I feel worried about posting about this topic since it can be kind of gross.
However, I feel that physical health is one of the most important things to understand in life as it controls your energy levels, affects your mental strength, and dramatically affects your physical attractiveness or beauty.
Tracking and problem solving my health issues will not only help me but may provide inspiration for others.
Digestion
Symptoms: bloating, gas, diarrhea, distended belly, sensitivity to cold, stress, and exhaustion
Brainstorm:
Raw ginger – seems to add an overall boost to blood flow (yang qi) and stomach circulation
Farmhouse Culture Gut Shots – tastes absolutely disgusting, feels like it may actually help
Unlocking/moving/stretching hips – ever since my knee injury, my hips are tight and contribute to the blockage in my stomach
Stomach massage – helps smooth out the knots and blockage points
Increase overall circulation – qi gong, running and cardio all help increase overall circulation and remove blockages overall
Activate digestion while eating – eat slower and smell food more
Eat less – to 70% fullness
Current Focus:
I need to improve my baseline before going after a specific treatment plan. The baseline will focus on two basic areas: overall circulation, reducing strain. The goals need to be very small so they are easy to maintain.
Circulation – eat ginger every morning, run around the block once every morning (minimum 5 min)
Reducing strain – focus on eating as little as possible, meditate once in the morning and night (minimum 5 min)
Hair
Symptoms: thin hair (but seems to be thickening), itchy scalp, hair falling out, dandruff
Very strange that my hair is thickening but falling out at the same time. Pretty sure my massage is working but the new hair growing in is so thin it falls out easily.
Brainstorm:
Vigorous scalp massage – increase blood flow and already thicken hair a great deal
Wash hair – more often, with cold water and apple cider vinegar if possible to reduce inflammation and increase circulation
Oil/fatty acids – use huge amounts of conditioner and castor oil to thicken hair and prevent breaking and falling out
Current Focus:
I need to cleanse and increase circulation
Wash hair every day with cold water and apple cider vinegar, need to use lots of conditioner to counter the stripping effect of washing your hair too much
Knee (injury)
Symptoms: afraid to put pressure or impact, no feeling at surgery area, pain
Brainstorm:
More movement – motion is lotion to the joints
Increased muscle mass around the joint – muscle is needed to support the joint
Gua sha – need to tear up the scar tissue around the area and increase blood flow
Warmup/loosen hips – hips are too tight reducing range of motion
I realized something. It is the end of my bedtime challenge! I have only three days in which I actually violated the boundaries of the challenge:
First time was for work, when troubleshooting an issue took me until 11:30 PM, I went to bed at 12
Second time was for my girlfriend, helping her with a school project until 12
The third time was when the challenge officially ended already, on the 17th (challenge ended on the 12th) when I was feeling too overwhelmed to pack for my trip back to my parent’s house for the holidays.
Although the challenge is over, the work continues.
It is even more critical now because I have a lot of issues with keeping control of my life while at my parent’s house and the bedtime routine isn’t as nice as I would like to have it. I will keep this challenge going for a few more days to solidify some of the more important aspects of the challenge such as the morning routine, and nighttime routine, and fulfilling some of the things I need from the nighttime (alone time, creativity, productivity, fun, and space).
Instead, I am feeling pretty much that my space and time are particularly intruded on in recent times and I need to find ways to meet those needs.
Overall, I am extremely proud of myself and look forward to all the health benefits this will afford me.
I’ve been unofficially focusing on posture for some time now, including mewing, building muscles and strength, and ultimately for more a more aesthetic, healthy, and functional body.
A really helpful video is this:
I always have a lot of tightness in my chest and would like to have more of a wider back and more shoulder mobility.
So I developed a new exercise in the middle of this week, but didn’t have the time to post about it.
To summarize the exercise which I will call the weighted knee spacer:
Use ankle weights, weighted shoes, or in this case, bands to pull on foot down
Do heel raises with the other foot to elevate the weighted foot
Keep the weighted foot as level as possible
I’m thinking this exercise is really useful in any scenario where I feel the knee is getting caught or stuck, which seems to happen a lot when there is any sort of bending exercises.
What I want to work on next is getting a full bend in my right knee without pain.
So it has been a full month now and I have not stopped this challenge yet or restarted jujitsu, but I think that is ok. I want to keep this challenge going until I can actually achieve the goals set in my original goals.
As a reminder, the goals are:
Lift up my knee and bend it feeling stable, comfortable and strong. Getting there for sure!
Stand for 5 minutes while feeling comfortable. Pretty much achieved this one!
Lay on either side feeling comfortable and relaxed. I don’t lay much on either side, just on my back these days, will have to revisit.
Sit on my heels while feeling comfortable and relaxed. Not even close on this one, probably need a full range of motion bend in my knee to be comfortable first.
Be able to jump feeling stable, comfortable, and strong. Part of the way there on this one! I feel pretty stable.
Able to kick a roundhouse while feeling stable, comfortable and strong. Not there yet but an improvement from before.
As I look at my jiujitsu challenge, I realize that knee rehabilitation must be an essential component to my strategy because strengthening my knee, healing it, and making it less prone to injury will probably be the most important factor for how successful the challenge is.
In looking into it further, I also realized that I completely forgot about my last post about my knee in which I outlined three goals:
1 month goal – be able to sleep, walk, stand and light exercise with zero discomfort. I will call this goal little freedom.
1 year goal – to get back to preinjury levels
2 year goal – the ability to practice martial arts, parkour gymnastics and skiing. My goal isn’t to go too hard in any of these areas, just to be able to do them safely.
It’s funny because it’s been 5 months since that last post and I pretty much immediately dived into the 2 year goal because I lost motivation for the 1 month goal.
I also realized that my first post with two exercises for massaging the knee are extremely effective, especially the one that lifts and relaxes the knee joint.
I also rediscovered this video about tendon strength:
With these key takeaways:
do concentric-focused movements, a lot of volume with lower weight, do them explosively, fast eccentric
reversing the direction very fast (eccentric to concentric), challenges the tendon
if you lower the weight slowly you will favour the muscle, if you jerk it you will favour the tendon
larger range of motion challenges the tendon, but you can train them with short range and high weight and high speed
progress all of these slowly: weight, range of motion, speed
Bottom line though, I don’t really know what to do next.
My main blocker is just this feeling that in order to achieve the level of strength in my knee that I want. I will have to literally work out every day for a significant period of time and I don’t have the strength and the interest in doing that. It also seems really hard to get that done while also juggling work, jiujitsu and sleep.
However, now that I write that out, maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong. Maybe I don’t need to work out every day at all. Maybe I just need to work out once a week intensely. I know that even that low frequency over a long period of time will be at least enough to sustain strength in my knee. I might even be able to get away with once every other week!
I also really want my workouts to help with one very important thing for me, stress relief. I have so many mentally rigorous tasks from doing work at my job, thinking about youtube, and playing Valorant that I need an outlet for my stress. I guess I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet, how to integrate it into my day that doesn’t feel like it is going to take a huge amount of time.
Perhaps it isn’t about taking a huge amount of time. Maybe it is like my posture challenge. Since I had some very simple exercises for that, maybe I need to simplify my workouts to be much more simple. I tried my warmup playlists, but they feel a little too slow and stagnant. This playlist seems really good to stop and start at any time:
I think what will be most effective is to slowly work through the video, only doing it for as long as I want to, for short periods of time. So always pick up where I left off, but never feel the need to go for a certain period of time. Hell, I could do 10 second intervals throughout the day. I can handle 10 seconds no?
Also, in the meantime, I think I need to find a way to do more of the knee over toes workout every single day, except the weekends.
The months I am not doing jiujitsu, I will need to organize my own conditioning and physical therapy workouts.
I think overall, I work too hard when I’m already exercising and too little when I’m not. For instance, right now I’m doing jiujitsu at least 3 times per week so I don’t need so many conditioning exercises, probably just more soothing massage, warmth, meditation etc.
When I take time off of jiujitsu though, I would like to go a bit harder.
Finally, I want to remind myself of a couple of truths when it comes to my knee:
Allowing tissues to slide and glide will remove pain, its not the scar that is the issue, it is when it sticks
Building up strength in muscles help protect against injury even with weak tendons and ligaments by absorbing shock
Building up tendons and ligaments will protect cartilage and bones by absorbing shock
Increasing range of motion help make muscles and tendons more efficient
Today I fasted and I had mixed results. Fasting seems to create more inflammation as my stomach felt irritated and painful and my body felt hot. The left side of my body felt blocked right where my spleen is. It sort of feels like I have an enlarged spleen. The only thing that sort of helps with this is doing meditation. I’ve been having sweats. My lips are cracking from the dryness.
But I decided not to give up. I am going to address the problems at their root, which is certainly the stomach and the spleen. Digestion issues are not new to me. I started using dance therapy techniques and feeling the discomfort in the spleen as sensual and my body started to move. I started to feel pain inside the spleen area. It feels cold. The pressure relieves a little and I feel a trickle.
I wonder if the stress of the drawing challenge and traveling soon are making my stomach clench. It is certainly possible.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. Dance therapy is like magic. I don’t know why I stopped using it. There is this interplay between feeling the feelings and finding comfort. I guess that might be why I left this technique behind. I left it behind to feel pain. To feel without judgement or plan.