How Strength Trumps Flexibility: A journey to the bottom and back again
Getting over a year of chronic pain and the importance of strength in day to day life.
This week’s essay is all around strength. Strength is card 024, a body card, with yang energy drawing energy from your root chakra. You need internal strength to perform most actions, but we often believe we’re a lot stronger than we are, until we have a catastrophic failure…
My Pain Journey
In early 2023, I had recently completed my Yoga Teacher Training (YTT). I was fit, flexible, and really happy! A YTT is a full month where you do yoga every day, eat a vegan diet, and meditate and focus on your mind and body. It’s incredibly cleansing. It had been a journey to start my teacher training qualification but after a recent breakup I needed a new focus; yoga was that. I did, however, neglect the fact that I’d begun to have lower back pain. I thought I’d twinged it doing yoga too intensely, but I had also had an incident after COVID when I was weak and my back just went.
A little niggle wasn’t going to stop me; if anything, yoga would fix it! I wanted to improve my flexibility to get release from my back pain, and 30 days of exercise, especially yoga, must be good?! Well, shortly after the YTT, I was on a different retreat in Sweden and I jumped out of bed, twisting my back so badly I was in a spasm on the floor. I had literally overstretched my back. Somehow with too much flexibility the twist had allowed my spine to move with hyper-flexible motion triggering the event. I was on the floor, alone, in Sweden, in agony. I dosed up on painkillers and tried to walk it off. Never before had I been in a situation that had put me both physically and metaphorically on the floor.
A Walk in the Woods
I was volunteering on the sound & light team at a retreat space called Ängsbacka for the summer. It’s in central Sweden, surrounded by forrest and lakes. I was staying in the small town of Molkom and I would walk through the most beautiful forest to get there. I decided I needed to go in to talk to the team about this injury (it happened on day -1, one day before I was due to start). I needed to figure out what to do. I dosed up on painkillers and began the walk. It became clear after 200m that I was going to need to take this in stages.
Every minute or so, the pain became unbearable, and I needed to lie on the floor with my knees up to take the pressure off my back. I would walk for a minute, lie for a minute. I reached a break in the forrest and found a single large rock, set 20m or so from the path. I lay on that rock and looked out at the sun, the forrest, the beauty of nature and I began to cry. I had put so much hope on reaching and starting a new chapter of growth, and then I now couldn’t even move. I couldn’t do anything. I was stuck. It was beautiful, and I was crying in a random forest on my own in Sweden, depressed.
I didn’t want to call anyone or do anything. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew I had to get to Ängsbacka. I remember placing a few stones on this rock and remembering where it was as I said to myself, “I’m going to meditate here and become my own rock.” Over the course of about an hour of vertical to horizontal movements, I made my way to Ängsbacka and met the team lead, Mark. He was a legend. Completely understanding, “take as long as you need” type guy. The snag? The sound and light team hauls speakers and spotlights around the festival site like nomadic roadies, which demands standing and lifting—skills I’d now written off! There was one thing I could do—cables! I became the cable guy; along with a portable mattress squeezing in 2-5 minutes of heroic untangling before mandatory lie-downs. At least I was present, pitching in, and fooling myself into thinking I was useful.
A Beautiful Summer at Ängsbacka
So the lame sound and light guy helped out, getting slightly better over the month, but never really able to lift or stand for too long. I figured out that sitting behind a sound desk was possible if I had this tall chair, and one of my favourite pieces of work was doing the sound for the open mic night, getting different entertainers, musicians, and stage shows ready, then making sure the sound was solid during their performance. It helped give me more meaning, and it felt good.
I was still depressed. Chronic pain is a nasty bugger. Imagine never really being able to forget something that both hurts and upsets you all day. When other people are moving or enjoying themselves, you make excuses to sit, or stay back to not aggravate it. You can’t keep having the same conversations or moaning about your situation, but the fact is you’re in pain. You also wake up in pain. Most pains get better over time; each morning you wake and you’re a little better. Chronic pain stays. Each morning not much changes; you still feel limited, it hurts about the same. So having never had anything like this, it gave me a new insight into kindness and forgiveness for people who say they are in pain. You simply can’t do things, and it’s hard to keep asking for space. So if someone has chronic pain and asks for a break or to stand out, be kind, let them, don’t judge them.
As a pure piece of luck, I was standing in the coffee queue at Ängsbacka, and I had a conversation that would change my life…
A Journey Through Pain
There was a man, a lovely man, sporty, healthy, and happy, and he asked how I was doing. I wasn’t feeling great, I felt open to sharing. I started to explain my injury. He looked at me, asked a few questions about my body and how it felt, and I got the sense he was assessing me. His name was Tente. He lived in Belgium and explained his 10-year pain journey too me. It had led him to become a personal trainer and professional in pain management. So much so, he’d worked with soldiers from the UN army to help them recover from catastrophic injuries. We met in a coffee queue, and by the time we had got our coffees, he said he felt he could help. What did help look like? We would go to the gym 3 times a week, and he’d help me learn how to use my body again. We’d figure out what was working and what wasn’t. The phrase Tente kept saying is “See pain as my guide”. I can use it to learn where my body was at. The only way out of pain was through it. I needed to build up my strength so that my body uses the correct muscles for each movement, removing the pain.
And with that, my journey of strength began.
Strength > Flexibility
I had never considered myself weak as a kid, but I was certainly not strong. I didn’t do much sport, but I was big, I could carry things, and I liked certain sports, but I was also lazy. I’d never really been to a gym, I’d not learnt how to use free weights, and I’d never really prioritised it. What I enjoyed about yoga was getting fit, while improving flexibility and accessing deeper places in meditation. I didn’t think strength was important. It was something I needed to learn.
The work I did with Tente revealed that along with my back pain, I’d managed to tear my hamstring by overdosing on painkillers and pushing myself too hard. So recovery was difficult as the two issues compounded in reducing movement, causing more pain which had caused me to push even harder. making it worse. I needed to start again. Back pain is tricky, but for most people, the focus shouldn’t really be on the back itself, but the glutes, shoulders, or hamstrings. These muscles have become so weak through time spent behind a computer, sitting, or no activity at all. To compensate for our lack of muscle, the back muscles begin to take over. The more the back compensates, the more your key muscles switch off. It’s a vicious cycle that unless corrected can stick with you for life.
I needed to relearn how to use my ass muscles. They had switched off and needed a jump start!
With specific movements and weights, I would focus all my attention on muscles in my butt. I needed to feel my butt muscles switch on and contract as I started a movement. This took a while; what starts out as fizzing or buzzing feeling in your muscles slowly builds over time into some form of awareness of a full contraction. Once you notice the contraction, you need to catch it with your mind’s attention and focus on holding it, tightening and squeezing it in your minds eye. By doing this, you’re rebuilding the important mind-butt connection! You associate movements with muscle contractions. It’s slow; you often overdo it, which can result in an injury and it resets the whole thing. You need to take your time perfecting the correct muscle engagement with each movement.
Recovery and Building Strength
Over the next 2 months, I slowly regained my ability to stand. I could dance, I could move, and I could swim. I began to get happier; I made new friends, I could move more freely, I became happier with the work, I started to go to the gym daily. It wasn’t big weights; it was repetitive movements, but I could feel their effects compounding. It was through this that I needed to find my own way. After leaving Sweden and thanking Tente, I knew the gym had to be an integral part of my recovery. So I signed up to a local gym in London and looked at strength training.
Through the power of YouTube I found a tried and tested bodybuilder technique called 5x5. It’s a set of 5 full body exercises you do 5 reps and 5 sets, making a total of 25 lifts per session. The key to it is building up the weight slowly. You only increase the weight by 2.5kg per session. If you do this slowly, you give your muscles and tendons time to build up resilience.
I picked up an app called StrongLifts (which I really recommend); I had some video calls with Tente at the gym to ensure my technique was right, and I started. Almost everyone starts the gym in the same way. You start out full of enthusiasm; 5 times a week is easy! You push yourself pretty hard; you get into some form of DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness; then you slow down and sometimes drop out completely. While I had my ups and downs, I twinged my back fully once and needed to reset, however I was now fully mobile and walking fine again. Over the last 12 months, I’m proud to say I’ve done 81 gym sessions. Those sessions got progressively larger; the weights got bigger, and my back pain started to fade.
Pain-Free and Positive
The chronic pain that was constant became a niggle, fading into an ache until finally I could bend and flex pain-free. Being pain-free after chronic pain is the greatest gift you can ever receive. You feel 110%. You are humbled by your body, and you are resolute to maintain your strength. I know my journey isn’t representative of everyone, nor is it something to copy. It’s just letting you know people stumble, people live with pain you can’t see directly, but people can get better. The overall feeling in my body now is that strength is more important to me than flexibility. I do slightly less yoga; I go to the gym 3 times a week. I feel awful if I don’t do the gym at least once per week. I am growing my weight-lifting goals slowly each month. I feel stronger than ever before.
Reflecting back now, I somehow knew that everything that happened to me was there to teach me. It certainly didn’t feel like that at the time. It’s partly what inspired the importance of the body essence in Manaprana. Without your body working and functioning correctly, you can’t truly concentrate or let go. I believe that every hour of work you put into your body gives you roughly 10 hours back. Your body’s strength is that core metric which over time leads to a healthier, happier life. So put some time in, commit to it each week, and feel the benefits!