Bending Over Backwards

Young Yogi backbends with ease. Grrr.

See this kid? I used to be this kid. When I was little, doing a backbend was as easy as breathing. I'd push straight up from the ground, my belly arcing towards the sky, creating a tunnel for my friends to crawl through, laughing as they went through. Or I'd lean backwards, my hands stretching towards the ground as I folded myself in half.

Ah, youth.

What happened? Life happened. Although I had plenty of opportunity to flip and twist as a collegiate diver, practicing backbends was an increasingly uncommon occurrence the deeper into adulthood I ventured. When I practiced yoga — and even when I taught — the backbends that were visited and revisited were less extreme bends: Cobra. Upward Dog. Fish. Standing Backbend. The very infrequent Bow. The even rarer Camel. And that was it. Good thing that, in all the years I've taught yoga, my students have been Gentle and Restorative students for whom Bow and Camel were cause for quaking.

Except for that kid up there, known in the Instagram circuit as Young Yogi. He's my son, and his ease with backbends make me a) proud of his abilities b) jealous of his flexibility c) reminisce about the way I used to be d) all of the above.

As the years went by, even these backbends took a back seat to other yogic postures. The only backbending poses I practiced regularly were Fish and Standing Backbend. In fact, I soon devised what for years I called my Big Three: the three yoga poses I truly disliked practicing. I might even say hate, if I believed in using such a strong term. My Big Three asanas were Cobra, Bow, and Upward Bow, aka Full Backbend. It took me until this past summer to realize what these three poses held in common: they were all backbends.

Kino MacGregor backbending. Grrr.

I truly do not know why I developed such an antipathy towards backbends. It certainly didn't have anything to do with adulthood, because there are adults with amazing back flexibility such as Kino MacGregor, who travels the world sharing her love for and experience in yoga. It's not that I was sedentary. I've always been been athletic, and work didn't call for me to sit at a cubicle all day for years, slowly killing my flexibility. I just grew disinterested. It didn't help that a severe car accident (my VW and I were sandwiched between a tractor trailer and a Dept. of Transportation snowplow on a blizzardy Iowa highway) shattered my left wrist and damaged several of my thoracic vertebrae. Two surgeries and a heap of physical therapy followed and, as a result, I could no longer push up into a backbend. It simply hurt my wrist too much and, after having it reconstructed with screws and pins, I was too afraid to risk damaging it. And, with my injured back, bending deeply into anything was now out of the question.

Still, because I had yoga students and because I had visions of elderly women with kyphotic backs, I started doing the gentle backbends again. These were difficult and stressful at first -- I could definitely feel the strain in my thoracic spine -- and Camel and Bow were still intensely disliked. Upward Bow stayed off my radar... at least until one year ago.

In February 2014, I evaluated my personal yoga practice and came to the conclusion that I had cut myself short, limiting myself to what I'd taught my students over the years instead of taking into account my own personal abilities. In effect, I'd become a Gentle/Restorative practitioner. Despite my injuries -- both from the car accident and from assorted misfortunes as a competitive runner and triathlete -- it was time to kick it up a notch.

Upward Bow Pose, February 2014

My lack of practice over the years had indeed taken a tremendous toll on my backbending ability. I was most definitely not about to have any kids happily clamboring in and out of that tunnel! I found myself gingerly pushing up into position, afraid to further hurt my left wrist (which, at this point, had now been broken or fractured five times) and I was just generally inflexible. Lack of practice had made my back non bendy.

I decided to focus on improving my Camel Pose, which I viewed as the least stressful of my Big Three. I wasn't upside down. I wasn't fighting gravity from the floor up. I was on my knees, just bending backwards. I could handle that!

Camel Pose, February 2014

Well, not really. I had completely forgotten the Rule of Interconnectivity. In short, it's not just my back that does a backbend. It's my whole body. My hip flexors had to work eccentrically and isometrically to bring my hips into proper alignment directly over or just in front of my knees) and keep them there. My obliques and rectus abdominis had to kick in to control the extension of my back, and my scapulae had to maintain my shoulders in position as well, while my quads just cried quietly to themselves.

Camel Pose, 05/14 and 10/14

Once I set my sights on a goal, however, I'm almost unshakeable. I'm driven to achieve, and I was going to achieve Camel or else! I targeted my problem areas with Pilates, I consulted with running and triathlon coaches, and I practiced asanas that worked the muscle groups needed for Camel. I recorded my practice so that I could see how my alignment measured up, what weaknesses I had to address, and what, if any, improvement was evident. The day I was finally able to fix my gaze on the wall behind me was cause for celebration. Now I just needed to fix my hip alignment; compromising the position of my hips in order to get a deeper backbend is a very common habit in yoga and not one I wished to embrace.

Upward Bow Pose, August 2014

In August 2014, I participated in an Instagram Challenge. To be honest, I don't even recall the name of the challenge. I just remember that I was driving home from visiting my husband at his Army base when the notification of the day's pose scrolled by on my phone. At the next rest stop, I paused to check in and discovered, to my dread, that it was Urdhva Dhanurasana, Upward Bow or Full Backbend. Eeeep. I chose a grassy spot somewhat away from prying eyes, set up the camera, and hoped for the best. To my shock, I pushed up with ease... and, more importantly, without pain! I couldn't believe it. I was so stunned by this that I stopped at the next rest area to try again. I was backbending without issue again! Sure, I still wasn't anywhere near what I'd been in my youth, but I was strides ahead of where I had been in February and without the struggle I'd gone through to hold the pose. It was the Rule of Interconnectivity again: all the work I'd done to improve my Camel had improved my Upward Bow as well.

Camel Pose, January 2015

By September, I had removed both Upward Bow and Camel from my Big Three (Bow is still there, but that's another story!). Camel has become one of my favorite poses to play around with, changing arm positions, binding a leg, and working to deepen the bend. I even included a photo of myself doing Camel in a desk calendar I gave my husband for Christmas. I've brought my hips into proper alignment and I am now working on getting my hip flexors to release even more so that I can drop fully backwards into the pose known as Kapotasana, or Pigeon Pose.

As for Upward Bow, I continue to work on deepening the arch and bringing my arms into better alignment... a rather

Upward Bow Pose, January 2015

lofty goal, as rotator-cuff surgery has left my shoulders with a limited range of motion. I can walk my hands backwards down a wall to achieve Upward Bow, and I can lift one arm, one leg, and even one arm and one leg simultaeneously without losing my balance. I am also working on slowly inching my hands and feet together, with the hope of someday achieving Chakrasana, or Wheel Pose, in which the hands grasp the ankles to complete a full backbending circle. That's in the distant future. Then again, I have registered to attend a Backbends Workshop taught by Kino MacGregor this April, so who knows what I'll be able to achieve in just a few months!

Splitsville

Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way sometimes. In my case, the arrival of spring meant the arrival of racing season. As a competitive runner and triathlete, my attention turned to training at the track, on the trail, in the pool and lake, and on the bike. My yoga practice never faltered — there hasn't been a day since I started my yoga journey that I did not practice yoga in some form — and I of course continued to teach my yoga classes, but my blogging practice certainly took a nose dive. I'm sure everyone who took the time to read this blog thought I was gone for good.

But just as life sometimes throws obstacles in our path, it also offers surprises. My return to this yoga blog can be considered one of these! I would love to say that I will blog faithfully each week from hereon in, but I also know that I simply cannot predict what life will bring. I will, however, make a conscious effort to post here as regularly as I can.

That being said, Splitsville also refers to one of my chief focuses of 2014: achieving Hanumansana, or full side splits. As flexible as I may be, I had never been able to do a split. Let me amend that: I was able to do a full slide split once, when I was nine months pregnant with my son Jaeson (aka Young Yogi on Instagram) and had his added weight to help drive my pelvis downward. Other than that one occasion, doing the splits was a pipe dream.

My Hanumanasana attempt for the June 2014 challenge.

In June 2014, I participated in a yoga challenge on Instagram. For the month's final post, one of the hosts, Nick, instructed us to post our impossible pose: the asana that we could only dream of achieving. It took me a nanosecond to realize that, for me, this was Hanumanasana. I posted my best attempt at this posture, as sad as it might be. At the end of the day, Nick further challenged us to continue working on our impossible pose and to post a progress photo at the end of July. The heat was now on, since I sometimes cannot back down from a challenge. Thank heavens we don't live in the age of thrown gauntlets.

My split at the end of July (top) and August (bottom).

Every single day in July, I faithfully practiced Hanumanasana. Oftentimes I thought my efforts were futile. I didn't see how on earth I was going to ever get myself any closer to the ground than I already was — which was hovering about a foot off the floor. Still, I refused to give up (I'm stubborn like that). At the end of July, I posted a follow-up photo: the top photo in this collage (I'm wearing black). I was amazed to discover that I had indeed made progress! No, I was nowhere near a full split, but at least now I was an inch or so closer to the ground. I continued my daily practice for another month and, at the end of August, I was hovering just inches off the ground (bottom photo in the collage).

I unfortunately suffered a huge setback in August: I severely pulled my left hamstring in a 5K swim race. Weeks of physical therapy ensued, which helped somewhat, but I could not escape that strained, pulling feeling at the back of my left thigh when I practiced Hanumanasana. From my running and triathlon networks, I knew full well that a hamstring injury could not only be painful but career ending. I had too much invested in upcoming races to risk further injurying that muscle. I cut back drastically on my workouts. I completely eliminated biking from my training regimen as well as swimming, since that is how I injured myself in the first place, although I did swim, bike, and run in the season's last triathlon (in which I won my age division and placed 5th overall... go figure). As for Hanumanasana, I no longer practiced it daily, and I knew — I KNEW — that I was losing the ground I'd worked so hard to gain.

Holding pattern: my split in October, still hovering by inches.

In late October, at my follow-up with my sports medicine specialist/orthopedist, he asked how I was doing with the injury. I told him the truth: that I didn't feel it was healing well, despite the therapist's note that I had regained some strength and range of motion. He asked me what made the hamstring hurt. I replied by dropping into Hanumanasana. The look on his face was priceless! He went on to comment that 95 percent of his patients don't drop into splits or run marathons yet continue to complain about their hamstrings. He set a follow-up appointment for December and told me to continue with the home exercises the therapist had given me.

Still concerned about sidelining myself completely by pushing the hamstring, I still avoided biking and swimming and just ran gentle 5K and 10K distances to keep myself fit. I focused more on my arm balances and inversions, practicing Hanumanasana perhaps once a week. To my surprise, the effort I was putting into my leg positions in other poses was actually helping me with Hanumanasana. Not only had I maintained what flexibility I had achieved, I was now in full contact with the floor with my left leg!

01/24/15: As far as I've gone in Hanumanasana.

It's late January now and, yes, I am still in therapy for that pulled hamstring. I have started swimming and biking again, since my new therapist explained that strengthening the injured leg would help with the healing process. My expectations for Hanumanasana have been modified, however, thanks to a series of MRIs that reminded me not only that I have a bone tumor in my right hip but that the hip is shifted downward and outward, preventing a full split alignment, and that there are definite signs of osteoarthritis and labral degeneration. There isn't much I can do about the turned-out hip or the tumor, but I am not going to let arthritis and muscle degeneration hamper me... too much! My focus is now on gently stretching and extending the right leg -- my back leg -- while in Hanumanasana. I may never be able to get both legs fully down, but I can do the best I can with what I have. And given that, for all intents and purposes, I've achieved something I thought was impossible a half year ago, I can only just start to imagine what else I am capable of achieving if I set my mind to it and work towards that goal.