new to BIKRAM – will it help my injuries?

Hi Shazastar!

I am new to this forum, but I discovered Bikram last summer and was going steadily without interruption until now. I have done two months without a break when I joined Bikram and then I was going steadily 4-6 times a week, and then, again, I completed my 30 days challenge… So I am somewhat familiar with B.

If you would ask me your question a month ago, you would hear from me big YES. Yes, it would help you. However now I am more cautious. The reason is the injury I received through B. Definitely one learns from those. Now I would tell you that Bikram Yoga alone is not enough to heal you. YOU are the most important part of this healing. You see, I was trusting BY blindly, sort of submitting myself to it, signing off the responsibility for myself, all I would do is to show up and do the best I can. And it was working until I hurt myself (pulled back of my leg).

Now you can say I am in the same place as you are: trying to heal from my injury. It is not easy and Bikram is not the answer. I have to think now “outside the box”. I discovered that gently running on the soft grass helps with the pulled leg and BY exacerbates the pain, especially from all this standing on one contracted leg. When I put all my body weight on the injured leg and hold it for a minute, it doesn’t feel good after class.

Building your core muscles is essential as a preventative care for injuries, this is very true. You say you have lower back issues. Often it can be elevated by developing good working stomach muscles. By contracting those we release the pressure from the lower back when we do forward bends for example. Will BY help you to build stomach muscles? Not without your active participation. I was doing BY for almost a year and did not build any stomach muscles until I started deliberately doing crunches every morning. In two weeks I progressed further at that than ever doing BY.

There is another thought. If you are already injured and you are attending hot yoga, then in the hot room your injured muscles would perform MUCH better than normally – because heat relaxes them and stretches become much deeper without giving you a feedback “stop, this is enough”. So I would say if you have injury, you have to stop before your muscles cry for help, otherwise you can re-injure them again.

As for the knee, it would definitely help to build muscle mass around the knee to protect it. Will BY help you with this? Sure it will. However I am not sure how effectively it will do it in case there is already injury. May be there are other specific exercises that help to build the muscle mass around your knee without straining the knee itself (in BY as you know all standing series put a lot of pressure on your knees, especially for beginners who do not have enough developed muscle/strength to concentrated all the contraction on the top of the leg).

Basically my main advice in your situation is to take responsibility and do not seek for the ultimate solution. I doubt if there is one. I would recommend building a plan of what do you need: build strong abdominal wall, build muscle around the knee, that type of a thing. And then research what type of exercise would more effectively solve those mini-goals without re-injuring.

This is just my experience. Pushing through pain…. I would not recommend that to anyone, but what do I know…

Hi Shazastar

Any updates? I would love to hear from you.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂