to sweat and increase their heart rates are much more straightforward way of promoting health.

Sorry this post is so longwinded and scattered. I have many thoughts on different aspects of this issue that I just need to write them out on a page before re-organizing them.

Spiritual Teachering

Recently I have been watching Youtube videos of a self-proclaimed spiritual teacher. Her teachings are essentially a combination of pop psychology, spiritual teachings from various traditions, some chakra stuff, some aura stuff, some quantum mysticism New Age stuff, some yoga teachings, etc. A lot of her teachings make sense to me, since she rehashes existing sound teachings. The way she reinterprets these existing psychological theories / spiritual teachings and comes up with her own examples illustrating the theories are very relatable to people, which makes her very popular.

The problem that she claims her knowledge comes from communicating with higher dimensional beings, rather than through reading many books and attending counselling sessions herself.

It seems like she has built quite a following and people will pay big money to go to her retreats and attend her workshops. Her audience would prefer to obtain knowledge from mystical beings rather than from science (psychological research) or  ancient (human) sages. Or maybe they know she learned from books rather than from clairvoyance, but they want the knowledge to be presented to them in an entertaining and charismatic manner. I guess it's human nature. I just worry that when people idolize a teacher, they do not question anything he or she says, and no one person knows everything, so people might take in teachings that may or may not be totally accurate.

The overabundance of real and false information today has made us more anxious than ever. We want uncomplicated answers to our anxiety. We want somebody to have the answers to our general problems. Problems with relationships, with our health, with our womanhood (or manhood), with love, with our careers, with family, with our finance. Those who are charismatic enough to claim they have answers to it all have potential to make significant financial gains.

I'm just wondering if it's better for a spiritual teacher to be honest about their lineage of teaching, or is it okay to mix and match different teachings, but claim it's from one source. Or is it okay to claim psychic abilities.

I have a desire for people to be more truthful, useful spiritual teachings or not, but maybe that's too much to ask for in this world. 

Noticing my habitual thinking patterns

Meditation really is a brain training exercise that is so useful for life, but can be difficult to understand the process. I guess without brain training, the mind is kind of on autopilot mode. I have always assumed that anxiety, fear, anger, and general helplessness are part of my nature.  Mean people make me anxious. Unfairness and injustice make me angry. Recently I have realized that external situations are not what make me helpless and angry. It is a habit of mine to react this way to most unfamiliar and/or uncomfortable situations. It is a form of learned helplessness.

I grew up observing my mother solving every issue at home. My dad is a hardworking man. However, he only feels responsible for bringing home the pay check and nothing else. He is what you would today diagnose as autistic: he has trouble expressing his feelings and opinions; he cannot have a conversation with you if he is not interested in the topic, which includes politics, some history/geography, and not much else. He has near photographic memory. He does not participate in decision making processes at home. My mom, being a housewife much less educated than my dad, has to make all the major decisions, such as buying and selling our home, raising children, etc. She learned to put on this very tough, confident, brave, authoritarian front while she made these decisions without much prior knowledge or understanding of the world. She did this to hide her anxiety and low self-esteem.

While this behaviour helped her survive her anxiety, it also gave me a lot of anxiety. Since her husband never participated the decision making process, of course there is no place for her child to get a say in the decisions that she made, even though I really wanted a say in which schools I should go to, interior decorations in our home, which extra-curricular activities I should participate in, etc. I felt my opinions didn't matter, no matter how much I complained. In fact, I got into this pattern of always acting out, complaining I didn't want to do the activities my mother had arranged, be it ballet, or tennis, or go to the schools my mother had picked. My mother would just shout me down, not allowing her authority as a mother to be questioned.  In the end, I would grumpily attend these activities, full of resentment. My mother would triumph that her authority was maintained, strongly believing that it was all for my good, and that I would thank her when I grew up.

My habit of resentment never stopped. I resented everything. Whatever didn't go my way, I would blame my mother. As a child, my mother always forced me to do things her way. She also never got me to stop resenting her. We would just shout at each other. So when I became an adult, when a teacher or a boss wanted me to do something I didn't want to do, I would bite the bullet and do it while secretly resenting them. A better alternative would be to express my thoughts and perhaps offer an alternative solution. But because I have had zero practice at this growing, I didn't even realize that this was a possibility until much later in life, but still now, I am not good at this.

It didn't help that in academia, professors get next to zero training in people management. To be honest, all of my bosses sucked at management. They are more reasonable than my mother, but they needed their students and staff to be good communicators and good at gently pushing back and offering solutions, which can be quite difficult for me to do, since I have always worked on complex topics using bleeding-edge technologies, where knowledge about the topic/issues can be lacking. I often felt tongue-tied, which my bosses would interpret as I knew nothing, when I was merely being overly cautious.

Recently I had to deal with a salesperson who made me feel helpless and that I did something wrong. But since this is not a boss-employee relationship, I realized that this is just my default way of feeling when I am in an uncomfortable situation with another human being. I have had neither training nor  practice taking charge of a situation among a group of people.

What does meditation have to do with any of this? Well, without meditation, I link my anxiety and meekness directly to the situation. With meditation, where I sit daily to observe ongoing thought patterns, breathing patterns and feelings in the body, I am able to put some space between me and these habitual patterns. These patterns are not fundamentally who I am. They are just habits.

I have always wished I could have better training from my mother or from school. Now that I am old enough, I realize most people, including my mother, are mostly in self-preservation mode, despite their claims that they want to do what's good for me or for everyone. I have to train myself to get mentally stronger and to reprogram my brain. Recognizing the habitual thinking patterns is a first step towards making changes.

Meditation practice and morning grogginess

Even though I have started a daily morning meditation practice, I am still as scatter brained as ever. On my way to do thing A (eg. take a shower), I get distracted and end up playing an hour of cell phone game. Or I am supposed to find some cleaning cloth to wipe off a stain from the dining table, then I forget what I am looking for and end up sorting through my makeup basket for nail polish. I'm hopeless that way.

However, one thing that seems to have improved in the short time I have been meditating 10-30min a day is that waking up in the morning seems much easier now. Normally it's extremely difficult for me to get out of the bed every morning. I wake up feeling very groggy, maybe in the middle of a dream that I can't even remember. Often my brain goes back to making up some dream plot and I fall back to sleep again. This struggle happens every day. Now I wake up, and my head is clear, not clinging on to some story plot that leads to nowhere. I don't mean I feel alert enough to do complex tasks, but I don't feel drowsy, yucky, painfully reluctant to fully wake up as I feel most of the time. Of course it helps that the days are getting longer and I wake up in day light instead of in the dark, but the brightness feeling of the brain is certainly refreshing.

I didn't mention that over Christmas when I visited my parents, I was waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweat with crazy ideas of mash up of things that happened during the day. I was just out of a job and my brain desperately wanted to come up with new ideas for my next gig. It was a combination of jetlag and stress-inducing mom that brought about this. I need to accept that visiting mom will always be stressful, because mom just has a very different personality that me and I can't really change her.

Anyways, I am documenting the benefits meditation has brought about so far. Being able to just wake up without an alarm clock (at 5:30am, no less) is amazing. I hope this effect lasts for awhile. 

Where do thoughts come from and where do they go?

I started meditating again recently. About 10 minutes a day, using Sam Harris's "Waking Up" phone app. Often I feel very restless during the meditation sessions. Thoughts come up and I feel like "I've got an idea for a post in my blog!" But I force myself to sit through it, and then 1 minute later, the idea is gone again.

Often I feel like I have something in my mind that I have got to put into writing. The ideas remain coherent. However, sentences I type up are totally different than the ones that come up in my head. I have no idea why that is the case.

Or I get the feeling I have so much thoughts I need to express, and then three sentences later, I have no clue how to complete the paragraph, let alone a whole post. The brain just feels like the idea came out the tap and is lost in the drain, and I only managed to catch a few drops on the page. I know that to be able to write better, I really need to force myself to write more often. More practice will improve my writing skills.

As the guided meditation suggests, thoughts seem to come out of nowhere. If I just observe the thought, it disappears into nothingness too all of a sudden. Sometimes the restlessness persists, then more random thoughts appear into consciousness. Occasionally, I can attain a state where it feels great to sit still for several minutes, where I can just observe the breath, feelings in the body, random sounds in the environment, with no random thoughts materializing from the ether to distract me.

In my climbing, I do notice that sometimes the random thought of fear of falling comes out of nowhere, and I suddenly believe I should get down to the safety of the ground right away, but if I just hold on and breath, then that thought goes away and everything is fine. Or when my forearms start feeling the burn (from fingers clenching the holds too hard), the immediate fear that my body can't handle the stress arises. However, the moment my feet land on the ground, I would suddenly think that I probably could do one more route no problem.

My problem is that considering too many issues leads to indecision and inaction. I hope to be able to be less distracted and be able to accomplish more goals in the future.

Small talk, or unsolicited advice?

A friend went to try climbing with family and friends the other day. Having to take care of their kids, watch their belongings, he did not get to climb, but instead took photos + film the others' climbing experiences + provide support. Upon hearing that I recently got into climbing, he unabashedly offered me advice on what I should do in order to improve my climbing. First, he said that I am already very good (having never seen me climb nor hear about my climbing experiences) and just need more practice and experience to "perfect it". If I want, I should take some classes on improving my techniques. Second, I should do probably do some auxiliary training exercises to strengthen my grip. Third, I can take some supplements after climbing sessions to help speed up recovery.

I must admit I had a strong reaction when I first heard his "advice", because it implies I don't know what I am doing. But now that I have organized and written out what he had said, I realize it's the most generic advice someone would say to a newbie starting any kind of new physical activity. So it was merely small talk.

Come to think of it, I would give the exact same advice if I had climbed maybe once or twice in my life (which is the case for him) and were asked to speculate what to do next to improve one's climbing. You can substitute the word "climbing" with "yoga", "strengthen your grip" with "lift some weights" or "pilates exercises" and so on.

Soooooo.... what are the problems with this seemingly accurate advice?

1) You are already "good" at climbing.

Define "good". I'm guessing he means I can move my hands and feet up a 15m wall on a beginner set-route. Most people in his social circles don't even want to try. That's kind of him, I guess, but it' feels very vapid. Climbing is one of the most intense physical activities I have done that I feel like I can improve with persistence. I have very strong feelings about this activity. I think something like badminton or soccer are "hard" for me because I don't have good coordination and people playing with me usually don't have the patience to train with me and wait for me to get good enough to have a enjoyable session with them. Climbing is something that one can work on at one's own pace, as long as one has the interest and patience to keep doing it.

2) You just need more practice and experience to perfect it get better.  

I'm not sure if an advice can get any more generic than that. I guess people say this to someone who claims an activity/goal is too hard and that he/she can never achieve it.

3) Take some classes to improve your techniques.

We are very lucky in this day and age to have the internet to provide a lot of written and video tutorials on how to do something. I already have a huge list of techniques that I know I need to work on. I think climbing mindfully provides great insights that differ from tips that someone tells you. Climbing, like yoga, shifts the center of gravity, ie. the hips, from directly above the 2 legs, to totally foreign places -- usually tilted sideways where your one foot is standing at a funny angle and you have no idea what to do with the other foot/leg. When this happens, the mind panics -- an alarm goes off in the head. At this point, you can have an instructor feed instructions to you (eg. "place your right foot on the foothold just below your right knee"), or you can just go climbing more often, wait for the "brain alarm" to subside (it usually does after you have been in a similar situation several times and/or when your muscles get stronger and can hold funny positions better), then you can look around the wall and try to figure out the next move yourself. I think a coach can be helpful when I get seriously stuck and frustrated at some point, but for now, I have a lot to learn from the climbing activity itself.

4) Do some auxiliary training exercises to strengthen my grip. 

Honestly, I actually bought some of those grip strengthening toys when I first started climbing. But I ended up not using them that often, and honestly, I'm not sure how much they help. I grip way, wayyyyyyyy harder on the wall when I am in fear of falling. Handholds on the wall feel totally different compared to these toys. A handhold can be gripped at different angles, with different fingers etc. In addition, my grip on the wall is always connected to my arm and/or body body weight. Again, the arms can be bent or be straight at different angles, and my body weight can be in so many different places in relation to my hands. At this point I don't feel the toys help at all with the climbing. Maybe when I become more experienced, the grip toys will come in handy when I have stronger hands (from climbing) and can train specifically while visualizing some specific moves. This is something one probably wouldn't know unless one has had some climbing experiences.

5)  Take some supplements after climbing sessions to help speed up recovery.

Guys with some body building background swear by this. My bf also feels like a protein shake helps him with recovery. I tried it a few times and I didn't feel a difference. My speculation is that some guys naturally recover faster + they really believe in the supplements, so there is an additional placebo effect. I naturally recover slower (coz I'm frigging old), plus I don't believe in supplements, so the effects are very minimal.

Basically, this is the type of generic advice you might blurt out if a reporter asks you "what is your advice for a beginner who wants to get better at climbing?" It's something to say so that one sounds like one knows something about the subject. Some people prefer to give superficial opinions than to admit they don't actually know much about this activity. It only works though if the other person also hasn't thought much about it. Conversations like these are deeply unsatisfactory to me, but my options are to unfriend these people (I might have very few friends left), or to take things less seriously. I need to accept the fact that my yearning to connect deeply with people will be satisfied very infrequently, and I should be mindful and grateful when those rare, precious moments in life happen.