Yoga Ain’t Easy

I injured myself during yoga last week.

I should have known I was in for a world of hurt when I signed up for “Hard Body Yoga.” Especially since I’m not what you might call a good yoga do-er. I’ve been working out at our apartment gym to help me lose the weight since September (45 minutes on the treadmill is just enough time to watch an episode of Army Wives or 24 on my iPhone, propped precariously on the ledge in front of me). Since I’ve been released to do regular working out, I’ve been trying to add in the yoga as a complement to the treadmill work every other day. A friend and I signed up for their Groupon offer a few months ago and then we had to use the darn thing before it expired!

Ok, so I’m at Hard Body Yoga on Thursday – my first yoga experience by myself, without my friend – and we’re doing lots of fun weird poses, like downward dog, upward dog, sun salutations (my favorite!) and yoga good mornings. I think the last one is what did me in. Those are poses where you lean forward with a flat back, legs more than shoulder-width apart, and you twist your stretched out arms upward over you and then back to center. There are lots of those. I think that’s when it happened.

I think I injured my sternum. Or strained a tendon around there. Because there was definitely a knot.

It was kind of scary on Friday when it started hurting, because I had a difficulty getting a full breath of air. Yikes. So with the shortness of breath, the knot, Hubs was asking all kinds of questions a la House and trying to figure out what was wrong. When he asked about a tingling in my arms, I responded that I was NOT having a heart attack!

At that point, I did what any self-reliant and intelligent 28-year-old woman would do. I called my mom.

We talked through systems and decided that it probably wasn’t a heart attack, was most likely not cancer, and was definitely not a reason for an ER trip. I rested over the weekend and even did yoga yesterday. That’s when I realized it was the yoga good mornings stretches that really did me in – because they hurt!

When I asked the instructor about it, like Hubs suggested, she said that she had never heard of someone injuring their sternum like that.

Yup! I’m special! I can injury myself doing simple stretches like no one else can.