PT natter: doing PT laughing

[elisem]

So I found a way to crack myself up laughing while doing one of my PT exercises. And it's also probably actually a good thing to try on its own physically therapeutic merits.

Some of you know I've been taking voice lessons since early in the pandemic. I started the voice lessons because I thought the breath work might help improve my diminished lung capacity. (It has.) Voice lessons turn out to be wonderful, helping me in a lot more ways than I expected, both physical health-wise and heart/mind/spirit-wise.

There was and still is a lot of learning to really breathe deeply and thoroughly, to let air in and let it out, to invite it and to direct it. So while I was trying to do one of my PT exercises for core strength and ankle proprioception tonight, I started doing some good big breathing with it. Didn't sing, because J is asleep and I don't want to wake him, poor dear -- and he can definitely hear me singing from another room. I really hope the unexpected laughing didn't wake him. But it was so funny.

The exercise is one where I stand a few feet away from and facing a tall narrow mirror so that I can see myself within the confines of the mirror. Then I lift one foot from the ground and try to maintain the same verticality I had with two feet on the ground, so that I can still see myself framed in the mirror.

It's an exercise I've always had trouble with. Many health professionals, most of them physical therapists, have remarked that I have almost no proprioception in my ankles. Standing on one leg is a significant challenge for me. The combo of very little ankle proprioception and an insufficiency of core strength means that I wobble and wobble and flail my arms. Sometimes I fall right over.

So I was doing those tonight, and feeling pleased that I actually managed to keep three-quarters of myself in the mirror frame and didn't actually fall over even once, although there was some flailing. All of a sudden, I started wondering if I could center and keep myself from tensing up in not-useful ways. I started doing some of the deeper breathing and centering I've been practicing for voice lessons, and what the hey? It worked! It took my mind off of fretting about whether I was going to fall over this time, because it added one too many things to the stack of what I was doing, and apparently fretting fell off. Realizing this is what got me started laughing.

So I still can't keep all of me in the mirror when I stand on one leg, but I sure had a good time trying tonight. And I do think it helped a little. I'm going to try it again next time.

Question, and feel free to ignore it if you like:
Do you have a complicated relationship with balance?

Comments

the older i get

[siriosa]

the more complicated it gets.

[mrissa]

....WELP

[elisem]

INDEED

[sartorias]

Ever since my stroke I get hair trigger vertigo. I use some essential oils behind my ears. I had to drop a bunch of yoga poses that didn't help, but I have a daily regimen of yoga poses that strengthen the core. The sad part for me is I no longer enjoy the ferry going to Martha's Vineyard. The slightest up and down motion throws me--I literally don't know if I'm upside down or not, and have to grip the handles of the deck chairs to orient.

[ellen_fremedon]

Yep. Can't skate or ride a skateboard; managed with great difficulty to learn to stay upright on a bicycle only to completely forget how within three years; have never learned to drive because I get panic attacks as a passenger--most commonly, while taking long gentle curves over low hills at moderate highway speeds; it's nothing to do with fear and everything to do with feeling gravity pulling in two directions at once.

(Oddly enough, airplanes don't bother me much--possibly the lack of significant visual input from outside the cabin.)

[carbonel]

I have a fairly straightforward relationship with balance. Once I realized (or admitted) that mine is way less good than the average person, and it's no good pretending I'm normal in that respect, it became easier to manage certain aspects my life. I don't have vertigo, but (for example) I can't manage a balance beam or stand on line foot for more than a few seconds. So I don't.

[halfmoon_mollie1]

YES I do. All my life I've been fat. I'm not now. Back in November I got all lost in my head on a walk and ended up walking too far. After a month, I finally went to Urgent Care who sent me to a doc who sent me to a p.t. The first balance exercises he/they gave me to do were a disaster. I've gotten better, at my age balance is a good thing to have.

[thistleingrey]

I love the idea that focusing on breath for singing has contributed to a different sense of balance.

I had really good balance, like spookily good, for 40ish years, and then I caught that virus (very early, when no one knew anything), which broke vestibular ... without my noticing, because apparently I've been propping up balance with my eyesight. Now I'm mending vestibular and proprioception and eyesight and the previously unprocessed trauma that had resulted in propping up balance, and some other stuff, all at once. On the plus side, balance seems mostly mendable, though the old baseline is unreachable (which is fine): I can stay upright with my eyes shut, lately, though I still need to lean against a wall to read. Being almost unable to detect anymore when I'm dizzy is a weird WIP.

[azurelunatic]

I used to have good enough balance and core strength to float on top of a yoga ball and propel it across the room with me moving the ball with my fingers while I was in the air. I miss those days...

[davidgillon]

Not so much balance as proprioception in general - I'll usually bounce off a doorframe at least once a day. My hypermobility and poor proprioception are in a long term relationship.

Balance and the ankle thing struck a chord not so much because I have trouble standing on one leg, and I do, but because I found that, completely unexpectedly, I could ice-skate (poorly), when skateboarding or anything similar had been beyond me. AFAICT the one thing that made it possible was that skating boots gripped my ankles so firmly that proprioception didn't come into it. My ankles weren't going anywhere, so I didn't need to know where they were going.