Learning From Injury to Find New Points of Balance
There was a moment during my first week post-knee surgery that I noticed something dramatically different in the way my body felt and responded than what I had been accustomed to my entire life. The combination of coming up against an injury and taking my first ever gentle yoga class caused me to reevaluate my practice. In recuperation, my usual patterns of dropping into the shape of the pose and flopping into a full throttle stretch changed dramatically.
Having a dance background, I’ve always been trained to go to the point of maximum stretch, something natural to dancers, gymnasts and many yogis. While flexibility may be impressive, utilizing the strength-building aspects of practice is just as important. Every person who practices has a different combination of stability and instability, strength and weakness in various muscle combinations. To find a truly balanced practice, it is important for practitioners and teachers to be able to investigate and evaluate appropriate range of motion and the complementary actions of different muscle groups working in concert around a joint. “Cultivate the areas that need cultivation,” says Denise Kaufman, a senior teacher with regular classes at Venice’s Exhale Center for Sacred Movement.
Cynthia Abulafia
I had always thought of myself as strong and flexible, but my experience with knee rehabilitation revealed many of my body’s hidden weaknesses and compensatory mechanisms, weaknesses that may have even exacerbated the condition of my knee and hastened my injury or need for surgery. Years of daily use had molded my body into a unique pattern from the pressure of gravity and strain of athletic activity. LA-based teacher and bodyworker Jill Miller addresses just these types of issues. Her signature practice called “Yoga Tune Up” targets these pitfalls through focused movements and highly adapted variations of yoga poses based on principles of biomechanics to address the imbalances created from habitual patterns and weaknesses. Within a few minutes of my walking into her class, she accurately assessed that my abductors were weak. The abductors are the group of muscles responsible for lateral movement of the legs away from the body. Through specific poses, she worked with creating more strength, attention and sensation through contraction in the muscles supporting the knee.
Playing with sensation is an important part of the practice when cultivating an appropriate level of challenge. There’s a reason why stretching just feels so good. Neurochemicals known as endorphins are released when we stretch. Orthopedic surgeon Ray Long, author of the Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga and The Key Poses of Hatha Yoga, writes about this phenomenon in Key Poses. “Endorphins are responsible for a variety of physiological responses including the sense of relaxation and well-being that follows a yoga practice. Stretching triggers the release of these neuroendocrine factors.” Kaufman reflects that everyone wants to explore the range of their capacity. When we do, it feels delicious.
Some people more than others need to go to the very extreme edge of their range of motion in a stretch to fully experience the sensation and inhabit their body. Yoga teacher and YogaWorks teacher trainer Annie Carpenter calls these people sensation junkies. They need to feel an intensity from movement and they may be creating compression in their joints in order to obtain feedback about where their body is in space. A feedback loop gets created where they’re addicted to sensation, wanting more and more, and then their practice may become more extreme in pursuit of the addiction.
Carpenter cites the example of a yogi with extremely bendy shoulders practicing downward facing dog and pushing their upper body to the earth to find the sensation in the front of their shoulders. According to Carpenter, someone who is already flexible doesn’t need any more stretch in the front of their shoulders at the expense of closing off or compressing the back of their shoulder. This type of movement creates an imbalance and instability in the shoulder joint. Their yoga, Carpenter states, is to learn how to draw back and utilize muscular strength and stretch in a slightly different way to develop muscular equilibrium, appropriate space in the joint and a healthy relationship with the sensation rather than sinking into the addictive extreme feeling. When backing off, it takes time for the mind to become aware of the more subtle experiences. Carpenter points out that this helps a yogi’s awareness to move in to the next most subtle kosha (layer or sheath in the body), beyond the physical.
I understood. This was part of my experience. When I formerly pushed my already flexible body beyond its healthy range of motion in the quest for shape, perfection and the experience of feeling the pose, I was missing another level of the practice. Once I slowed down and noticed the breath and the spiralling energy of moving into the pose I felt stronger. “How could this be?” I asked myself. I am recuperating from knee surgery coming from a place of weakness, yet my practice seems stronger?
One aim in yoga, particularly for healing, is to access prana (life force). By cultivating prana, we actually tap into a greater source of our own strength and learn to find sensation without needing to jam and slam joints. Alignment without compression allows us to feel prana. As Carpenter says, “Addressing the free flow of prana is the only reason why alignment matters. When someone gets hurt, they need to work even more with physical alignment to help prana start to flow freely.”
Adjusting the practice, correcting alignment and developing a relationship with stretch, strength and joint health creates a healthy mind/body connection. Stretch, then, needs to be modified to alleviate compression of the joints and allow prana to flow freely. For this reason, Miller believes how you stretch is as important as what you stretch. There are several different types of stretching that will suit you at different times during practice. According to Miller, understanding distinct types of muscle contractions and how these movements affect the body is the gateway to building strength and endurance, and to increasing healthy joint flexibility.
Miller identifies the three types of muscle contractions. A concentric or isotonic contraction, often associated with body building, contraction can be found in the classic bicep curl when the muscle shortens continuously while dynamically moving through a range of motion. The second type is eccentric muscle contraction, when the muscle contracts and lengthens simultaneously. The best way to understand this is to think of the transition from up dog through down dog moving the body in a slow flow. The third type of contraction is the isometric contraction identified by the muscle generating force accompanied by tension. Holding the arms out in warrior two with a sense of dynamic reach is an isometric contraction.
Different types of stretching engage the body and create change in different ways. Ballistic stretching happens during movement, such as in the flow of a sun salutation. Passive stretching involves holding a position and using gravity, the body’s weight and the opposing actions of muscle groups in order to stretch both muscles and fascia, or connective tissue around muscles. As Long states in Key Poses, “the body is placed into the position of stretch and held there for longer periods to allow the stretch receptors to ‘acclimate’.” The third type of stretching is known as proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF). PNF involves briefly contracting the muscles targeted for stretch. The contraction stimulates the Golgi tendon organ stretch receptor imbedded within the muscle, setting a series of events in motion which trigger the muscle to relax. Relaxed muscles can then be coaxed into a deeper stretch, a technique Miller incorporates when someone needs to encourage more pliability in the body.
Just because someone is flexible in a joint, it does not necessarily mean that their muscles are pliable or even strong. Combinations of stretches and contractions are important for stabilizing joints to increase whole body mobility. A flexible person can rob themselves of understanding of what it is to have strength in a posture. In my own body I had imprinted a point A to point B stretch, the stuff I learned in ballet that gave me the intense sensation in my joints.
I needed to learn to release my energy in a more thoughtful continuum. The poses never stopped needing energy and my practice seemed to open and awaken my physical body more than in the past. It took knee surgery and Jill Miller to convince me that ligaments can be over -stretched and being flexible alone isn’t enough. It takes stability in the musculature around a joint to facilitate the opening of space for the movement of prana. This expresses the ultimate freedom of letting go and feeling the flow of prana in any yoga practice. In this way yoga’s benefits become therapeutic and restructure the whole body’s landscape. I can see in my own practice that my focus on this deeper opening, awakening my physical body more than in the past, has also lead my mind to a further awakening. It has taught me how to feel the subtleties of prana rather than the intensity of sensation while sinking into joints. It has taught me that yoga is truly the journey of getting there through the practice rather than the final destination.
Kathleen M. Reddington is a Southern California based writer whose work has appeared in publications including Shape, Self, LA Times Magazine, Health, Men’s Fitness, Los Angeles and LA Weekly.
By Kathleen Reddington
