Overhead

Mar. 20th, 2015 09:16 am
clevermanka: default (dS icon 1)
It's Friday! Before we party, let's start with body stuff.

First, a recommendation find: Overhead squats are my most feared (yes, feared) lift. Frankly, they terrify me. I'm a bit unsteady in even a basic weighted squat, but I feel downright unstable in the overhead squat and I have actually fallen over backward while in the bottom of one. With weight overhead. In a full squat. I am still proud of myself for bailing out under it correctly and nobody was hurt, but still. The overhead squat is really, really scary to me. If you're in the same boat, the trouble might not all be in your hips. Here are a couple mobility drills to open up your thoracic spine which will allow that gorgeous, broad, open chest and strong uplifted arms that are crucial to a successful overhead squat. I'm going to add at least the first one to my Restorative Yoga Collection because honestly it looks gloriously soothing.

Next, a personal find: I mentioned a little bit ago about my newly-smooth thumbnails after decades of them looking like tiny washboards. I now have little half-moons under my fingernails. Used to be I only had half-moons under my thumbs and the fingernails were just solid pink beds. No more! Circulation and oxygen supply must be vastly improved because I have at least a suggestion of a moon under every finger. The pinkies are barely there, but they're there! So exciting! Visible progress like this is incredibly rewarding.

Yesterday was my monthly supplementation consultation with Dr. Jonah. We're phasing out the digestion treatment, continuing with the endocrine support (decreasing amounts on that was an informative experiment but not one I'm going to repeat for a while), and starting work on gut flora--clearing out overgrowth and bad stuff as well as re-populating the good stuff. If this helps my abdominal swelling issues, it will make having my period at 221B Con so much easier.

Last night I slept pretty well. Cramps woke me only twice, and the second time I was able to fall back asleep after taking a Naproxen. SLEEP IS SO GOOD. But before bed (and by "before bed" I mean "immediately after eating dinner"), I settled myself into bed with herbal soothers, a heating pad, and my laptop to indulge in some fic-reading. I'm going through an old LJ community for due South fic recs and found this story that was really touching and a slow build to some very steamy and sweet sex. The comm has been inactive for more than ten years, so a lot of the URLs don't work anymore. I'm glad that one did. Sorry I can't give you the comm name--I have it as an open tab on my home computer and I can't find it in an LJ search.

Update on that DIY Vitamin C Serum I mentioned a couple weeks ago: It's pretty fucking amazing. I just upped the percentage of LAA to 10% in the batch I made last night, but even at 5% I was seeing skin quality improvement. In fact, last weekend [livejournal.com profile] mckitterick said something like "I don't know what you're using on your face lately, but your skin looks twenty years old." Granted, I have anti-aging genes and not a lot of wrinkles, but the little pre-crow's-feet lines next to my eyes are gone and my naso-labial folds are as minimized as they're going to get on someone with my size nose and cheekbones. Also, just the overall skin quality is improved. And because of the tiny bit of glycerin included in the mix, I don't have to use any sort of additional moisturizer. I'm going to have to be super careful about slathering on the SPF this summer, though. Probably gonna switch to this SPF this summer to avoid those chin-breakouts I'm prone to.

If anyone local wants to try the serum for themselves, I'm willing to part with a half teaspoon of the LAA powder I ordered to get you started. Once mixed, it's good for a week before it deteriorates. But it will give you a sense of how your skin reacts. Bring your own dropper container, though!

I'm all alone in the office today \o/ and am very much looking forward to the weekend. I am dreading the task of getting the house organized for the student-recruitment visit reception on Monday. Thinking we probably would feel better getting that out of the way as soon as possible, but I'm pretty sure we'll put it off until Sunday night just like I said I didn't want to but it's the weekend.

clevermanka: default (changed priorities)
Last night was my appointment with Jonah Yakel, and I feel...positive about it. And him. He approaches healing from a different angle than other health practitioners I've seen, which is encouraging because new and different. Although other people (Dr. Khosh, Kiva my acupuncturist) treat holistically, they still tended to focus on symptoms. Dr. Jonah (which he prefers over Dr. Yakel for--to me--fairly obvious reasons), just straight up doesn't address the symptoms at all. He wants to know my symptoms and he wants me to be sure I recognize my symptoms, but only so we can track how they are affected by the treatment. Treatment consists of various supplements (for me, to lower my acidity level--surprise, surprise, I am highly acidic--among other things) and then a hands-on healing technique that he refers to as "Flow" which is basically light touch on certain areas of the head/neck/spine/hips. During the treatment, I felt a definite loosening in the tension of my neck, and my sacrum and feet started to get warm and tingly.

I also learned that my breathing is exceptionally shallow. He said that if he hadn't known I was alive and breathing on his table, he would have wondered about my actual living state. My breath is so shallow that, lying face down on the treatment table, my back rises hardly at all in the low thoracic region and is completely still everywhere else. This suggests a lack of adequate oxygen as well as a highly tense spine (despite my general spinal flexibility). It also might explain why my muscles get fatigued so easily and why I am easily out of breath even from minimal exertion.

There's a whole host of things we went over about gut health, the nervous system, hormones, cellular health and replacement, and getting the body to a place where it can heal itself. I like this approach. He's not addressing my wacky hormone levels or the autoimmune disease or the fatigue or anything except why my body is harming itself instead of healing itself.

Like I said, new and different. He's also surprisingly inexpensive. His sessions are a third to half of what I've been paying per session to see Dr. Khosh and (previously) Kiva. He keeps them low cost by having multiple people at a time for Flow sessions. Private consultations are, obviously, private, but during the Flow sessions he goes from table to table, treating people at the same time. Pretty brilliant, really. It spoke well to his popularity and effectiveness that there were four or five other people getting treated at the same time as me. They all seemed very pleased and confident to be his patients, too.

Here's hoping.

ETA: Holy wow. I just did a good shoulder/back stretch and for the first time in ages (months definitely, perhaps as long as a year) I was able to touch my elbows behind my back. It's not as easy as it used to be, but it happened. From just a few of his touches? AMAZING.

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