Day 3: Now with Less (but Still Some) Face Planting!

I woke up this morning and found myself with shoulders that were even less mobile than yesterday. But I pushed forward and told myself that I can't punk out on day three.

I started with a couple cycles of the Ashtanga A series and one of the B series. Despite my increased shoulder soreness, I was pleasantly surprised when I lowered myself to the ground from plank pose. Yesterday, my arms buckled immediately and I ended up repeatedly smashing my face on my mat. Today, I found I had a little more control and made it about halfway down before my arms gave out.

Progress!!!

After completing a few cycles of the series, I decided to try goddess pose. This was one of my least favorite poses when I took pre-natal yoga. Here's a great demonstration photo from PopSugar:

I can tell you right now, my face was not this relaxed.

It doesn't look super hard but my leg muscles don't have the stamina to hold this one for very long. I tried to stay in this one for a bit and focus on my breathing but all I could think was, "I HATE GODDESS POSE."

Once I let myself get out of this, I wanted to do some hip openers and after doing a squat, I sat down to try cobbler's pose again. Based on my performance in this pose yesterday, I wasn't expecting much but my knees were already back down at the floor. I was shocked! I still felt some tightness in my hips but there were my knees, all the way down like when I regularly used to practice yoga. I did a couple more hip stretches like lotus and burning logs (legs stacked on top of each other) and finished with a supine twist like this photo from twistedtreeyoga.com before savasana:

More painful than anticipated.

This one actually stretched out my shoulders much more than I expected but it felt really good to stretch them without my shoulders having to be weight bearing.

I felt pretty good for most of the day after my practice but I had to spend a lot of time in the car driving to another city for an appointment for my son. When we returned home this evening and I got out of the car, my hips felt like they had fallen out of their sockets and they both popped really painfully--ouch! I don't know if I loosened them up too much to the point of making them all loosey goosey or what, but ever since I got home, they've been a bit sore. A hot shower helped thought and we'll see what they're like in the morning.