sofiak

Thanks Gabrielle! I’m now well into my 8Xth session since I first started mid-June… For the last 3 weeks or so I’ve been averaging 9x a week… 5 on weekdays and doubles on weekends… it’s come to a point where despite my addiction, my body is extremely exhausted, so I took a day off last Thurs and this week am averaging just 6x a week…

But knowing me, I’m been known to always push myself to extremes, forcing myself to focus on moderation is a huge task for me!

I feel much better, but my knees are still not 100% healed. For instance, if I walk up and down stairs a bit more, my knee caps start hurting. For the past couple of days when I did the 3rd part of awkward pose, my knee caps were snapping and hurting, so I backed off and just balanced on my tip toes. Do you know why this happened? I’m confused, because I used to be able to do the 3rd part of awkward pose, and now I can’t bend and sit on my heels. Maybe it has something to do with I may have reinjured my knees walking up and down those stairs?

I still can’t sit on my knees, so whenever I do the rabbit, tortoise and camel poses I have to put a towel under my knees …

Hi Gabrielle, thanks so much for getting back to me.

To answer your questions:

1) I wouldn’t say my knees ‘hurt’ per se during bikram yoga, but I feel uncomfortable ie. when I do triangle pose, and put pressure on either knee when I’m bending them, feel swelling when I lock knees etc. Other than that, my hips and lower back ache too when I do hand to feet pose. My left shoulder hurts too when I do the fixed firm pose.

There is one particular pose I still can’t do, and that’s the wind removing pose. I cannot squeeze my hands around either knee/leg and pull them down because that aggravates my bursitis. So I just put my hands around my knee(s) and just stay in that position….

2) Yes it was a professional diagnosis of bursitis, my doc made me do MRIs on both knees and found minimal swelling/effusion (sorry forgot the specific medical term). Other than that the MRIs showed that everything was normal.

3) My orthopedic surgeon urged me to do bikram yoga as he said my muscles especially my quadriceps were very weak, and the only way to to heal my bursitis is to strengthen my muscles, or else I will keep reinjuring myself whenever I do a bit more activity. I suppose he’s right because all my life I’ve had a sedentary lifestyle, not active as a kid.

My ortho surgeon is a big fan of bikram yoga, says it healed him when he inherniated the disc in his spine and was paralyzed in one leg.

4) I’ve been doing yoga everyday, I actually stopped for one day and the next day I went back, I felt worse, both physically in terms of my knees and my performance in yoga as well. I know it may sound a bit excessive, but I read on all the websites that Bikram Choudhury says we should try to go everyday esp if we have an injury until we are fully recovered, and or can do 80% of each pose, then we can back off a bit. It’s been helping with my knees, so far today’s been my 35th day and even though sometimes I feel a bit iffy in my knees afterwards, ie. in a particular spot on my knee cap or sth, when I go back to yoga the next day, it corrects it. And that uncomfort goes away.

But like I said, I have good and bad days. But so far I feel a lot better physically as a person. I do one session on weekdays and sometimes on weekends I do double sessions (but not consecutively, I rest/nap for a few hours in between).

Right now my hamstrings kinda hurt, and my hips hurt. I still can’t do camel pose to save my life, I suppose my back is super stiff …

5) Re: my left foot, the top of the shoe on the side (near the ankle bone that protrudes) causes pain so I wear flip flops now since it’s summer. It started when I was swimming (I don’t swim anymore now) and I noticed when I was kicking during freestyle, my left foot tends to kick slightly sideways as opposed to up and down. That may have caused my pain …. My ortho surgeon took a look at my ankle and he said that it’s uncommon that people’s ankle bones protrude so much, but mine has been like this since the day I was born.

6) Yes I checked out your video a long time ago, it was great in helping me lock my knees, it took me a while before I figured out how to lock my knees esp. to keep my big toe grounded, although sometimes my other toes tend to claw onto the yoga mat to keep my balance.

Looking forward to hearing your views … sorry for such a lengthy post!