Flexibility as we age..
Saturday, July 30, 2011 at 10:34PM All of you know that Bikram Yoga has become a part of the routine for me and the MIL and we are now regulars to a point where our laundry cycles are synchronized with the number of Yoga clothes we own!
The three week hiatus in Bikram Yoga during the India trip was interesting. My logic was that Chennai temperatures were 98 to 100 F during the time we were there and the lows were in the 88 to 90 F range. Chennai is on the coast and is usually humid and so doing Yoga in the living room should be the same as doing Bikram Yoga in the studio here.
Have never been so wrong. The first day after landing there, tried to do the exercises starting with the breathing. Usually we sweat a lot after the very first breathing exercise. There was no sweating. Forget profuse sweating.. there was simply no sweat. It was a very bad clammy feeling. Still went through the routine in a little over an hour. The timing was a little off but did finish it. The rest of the day was a bad headache. It was possibly accelerated by the Jet lag but after having missed headaches for 100+ days, it was a rude shock!
The next day tried to go through the routine again and no sweating. Then decided to stop the attempts. My body was saying "enough. go back to a hot room" and my skin was clogging up. The rest of the trip saw no yoga, only a careful watching of the diet and before we knew it, we were back home in Cupertino.
Instinct was to go do Yoga on day one, but the body was jet lagged and we decided to wait for two days. The first day of Yoga was stressful. The mind knew how far to push because of previous experience but the body did not respond. A funny thing happened. There was a lot less sweating and felt like peeling off my skin and throwing it out. That same clammy feeling. A feeling you get just before it rains after an extreme bout of heat in Chennai summers! (what we call Puzhukkam in Tamil). Would come home, take a shower and the minute I dried myself with a towel and walked to the kitchen to make tea, my vest, shirt and pants would be drenched in sweat as if I had just finished the yoga session.
Obviously something was wrong with my skin and the pores were clogging up because of the weather change. Do not know if the water change and soap change added to the weather change, but it is a possibility. After the third day of Yoga, things came back to normal.
Did have another small snag with a TdP vaccine giving me side effects that made me miss Yoga for another three days this week, but so far so good.
The kids are having fun watching try hard to get back in track..
They have a lot more flexibility because they are young! Wish they retain this as they grow old.
One thing that has been brought to my attention recently that has to be shared. Doing Bikram Yoga seems to be like a test of the body in itself. If something is wrong or about to fail the Yoga seems to bring it out. The recent health check up showed a severe Vitamin D deficiency which is being corrected. Do not know to what extent this is true but we know of three cases where an underlying health problem has been highlighted by doing Yoga. There is always a question of "did the Yoga cause the problem or help bring the symptoms to the foreground?". Google searches suggest the latter.
If you have any such experience, do share in the comment section.
Meanwhile, the Yoga experience continues...
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