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The yoga teacher who told me to stop stretching so hard was right
I took a hot yoga class in Austin last spring and the instructor, this tiny woman named Dee, kept yelling at me to ease off. I thought she was being lazy and wanted me to be less intense, so I kept forcing my hamstrings into deeper folds. Ended up pulling something in my lower back that took 6 weeks of physical therapy to fix. The PT told me the same thing Dee said: my muscles were guarding because I was pushing past the point of actual tension release. Now I dial back to about 80% effort on every stretch and honestly my flexibility improved more in 2 months than it did in the 2 years of forcing it. Has anyone else gotten genuinely great advice from a random class instructor that you initially wrote off as a soft take?
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lee6891mo ago
ease off" lol yeah i mean i get it but you also gotta wonder if you woulda learned that lesson anyway. 6 weeks of pt seems like a hard way to find out but hey at least it worked out.
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troychen1mo ago
“6 weeks of pt seems like a hard way to find out” haha that’s EXACTLY it. I did the same thing with my shoulder, pushed through a few months of lifting when it clearly hurt. Ended up doing 8 weeks of pt and honestly, the weirdest part was that they made me do these tiny little band exercises that felt pointless at first. Then one day the pain just vanished, and I was like oh, so this is what “rehab” means. It’s annoying but yeah, sometimes you really do have to learn the boring way.
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