I've turned into a 'poser' (in a good way...)

So I have been doing a lot of thinking lately and sometime last week I started throwing around the idea of being a Bikram teacher. For those of you who don't know, Bikram is a specific form of yoga that includes 26 poses and 2 breathing exercises, all which are done in a 105 degree room with 40% humidity. Each class lasts exactly 90 minutes.

I love bikram and it is literally changing my life. I went from not being able to sit down for more than 10 minutes without ending up with a stiff back that made me walk around like an old lady, to having no problem at all with lower back pain. At 23 it seemed unacceptable that if I sat down to pee in the morning I had to walk, hunched-over to the shower and couldn't straighten my back out for a few minutes. As much as I love running and p90x and insanity and all those crazy workouts I would do, it seems that Bikram is the perfect fit for me.

In the past month I have never shied away from going to a class. I look forward to being all hot and sweaty 1) because it opens up my pores and helps you get clearer skin (added bonus!) 2) it really increases my flexibility and range of motion. I would dread warming up for practice or the first 5 minutes of a run because my back was always so stiff that it seemed to take forever to simply get normal mobility. The best thing about bikram is that I leave every class feeling better than when I went in and stronger and with a larger range of motion than the day before.

The other day the teacher in my class said something that really interested me about how we spend the majority of our lives 'forward bending' (i.e. shoulders hunched forward sitting in a chair, back rounded forward sitting on a couch) and we rarely ever get into backward bending.

Example:

Ok so this does look a little bit drastic and it is fairly advanced, but when you actually think about it, we rarely ever backward bend in our daily lives. The lack of backward bending causes the discs in between our vertebrae wear unevenly, compressing only one part of our discs as we forward bend.....resulting in lots of back problems. In bikram there is a good amount of backward bending that pushes you to increase flexibility and open up different parts of your spinal column. Personally I have mild scoliosis, 2 bulging discs, chronic lower back spasms and every disc in my back is irregular/abnormal (the doc said it was the worst back he had every seen of someone my age after looking at my MRI). So in lieu of this diagnosis (and the threat of surgery or constant pain medication) I decided to return to yoga as a more low-key form of exercise to reduce the constant loading and pounding on my spine.

While I was right about the decrease in loading and pounding on my spine, I was VERY wrong about the 'low key' part. Every class I feel challenged in the 105 degree room (those who know me know that I am already flexible so this says a lot) and my body is stronger than it ever was!

So, here I stand now, after only a month of returning to Bikram, pain-free, more flexible, more energized and healthier than ever. After 5 years of tearing up my body playing college lacrosse I have finally found something that works for me and I encourage you to check it out.

The studio I practice at is Bikram Annapolis and if you want more info on bikram yoga, visit the official website.

A quote by Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram, often cited about the yoga practice is:

It's never too late, it's never too bad, and you're never too old or sick to start from scratch once again.

Think about it.