My Nemesis

220 classes in 212 days.
73 classes in 69 days in the 101 challenge.

Everyone has postures they feel good about and even look forward to in class, and then there are those postures you dread. Of course, those are the postures our teachers tell us are the most important for us to do, because our body needs them the most. For me, those postures are the spine strengthening series. You know, those four postures where you lay on your stomach and lift up in various positions against gravity? I laugh when our teachers tell us near the end of the standing series, "We're almost on the floor!" All this means to me is "We're almost on to the postures you hate!"

From previous blogs, I mentioned that back pain is THE reason I started doing Bikram Yoga. Now, it's handled those problems well so far, and I definitely don't have pain any longer. However, my back is far from perfect. It's still sore and if I do certain things it hurts. So I obviously need the spine strengthening series!

I've gotten with some teachers recently about these postures as they were becoming increasingly frustrating. Without going into lots of detail, I did come to some sort of happy medium on what to do, so I can get some depth and still hold the posture and get benefits. For example, I can actually get fairly high up on Cobra, but I can't hold it for very long. So we worked out getting high enough to feel it and to a point where I can hold it the whole time, while also being able to push up a little bit to increase the depth. This might sound complicated, but it's simple once I figured out what to do. As a result, these four postures are now going much better. They're still tough for me, but I can feel it working the different areas of the back the whole time now.

For the next few days, I'm trying to do doubles on Thursday and Friday. We'll see if this really happens...

Greg