The Trick (III)

Victory

There was something going on with these contractions that made use of these weird muscular involuntary movements. The PT was ending and I thought it was worth it to keep trying at my room in hopes of making it more systematic instead of a random fluke, even if it was against what my therapist suggested. You know how this thing is, there is no hope against this condition, and having hope and then inevitably failing can crash you further, but I persisted (perhaps irrationally) anyway. I resumed the experiments without telling my mom. I tried many things, all involving some kind of muscle spasmic motions or special positioning of the joints. Some involved strengthening with the bands I got from PT, also walking or cycling trying to let my joints be more free-moving or spasmic, for example trying to walk with the hip wobbled (rotated) to a side, which was really hard. Also tying a belt around my thorax to try to stabilize it (it broke lol). All of this was mostly useless, but there was one event where I tried doing a crunch while doing the same trick of letting my right foot to be free (oscillating, spasmic). I could get a full core contraction, which had a very powerful, I'd say miraculous effect in stabilizing my hip and knees. It immediately stopped any grinding pain there, the hips felt a mindboggling cushioning compared to what I felt before, and my body felt a totally magical new equilibrium. I remember I gave a few walks in the street with my "new" hip, and also could take a bike ride with a sharply decreased strain. I was marveled by that experience; the world was perfect for a day. Sadly, the relief effect lasted only a day, and I crashed back to the constant fatigue and pain once again, so my victory was very short lived. That foot-to-core connection was an extremely fragile, rare thing that I almost never could get.

This experience showed me that the path was doing strengthening while letting joints to be "free", like letting the feet to oscillate freely while doing abs. It didn't matter if the parts involved were seemingly disconnected or far apart (like the feet from the abs), it was clear these full-body correlations were crucial in making this work. The foot oscillating "on its own" is only one kind of involuntary ("relaxed") motion, and in December I had already explored some of them (neck, hip and arms free motions/rotations, eye twitches, feet arching, pelvis clenches) but not using a simultaneous strengthening. So from now on the thing was figuring out more about these free movements and spasms, and combine them better with strengthening exercises. All other things I had tried like posture, using stabilizing belts, or light exercise like walking or cycling, were discarded as their effect was nothing in comparison to these “holy contractions”.

Some were straightforward, like the jaw just can open and close, or move to the sides, and the other joints (like the elbow or knee) can freely rotate in whatever way they want when doing say a squat. The shoulder was a bit tricky: it can shrug on its own, usually in a very erratic/spasmic way, and the blade can glide/rotate to any position as well. The tongue is free to swirl around, roll or pull out or in. There was one missing piece which was the eyes, how does their relaxation look like? I saw a post in this r/ehlerdanlos in which a girl uploaded a video doing chaotic eye motions (nystagmus). I also thought of the double vision, that I could make my vision center or double on will. The eyes relaxation could possibly look like chaotic motions and also vision defocusing (the eyes muscles stop straining to center and focus them). Indeed, I tried to do exercises (I remember pushups) keeping the vision defocused, but noticed the same thing that happened when I tried to do planks with the pelvis unclenched: I couldn't even lift myself from the floor in that form, while I could do it fine in the normal form. Doubling the vision also made one shoulder to shrug on its own when pressing, so these two were tied together (the pushups were not with parallel shoulders which was weird). The eyes muscles are very small but are still a crucial support point, much the same as the pelvic ones. I had seen in December that something even as small as the occipitals had a massive effect on hip pain so this was not so surprising. Indeed, if say the hip relaxes, that effect must be felt all the way up to the spine to the eyes, so the eyes must inevitably also shift in response. If they are fixed, it means the hip (or anything else) isn't relaxing, they're also fixed. So freeing the eyes is a necessary condition for body relaxation. Freeing the eyes relaxes the surrounding neck muscles, which should relax the trunk muscles, all in a domino effect that should reach the hip, inevitably. The hip free motion is wobbling rotations and lateral/front tilts, so an eye chaotic free-movement should correspond (intricately) to a hip free wobbling or tilt. And so on with all of the different joints’ involuntary free movements: they should all be intricately interconnected.

A major issue was that the "unstrained" mechanism for lifting is very weak and unreliable, since the body tends to want to activate the tightened mechanism as it's so much stronger. I could only go down a (kneeled) push up with double vision a few inches at most before the eyes focused again to get more power (killing the effect) or I fell to the floor. Getting a proper full contraction was really rare despite many attempts. Still, with the pushups done in this form, I could in rare occasions get a thoracic contraction very analogous to the core contraction I had before when I let my foot oscillate. Whenever it happened, I'd have a day of relief once again, but since I couldn't get it again, I'd crash back to the daily pain, sickness and flares. It was not very clear what to do to make these contractions more reliable and systematic instead of a rare lucky thing.

A key aspect that let these contractions to become more frequent was the idea of the connectedness of the different reflexes. I had done exercises only doing relaxations part by part (like doing pushups with the vision doubled, or pelvis unclenched, or wobbling hip, separately), so I started doing simultaneous relaxations of more body parts (like say doing pushups with defocused eyes and unclenched pelvis). This was even harder than the single one at the beginning, but I was betting on that there should be some kind of "relaxation transmission" from the eyes (head) to the hip. I don't really remember well how it happened but essentially over a period of time, in trying to tie together the disparate joint relaxations, it turned out that transmission was caused by shivers at the spine. When the force was transmitted, it made the spine much more stable (so I didn't collapse to the floor) and the pushes more robust, so I could afford to do more weak reps without collapsing sometimes, although barely. With practice over some weeks, I could get those holy contractions more frequently, although it was still uncommon. At one time I could even have them for a few days in a row. I got overconfident I told my mom my issue was under control, after many months of struggle, but then I lost the streak and got back to daily pain. This was the harshest part of this story. For roughly a month or two I felt I was so close to having something systematic, but it was still so imperfect, it was uncertain if something systematic was even possible. I had to endure mixed days of bliss followed by agony, not knowing well what exactly caused those holy contractions. Keeping my hopes up in this uncertainty and repeated crashes hit my mental health badly over the weeks.  There was no guarantee of success, and if I failed, I wondered if it was better to give up to at least save my sanity. Despite all this I kept persisting, trying to nail down this thing.

The final addition which concludes this section is an idea relative to joint subluxation. There is an apparent contradiction in that joints can be hypermobile but also the muscles can be stiff at the same time. I thought that it was just that the muscle was so stiff, when you moved say an arm, instead of gliding along the bone, the tendon would shift abruptly to another position, before acting in its full range. Another contraction mechanism would take over. In just one arm motion there could be in fact many different mechanism switches. This is also compatible with the fact that hypermobiles like me tend to accommodate a lot to avoid fatigue (like I couldn't stay standing without accommodating my legs frequently or my hip and knees would burn). The joint seems to be very elastic but it's only because the tendon "derails" (subluxates or even dislocates), not because the muscle itself is elastic. The body is not used to work with a more constant, smooth mechanism over the full range.

One thing I tried was just to do band exercises, but making sure to evade feeling tendon slips or clanks, so that muscles get trained in their whole range smoothly. To do this, you find out that it's not possible to move the arm just in a normal looking straight line, but that one needs to move and twist the arms, elbows and wrists in weird looking motions. For example, push arm a bit to the front, rotate elbow out, then keep pushing, then supinate the wrist, then keep pushing, then rotate the neck, then push, etc. In other words, the normal pushing mechanism looks outwardly normal, but from a "contraction smoothness" point of view it's not natural. Meanwhile, intricate twisted pushing patterns don't look natural but are actually natural for contraction smoothness. Further, this seemed to work better as other joints variations were incorporated. Motions like pushing, then flexing an arch, then twisting the wrist, then keep pushing, made these holy contractions to happen more frequently. Quite oddly, sometimes the breathing too had to be involved to guarantee continuity (for example, push forward a bit, then breathe, then keep pushing, then exhale, etc.). This was the first incorporation of breathing in this search, of course without wanting it but as a natural byproduct of these physical constraints.

Although the arms’ pushing pattern is extremely specific, with more practice it seemed like these intricate twistings and synchronized contractions are quite natural and something that the body does on its own. This matches with the observation of free moving joints (like free moving arm) of December, so in the end, the contraction smoothness condition and free moving joints thing are the same. This fact is really important because from the perspective of "ways to twist the arm in synchrony with all other joints", those extremely specific rotations would naively be really hard, almost impossible to do. But if it's a preferred mechanical pathway for the body (which the body does on its own), then it's much easier, it removes the active thinking and you just have to get better at "letting the body do its thing" while you push. With the incorporation of breathing and spinal shivers, and the fact that these intricate paths are very natural movement patterns of the body, I was able to get these contractions daily (not every time, but at least once a day). The condition was finally under control and systematic improvement began.

After finally getting this nailed down, I could finally have relief. It indeed was possible to have systematic improvement, and this thing protected me from the crashes and pain, although I was still not sure if it’d work forever. My life was not over anymore, my future with this illness was no longer uncertain and I could stay in the PhD. The first thing I did as soon as I got this is to take photos of myself as I was back then, in June 2021. I had no idea on how this whole "recovery" thing would play out but I wanted to be able to see any physical changes if any.

 

The Trick

I spent June and July 2021 learning to execute this thing better. One odd aspect of this kind of exercise is that when doing arm work in this style, even if the exercise is meant for the arms and upper body, even the feet arches would need to flex to assist the movement and guarantee smoothness, so the legs are inevitably trained too. At the beginning it was very hard to synchronize intricate arm rotations with say feet archings and the other reflexes, but as explained earlier, over time it seemed more and more like this is a very natural contraction pathway for the body. Again, that I don't have to actively synchronize them (which is near impossible) but it's something that the body naturally does (the arms and ankles rotate in synchrony on their own while pushing) as you open up more and more degrees of freedom to move freely. I also started using aids like using one hand to touch a tendon to better feel when it was slipping, instead of just mentally focusing on it. This touch along with the "self-synchronization" which I got with practice boosted the reliability of this technique. When the power wasn't strong yet, I would try it with many different types of motions like walking in lunges or doing side-walking, to bend to the front, crunches, legs liftings, trying jumps, hyperextensions, leg bridges and so on, all bodyweight. It wasn't until late August that I stopped experimenting that broadly and I stuck to the more effective (bodyweight) squats, among other classical movements.

After the precision was nailed, there was a big issue with the contraction power. I could barely do light band work like this, and could barely go down a few inches in bodyweight squats. Progress was systematic but weak. I knew my whole body was atrophied so I needed something stronger to pour on more muscle. Ideally, one would like to do heavy weightlifting in this style. However, lifting heavier usually made me faint and fatigue, and could also damage my joints, worsening my condition (which is why I stopped lifting years ago) so it was a risky bet. I started going to the gym and tried to increase the weight slowly, starting from essentially nothing (as in 1lb or 2lb weights for the arms). In the first weeks, I found that when increasing the weight, it was harder to keep the synchronization (it tends to break down) and so not all exercises felt good, in fact the increased weight worsened my fatigue and neurological symptoms. Oddly, this bad effect felt worse than normal weightlifting, it seemed to mess up with my nerves more directly and hence seemed dangerous. I had one week of backtrack at the beginning of August because of this.

Thinking on what could more safely boost the weightlifting power, I thought I could just do a tissue release (a hard massage :p) on a muscle. The logic was that suppressing a muscle creates a vacuum of support in the body: since the muscle relaxes and hence loses tension, the lost support point must be felt in the rest of the body, and other fibers must necessarily contract in synchrony to compensate for this force vacuum. A condition to see if it was a proper relaxation was that on pressing a muscle (say in the arm), I'd see a muscle or joint somewhere else (say the ankle) jumping or shifting position in response. If not, it means the relaxation is not propagating. That effect indeed happened with some practice. What remained was using this effect while strengthening, like doing a squat while the joints were temporarily contracting in this synchronized way, trying to preserve it like that in all the movement (because as explained earlier, the body tends to tighten up and break this fragile synchronization).

Turns out this enormously boosted the power of the technique, and introduced a new effect: the breathing changed more abruptly, doing sudden expulsions of air. When the thorax was so compressed, the inner guts and my throat would start to cough and gag from the pressure, that vomiting sensation everyone knows (with some eye tearing even). I noticed using these gags while lifting allowed to lift much heavier while preserving the synchronization all the way, with less need to actively check the smoothness anymore, making things easier. There was a subtlety, that not all pressing points gave an equally strong effect. Some were better than others in triggering this effect better, and I'd just try many until I found a good one, then pushed. The trigger point would even change mid-movement, but it got natural to always be able to get one with practice, although it was quite tricky at first. I'd say the proper "fast" recovery started here, since with this increased power, no exercise could give me adverse effects anymore, so there were no backtracks since.

There were many limitations still. The technique looked awkward, as I had to lift while using one arm to press a muscle constantly (so I went to a university gym that had very few people, and waited until there was none there). It was also very difficult to preserve this constant synchronization all the way. The arms were shaky, trying to subluxate and break it down. If I wanted to have more contraction power while keeping this synchrony, I needed the pressing hand to suppress the muscle better, but pressing too hard would make the pressing arm itself want to tighten, breaking the synchronization. As such, the contraction power didn't feel like proper heavy weightlifting yet. Pressing hard also gave me bruises and sometimes painful pulls of the skin, which left marks. Also, I thought that I had to release as many muscles as I could, but it was very hard to press on some muscles in the back and ankles. I feared not releasing everything uniformly could create muscle imbalances. Needless to say, I couldn't do two-handed movements like weighted Squats or any movement that required a barbell, since I needed one free hand for this to work, so I was limited to one-hand dumbbell exercises and machines.

There were a few immediate things I felt in those first sessions. The contraction when I did, say, leg extensions, were felt very strongly at the inner hip/pelvis, instead of fatiguing my knees which was the usual. When I finished the first session like this, I felt a really strong reparation effect in my whole body for the first time. Things that felt totally magical back then, but that now I'm very used to. A common effect is that I felt releases along my body muscles very frequently along the day. Also, many different muscles would contract on their own all day in weird synchronized ways, frequently cracking the joints (and spine). I was incredibly amazed by this at the beginning, but over the weeks it became normal. The "correcting symptoms" became much more frequent, it was an onslaught of effects that began hard to keep track of. There were also not-so good effects too. The first week of this, I'm not really sure why, I got a really bad limping and I struggled to walk (although pain-free). When I recovered from the limping, I got many events of harsh chest closings, like my chest would press on itself and asphyxiate me. The limping event happened only once luckily, but the chest asphyxia would happen some other times later on. I also got many "almost cramps" at the calves which sucked but had no choice but to endure as part of the recovery (this would be really common at the beginning, and would become rare months later).

After a month of training like this, I noticed something strange and quite marvelous. At the beginning I had thought of this as a way to "pass the strain from the knees to the inner hip/core", like a more powerful yoga that hits hard the inner core and breathing muscles. But after a week or two, I was feeling the pull not at the hip but further up the core. Every time I went, the pull climbed upper and upper reaching my thorax. By the end of August, one time doing leg extensions, my neck and jaw were forced to contract and open. The same repeated for arms exercises. That was really odd but luckily, it was Covid time and the mask covered the stupid grin. When the neck was hit I realized that I wasn't just strengthening my inner hip/core. I was actually "building up" my spine muscles from the hip base to the head. When I reached the head, I got a new wave of symptoms that were related to it like sinus decompressions, and also some very weird effect on my dreams. The neck stabilization had a direct effect on my flares: I had my last flare at the end of August and I could start to remove my medication, eventually getting rid of it all. Around that time, one day walking back home from shopping, I felt like dirt had gotten into my eyes. I scratched it but it wouldn't go away. I thought it was some annoying street dirt, but when I got home, I still kept having the annoying dirt thing. I started seeing eye floaters after that, they'd be a common thing for the next month and indeed there was a progressive effect in relaxing my vision (but it took a month of this to really note the difference). 

Just after the neck was reached, it felt like a different lumbar muscle activated, one that extended the spine more explicitly, which I thought could be the Multifudus. In comparison, the muscles I trained before seemed to only cause gags and gut contractions. The new one did proper lumbar extension. It seemed as if as soon as one "connection" from the hip to the neck was finished, another one would start again from the lumbar. I already had seen the pattern of "contractions climbing up the spine" over the weeks, so I expected the same from this new group (and indeed it happened like that). These ordered contraction patterns were there not just for the spine but for all muscles in general, but I didn't get any explicit legs or arms contractions until the end of September, it was all purely spine and core for a while.

There was another very unexpected effect that I noticed by that time: regardless of which pressing points I used (whether at the calves or at the chest or the spinal ones), the muscles that contracted would be the roughly the same. For example, the inner hip would always be hit in leg extensions no matter the pressing point I used. It seemed the specific pressing point used wasn't that important, and I started using the easiest to access ones in the front body, and not the hard to access back ones. Doing this didn't cause any muscular imbalances or worsening of my condition, the recovery effect was just the same, so over time I restricted the pressings to a very few places like the chest or arms, also forgetting about the legs which were hard to reach. This removed me from the initial idea that I had to release muscles one by one in my whole body, and brought the idea that since all muscles are interconnected, releasing the tension at one necessarily releases it in all others, so the releasing mechanism can be started anywhere, and the relaxation would propagate to the rest of the muscles.

Now, the strategy was successful but the bodyweight squats I did at home were starting to feel light. I knew heavy barbell squats and deadlifts were the best full body exercises, and should have a much greater effect in strengthening the legs and spine, but I didn't know how to incorporate them since I couldn't do this thing handless. I tried pressing points at the hands like the fingertips (specially at the nerves) and also bites to the tongue (thinking the tongue was a muscle, so one could release it just like any other muscle. The tongue is not a muscle so I messed up bad, but it still worked!), since only such points could be used with a barbell and also were much less visible in the gym. They were also much easier to press on, just doing it with a finger nail or the teeth, and didn’t require as much strong pressing as with the bigger muscles. This circumvented the previous problem of the pressing arm wanting to itself tighten, and the effect these points produced was just the same or even better than pressing on big muscles (and definitely much more convenient). I knew from before that releasing a big muscle like the quads caused other small muscles in the head to shift in response, but thinking the reverse (that releasing a small muscle at the head or hands would shift the quads in response) was a bit crazy. However, it had to be true by the principle of action and reaction, and it turned out to be right: one can use any pinch point anywhere, even a super small muscle, and that will make the entire body's big muscles to shift.

Out of all this testing and filtering, the most convenient part to use was the tongue, since it's the only one I could release with the teeth, freeing up my arms to more easily do barbell movements. I could spam pinching the tongue every time with the same effect, so it became very easy. Upon further testing, I found that I didn't really need to teeth-pinch on the tongue much, and actually just rubs with the teeth was enough, although I'd have to try different pinch and rubbing points to get the best effect (with different tongue rolling positions too). This "tongue scanning" for trigger points was a bit tricky at first, because such points are very specific and don't obey any pattern, you have to rub over the whole tongue continuously until you feel the trigger, and the trigger can be anything like a sudden strong arch contraction, an eyebrow lifting, a fingers pose, a thorax collapse, vacuuming or breathing expansion, a gag reflex and such, again with no clear pattern, but it quickly became natural. 

I later tested with skin rubs and it also gave the same effect. The strategy had mutated a lot from the original "press on big muscles everywhere to release them". Just a strange "nerve stimulus" type of thing was enough to trigger the body relaxation mechanism, even only one pinching or rubbing point was enough, as long as one was sensitive enough and "let the stimulus propagate". This was closer to acupuncture in spirit, and indeed seemed more magical, but it's derived from pure mechanics. Finally, with more practice it turned out that using the constant pressing or rubbing in all the movement wasn't necessary. One only needs to do it before the lift, and after some seconds, the thoracic pressure and inner guts contraction becomes stronger, causing a gag. As soon as the gag is there, one unracks the bar and pushes, the thoracic pressure being stable enough to hold a complete strong lift, without needing to worry about pressing anything in the middle of it. With this addition, the contraction power reached the same ceiling as in normal powerlifting (but now with the property of contraction synchronization), and what I called "the trick" was complete. Without the need of hand pressing and the mask covering the weird tongue poses and rubs (thanks to Covid), the trick was much less visible and eventually I could move to a bigger packed gym without anyone noticing much, except for some calls of people saying my form was terrible, because the lifting doesn't look symmetrical or upright most of the time.

The full "trick" was complete by the end of September. It really seemed like the holy grail of Physical Therapy. It repaired every joint, muscle and tissue simultaneously and extremely precisely, decompressing everything down to the smallest nerve or blood vessel, no matter how intricately trapped. All that was left was spamming this trivial routine over and over, and I could forget why this trick works in the first place. In this sense, the syndrome now looked like a total joke, and repeating endlessly the same routine was the dumbest thing in the world. Now, at every session the muscles would rearrange in completely different unpredictable ways, and different unexpected muscles would fire, but I didn't need to know that. A full body routine based on heavy Squats, Bench Presses and Barbell Rows once every two days covered all the main muscle groups and was enough to do the job. The fact I could do now heavy compounds with maximum weight and both hands in this style made the contractions stronger, and so I could feel more explicitly which muscles were contracting. It was easier to identify them and note them down, and then try to see patterns in the muscle activations. It was also then that I got to trust the reliability of this method. Although at the beginning I wondered if this continuous lucky strike would go on forever, some months of doing it gave me more certainty that the thing would keep working all the way to recovery. It was absurd but really, the strategy never failed, the right muscles would always activate at every step of the way. Even if I was still suffering under the syndrome and neuropathy, no matter how severely, the war was already won. But I had no idea on how long this would take.