The Gates (II)

I will also write the logic behind the "trick" in a more concise way, skipping all the testing and the story that made it longer.

I: Why it's muscular in the first place

First of all, although the syndrome manifests itself in a lot of symptoms, a set of them seem straightforwardly muscular/mechanical (widespread muscle, joints and nerve tinglings and pain, subluxations), and then there's another set which is more mysterious, complex and seemingly unrelated (blood pooling, brainfog, dysautonomia, etc.). The first suspicion is that since the muscular issues, weaknesses, pains are so widespread from head to toes, that they are all connected, even if it's not clear exactly how, so the approach is to think about the issue in a  "global" way (thinking of all the muscles and joints as a coordinated system), and not "locally" (joint by joint). Then, given the muscular issues are already there and in the full body, you could think (or hope) that the muscular pressure or instability is also the reason of the other weirder symptoms: compressed blood vessels could cause the blood pooling, pressure at the head causes brainfog, the dysautonomia hopefully is by a pinched nerve that regulates such things..., now, the sickness feeling and flares are not clear at all, but you could vaguely think "the extreme strain in the whole body must make me feel very fatigued, maybe it restricts bloodflow, makes breathing harder, or maybe it presses on something that makes me feel sick". Because there's really nothing else in the tests that suggests anything else (the brain, spinal cord, immune system, all those seem fine), and also we're short on other options and time. 

So here's the hope: if one could find a way to decompress the muscles in the (full!) body, hopefully all of the other symptoms also get alliviated at the same time. There's one and only one goal in mind: how to untighten tight muscles. We forget about the neuropathy and neurology, or blood things, or whatever. If you figure out the muscles, all the other issues get solved automatically. In few words this is an entirely physical therapy problem. Now, naively that sounds like an easy question (it's just tight muscles :B), except that anyone that deals with this knows that absolutely no therapy works, including physical therapy itself. Doctors have resigned themselves to tell you go do yoga, take a cream and go do therapy for your depression. There's no way to untighten the damn muscles, and they keep making your life hell. 

II: Physical Therapy and Body Mechanics

The strategy consists of the following. First we adapt the ideas of physical therapy to a more "global" way of thinking. Key concepts are "torqued joints", tight muscles and weak muscles, and how they relate to each other. One idea is that if a joint is "torked", say the hip is innerly rotated to the left causing lumbar strain on one side, it is impossible that the strain doesn't affect the arms too, because there are muscles that connect the hip and arm, like the latissimus dorsi, that transmit such strain forces. Now, for the other joints there is always a muscle that connects say, the arms to the head (through the Trapezius), or the head with the hip (through the spinal erectors), the hip to the feet or shoulders to the hands. So whatever torque the hip has has to be transmitted to all points of the body. We conclude that there is never an isolated torsion at a single joint, but that if a joint is torsqued, there has to be torsion in all others. So all the joint torsions and muscle strains have to be intricately related. 

Then is the idea that if a joint is torqued chronically, then all our motions are done using that strain, our posture (which looks neutral) relies on that strain support, it's hardwired into how our body works. So it's really hard to get rid of, our body will always tend to use the strained mechanism, use the tight muscles that are used to strain, because other muscles are weaker and not practical for everyday use. We could think what would happen if a joint stopped using that strain (this is what we call relaxation). First, if there's hip strain, it must be keeing the joint in a neutral looking way, and supporting all the body structure. If we completely got rid of the strain, the hip should destabilize, and with it the rest of the body, so we should drop to the floor. It'd be just like a corpse that moves purely by joint mechanics and gravity (so we could say, strain is something that a living being applies to aid in functionality, to keep ourselves upright, walk and all, because our structure on its own falls down no different from a mannequin. If we kill the brain, the artificial forces go away, and driven only by dead mechanics, we fall immediately). 

Another aspect is, if the hip is chronically innerly left-tilted, causing pain on the left side, if we stopped using that left strain, then the force that was keeping the hip aligned to the left stops acting, so the hip should tilt to the right. However, we said earlier that a strain in one joint is associated in strains in all other joints, and in general whatever happens at one joint will affecct all others. So if the hip tilts, we expect corresponding tilts in all other joints, propagated by the muscles changed tension. Hence overall, muscular relaxation has to be a full body phenomenon in which the joints tilt to some direction that deviates from neutral alignment. The direction to which they tilt is always opposite to the strain. 

Finally, there's another caveat: that you don't know to which direction the joints would tilt. In the case I showed, it's trivial to say "if the hip has strain at the left side, upon lifting the strain, it should shift to the right". Visualizing this, a person that tries to relax his hip (which is left tilted, or left strained) should see his hip moving to the right. This should happen regardless of if the person knows or not that his hip is left tilted: even if you don't know it's left tilted, it should still move to the right. It doesn't make sense that the direction to which the hip tilts on relaxation depends on what you think should happen, because it's a completely mechanical thing that only depends on what the strains of your body muscles are. So on relaxation, a joint should tilt to a direction that is independent of one's thoughts, driven purely by mechanics, "on its own": an involuntary motion. Muscular relaxation should involve a tilt of all the joints, in an involuntary manner, each to a direction which is unpredictable: your hip may left rotate or right rotate, or front or back rotate; the arms may innerly or outerly rotate, the neck could look to the left or right, or whatever. We don't know the direction chosen so you have to be open to all possible motions that each joint can do. Whatever the direction is, it is the direction of relaxation (opposite to strain), the joints will naturally choose those tilts, however complex or unpredictable they are, upon lifting the strain.

Continuing, an idea from physical therapy is that a tight muscle is caused by a corresponding muscle that is weak and doesn't support the joint well, so another muscle strains to compensate.  We adapt this to a more "global" way of thinking: it doesn't make sense for a muscle to be weak in isolation. That deficit in strength or tension must be felt in the rest of the body, and affect all other tensions, so the imbalance must be felt at every joint. If a muscle at the hand is weak, a muscle at the forearm is also weak, and the arm, trunk, legs, head, and so on. It's not isolated weak muscles but chains of weak muscles covering the entire body. Similarly, there is no isolated tight muscle, as we said, but chains of tight muscles covering the body too. The idea of a "muscle straining to compensate for a weak muscle" has to be replaced accordingly, and we think that there's long chains of weak muscles in the body, that make other long chains of muscles to strain in compensation. As we said, a tight muscle can't relax in isolation, since it always belongs to a longer chain covering the body, all their tensions entangled. If we want to do muscle relaxation or de-straining (the ultimate goal), we can only relax whole chains of muscles (relax the full body simultaneously), and not a single muscle. Finally, the same happens with strengthening: one can't strengthen one weak muscle without strengthening all other weak muscles in the chain too.

Now let's think on what to do to de-strain (relax) those tight muscles chains. First of all we forget about figuring out what those chains are, because whatever they are, they must be extremely intricate, just as extremely intricate as the tilts. That means we'd need to know how a weakness at a small muscle at the hand (say the flexor policis brevis) correlates with a weakness of a muscle at the foot (say the abductor hallucis), and so on for all joints and tissues at the trunk and full body in simultaneous. Needless to say, this is obviously impossible, it seems as we need infinite knowledge for that. Although we assume such correlations exist, the complexity of the muscular system is overwhelming and our current knowledge is severely lacking in comparison. But if it seems we need infinite knowledge to solve a question, maybe the question is indeed impossible, or maybe it's framed in the wrong way :) So we try to go in another way, and give up on trying to decipher these impossible correlations (by the way, obtaining information about structural muscular issues of patients through many means, being imaging, touch and other means, to later design a treatment, is what the medical industry tries to do. What I'm saying is that all that is futile, it's not a problem that is feasible, and given the extreme lack of progress so far, I don't know if even in a 100 or 1000 years we'd get there this way).

One other thing associated to a stronger relaxation effect is a massage. You could think, well, just smash that muscle (say the tight trapezius) hard with a tennis ball and it feels oh so niiiice. But we have to adapt this to our global way ot thinking. So should think, wait, if all muscles tensions are interconnected, it's not possible to relax a muscle individually, so such a massage should change the tensin of the trap, and should propagate to all other muscles. If such effect exist, and say massaging the trapezius changes the tension at some muscle in my foot, it must manifest itself as my foot moving to a side, or arching, or some kind of contraction or movement. Same for all other joints. Similarly, the force propagated from the trap is a "dead" force, purely mechanical, not a voluntary thing we're doing, so when it reaches the foot, the foot should move to some direction on its own, purely by this dead force. So this is just relaxation (an involuntary tilt of all joints) that we argued earlier but for a massage. Now we have to ask if such effect exists, how much time does it take for a relaxation of the trapezius to be felt at the foot, given it's a distance away? The muscular fibers are solids, and tensions propagate fast in a solid, so we assume it is, in practice, instantaneous. So pretty much as soon as the trapezius relaxes, the foot must switch position abruptly, almost like a reflex response, and all the other joints too, all at the same exact second. 

A few notes about this. First, the way the joints would switch would be deviations from the normal alignment that you joints have, through the reflexes, which btw, tend to look erratic or spasmic. A way to think about this is that there is an underlying tendency of the body to shift to another position, or equivalently the muscles to change to another (more relaxed) tension, and those underlying forces are purely mechanical, erratic and shoot to unpredictable directions, so to say, in contrast with the smooth normal-aligned appearance we always have (it is the normal smoothed appearance which is artificial! Driven by pure mechanics your muscles are overwhelmingly likely to choose any kind of weird movement). Having one foot point to the side, and another to the front, having a shoulder shrugged, the other elbow lifted up and the neck rotated to the side is an example. So it'd look really awkward, twisted, erratic and disfunctional. One subconsciously would return to the normal alignment as soon as you want to walk or someone else watches you. So if this thing exists, it'd only be a temporary state of a few seconds or less than a minute at most, and breaks as soon as you want to walk, as your body would return to using the usual strain with the normal-looking alignment again. You can think of it in this way too: the body, purely mechanically, tends to converge to that relaxed state, but such state is very disfunctional, so we subconsciously try to fight it back. An obvious example is if you tried to destabilize your hip, you'd naturally collapse to the ground, but you'll prevent this from happening, so you may fall for a split second and then in a reflex, strain to put yourself upright again, or you will smash your face to the ground. 

Another point is that this relaxation has a temporary effect, it feels nice for a bit, but it doesn't solve any issues long term. Whatever structural issues that you body has will barely be affected by a stimulus like a massage. A permanent relaxation would need to change the balance of forces in your body, some kind of strengthening that say stabilizes your hip with actual muscle, and not some temporary nice-feel patch which leaves your body the same. So we make this distinction of temporary relaxation (a massage, and the muscles tighten again quickly after the nice effect runs out) and permanent relaxation (in which you actually stabilize a joint, and the strain is permanently eliminated). Still, we'll need this later on.

So we touched on temporary relaxation, but what we ultimately seek is permanent relaxation beyond a temporary relief. Relaxation is hopefully a strengthening of some kind, that targets the chains of muscles that are weak with as much precision as possible, so that in response the tight muscles stop straining, as they're no longer needed for support. We said we don't know what those weak muscles are and we better give up on it because it's so extremely complex. What we could use instead is the fact that we sort of already know how to relax the body, if only temporarily: we know if the strain is lifted, we get a temporary, synchronized, involuntary tilt of all the body joints and bones, with a corresponding shift of muscle tensions, which tends to dissipate after some seconds. In this state, the configuration of the muscles are more relaxed, which is precisely what we want, but the effect vanishes quick, so in the end we're back to the usual pain. How do we make this state more permanent? We could, naively and quite vagely, try to "strengthen this state", say do a contraction while the body is temporarily in this de-strained state The logic is that, usually, the weak muscles are supressed and remain weak because the strained muscles are taking over their role. But if the strained muscles are temporarily supressed and then we do a contraction, the weak muscles will have to fire to compensate for the missed strength of the strained muscles. Then over the days those weak muscles strengthen with added mass, and the corresponding strained muscles should relax. This should make the joints to progressively innerly tilt to the new more relaxed state as the transition happens. In a few days the body state should be more "self-held" by the new muscle and the strains gone permanently (since the new muscle will stay there forever), the permanent relaxation that we seek. So this is the idea: given we know how the temporary relaxation works, try to do weightlifting in the short lapse that relaxation happens.

Well, there is a big issue with the implementation. As we said our bodies tend to strain back and break this temporary state quickly, specially if we want to do a task like walking, or any other task that requires some strength. Weightlifting requires much more strength than walking, so as soon as you want to lift a weight, the relaxed state collapses immediately, and you end up doing normal weightlifting. The goal is to see if there's a way to make the relaxed state to be more robust or stable under heavy force like weightlifting. We don't need it to last that long, only the seconds that the weightlifting lasts. We seek to have as much contraction as possible without the state to collapse, ideally to allow for the same intensity as say powerlifting. So this is the layout, but to get there explicitly first we need to go back to relaxation and complete a few ideas.

III: The Relaxation Mechanism

We said that relaxation should involve a temporary shift in all the joints, but this in itself is incomplete. The thing is, if say your neck tilts to the left, you expect this force to propagate down to the feet and say make the right foot to tilt outwards. But this propagation has to be pass through the trunk, which has muscles like the breathing or spinal ones, also the ones at the blades, core and such, and all of them should also be affected by this propagating force. If they don't "shift" in some way, then the force is not propagating and it won't reach the feet or any other joint. Overall there are many body parts that are trickier to imagine than just the arms or elbows. Let's start with the easier ones: the body peripheries like the feet and hands. The joints are also free to move in whatever way, it could be fingers adduction or abduction, close or open fist, any combination of fingers lifting up or flexing down, the wrist rotating in any direction. In the feet only, there can be arches archings or flattenings, or grips with the plant. In the hands only, there can be a lot of possible ways in which the fingers can be positioned, like those yoga poses (mudras) or the middle finger sign, or the rock n' roll sign, whatever. These ones are not that hard to imagine. 

Now for the trickier ones there is the face and neck, and all the trunk things like the thorax and its muscles, the spine, hip, pelvis and so on. It's a lot indeed but we can guide ourselves with our"let's consider all the possible movements a joint can do" principle of earlier and apply it to these more weird cases. On the face, there are all the possible ways the muscles can contract, which can make all sorts of grins, eyebrows frowning or not, nose contracting up like a rabbit or not, the jaw opening or closing, mouth pouts or strong smiles, cheek inflating and whatever, even ears lifting and such. The eyeballs have to be affected too, since it's held by inner muscles which control its motion, and also the tongue. The eyeballs muscles shifting should have some effect on vision, and could move in whatever way, which we said should deviate from the neutral position, which in this case is centered and focussed. So the eyes are free to point towards any direction, they can in general move chaotically (nystagmus), and vision is certain to be affected here, it can look chaotic and even defocus. The tongue can go out or in, move to any side, it can roll to the front, or whatever. It's not hard to imagine but it's easy to miss out on the tongue.

On the outer thoracic muscles like the pectoralis majors or the latissimus dorsi, trapezius, abdominals and such, and the corresponding ribcage and spine, we can expect the ribcage to go up and down, bend side to side, or rotate axially, which will make the muscles to either shorten or lengthen (changing their tensions, as we said) to some direction. Shoulders can shrug or not. The spine can bend front and back, or side to side, or rotate axially, at many parts of it  (at the hip-lumbar, or thorax, or neck), and with it the ribcage moves and muscles move as well. Given the hip also can move in any direction, at the interior there is the pelvic floor, and it should be free to contract (clench) or not too. So far it's all purely joint-mechanical, but now, the thorax and core muscles changing their tensions should have an effect in the lungs air pressure, since they surround it tightly (and the diaphragm attaches to the ribcage, after all), so any change in tension in these muscular walls should make the inner pressure to change. So it should involve things dealing with air, lungs and throat, like expulsing or inhaling of air, and coughing. With coughing could probably come other weird throat things like hiccups, swallowing, vomiting(retching) motions and such. We can expect a suction or vaccuming type of force at the throat too, and analogously also at the core (stomach vacuums). 

Well, at this point it's getting quite tricky, and one could wonder if it's possible to find all the required motions for all the body parts. It seems we really can't miss a single piece, and they're so many and so intricate! Fortunately for us, as you involve more and more of these motions, they naturally start unlocking the other remaining ones, because the forces will propagate there on their own. So we get the others by "completeness". This is how, say, things like retching are found out. If say you try to propagate a force from the neck to say the hip, at the beginning you fail every time, but every once in a while, very rarely and weakly, you may feel like a cough or vomit sensation. If you notice this and think "oh, maybe it's not just a weird coincidence but it's related to the other motions", and then try to induce the retching on purpose, then the propagation becomes better and stronger, and you learn to always do this from now on. You keep doing this and find out new motions, the contractions keep getting better and you feel better. So you persist until you have all of them (this is not so much scientific as it is survival, because by that point you're already tasting the recovery, but it's incomplete and you crash back, as I wrote in earlier posts. So you really want to nail this thing down and get rid of the excruciating sickness). The propagation then goes from being very weak and rare to something more systematic which is what we seek. 

All this preamble is to complete our search with the last motion, which is spinal shivering. This is among the most central because it lets the forces to propagate through the spine, connecting all the peripheries together, but at the same time it's really hard to guess because it's nothing like the others. Indeed it is not guessed, but obtained by completeness: if you have almost every other piece, and keep practicing this, sometimes you feel a bit of shivering. If you notice this and try to shiver on purpose (while you do all the others) the propagation is much better, so you learn to incorportate it from now on. Shivering and retching are probably the most important of all this thing, because they move the very big muscles at the trunk along with the very heavy spine. 

Given this shivering component, we could see the trick in another way. We said that a completely relaxed hip would twist and fall to the ground. However we could also think that instead of falling, another muscle could pick up the force that the hip stopped doing. A common muscle which tends to activate for example are the traps. In this way we remain standing, just with an altered force distribution (the hip is temporarily relaxed and twisted, and the traps temporarily contract). The way we pass the force from the hips up to the traps is by shivering, so the mechanism can be seen as letting the hip collapse and at that exact moment, shiver the force up to the spine to the rest of the body. In this way we remain standing and ready to do a Squat but with the altered force distribution, something we couldn't do if we just let ourselves drop to the floor. 

So I guess this completes the relaxation section. In summary, we got to a complete relaxation mechanism of the muscular system (at this point it is really a mechanism, because it got so damn complex, but it started as a naïve guess, ain't it crazy?). It consists of doing all kind of ugly reflex things like spinal shivers, retching/gags, stomach vacuuming, breathing expansion or exhalation, pelvis clenches, eye chaotic motions, defocusing and openings/closings, all sorts of face grins with jaw openings or closings, all tongue positions (out, in, sides, rolling), and in the rest of the joints (neck, elbows, wrists, knees, ankles, hip), all possible combinations which usually are side-to-side, front-back and axial rotations. All of these have to be done at the same time, or almost at the same time, and the combination you'll get is always unpredictable. As if the joints had a logic of their own, the joints and muscles will always converge autonomously to the right combination by the path of least resistance.

IV: Stimulus aid and the trick

There's just one simple missing ingredient, which is the need of a massage, an actual physical stimulus. The issue is, even if you get this relaxation mechanism, although it is reliable, it is very weak on its own. One can do things like light band work with this, but for stronger weights the state collapses very fast. So we seek to make the relaxation more intense and robust to handle greater weights. This is kind of ad hoc, but it turns out that a massage or pressure point creates this effect, assuming one does the relaxation thing simultaneously. For example, if one tried to just do everything without the pressing point, we would start with the trap relaxing to a more shrugged state, but this would happen weakly, and the propagation to the other joints is also weak and unstable/shaky. Pressing on the trap itself relaxes the fibers there much more strongly (like an order of magnitude more or so), and similarly, the propagation to the rest of the body is just as strong. 

Two questions that one could ask is, first, in which points do we need to press, and then how strong do we need to do it. About the first, one could think we should massage or release the tightest points. It turns out that you don't need this, any point is useful, but some points create a stronger effect than others. It just seems that some points are more sensitive than others, and you should look for the ones that on pressing, generate the stronger relaxation effect. You know this if you feel a stronger propagation and erraticness, say if you press on the trap and then see the foot switching more abruptly. There's no a priori way to know which precisely are these points, you only know by trying many and looking for the best reactions. Also, it seems that you can always find sensitive points in any given muscle (this is just experimental, but it seems to be because the strains in all muscles are connected, all part of the same chain, so you can press on any giving the same result). If this is true, then we should choose the easiest muscles to tap on, because tapping say the feet plants, although valid, is very awkward, and tapping an arm point gives just the same effect. On the second point, one could think that the stronger the pressure, the greater the stimulus, but pressing strongly with a hand can also tighten the hand itself, killing the effect. So one has to be careful. If you try to go the other way and see how weak you can make a pressing to create the same effect, it turns out you can create very strong relaxation with just a slight press, and eventually even a rub or pinch. With enough practice is looks like doing a rub at a point and "shivering it" to the rest of the body. 

Now, once this is completed the relaxation looks like just passing forces from one (tight) muscle to another (weak one), in a very decentralized way. For example the pelvis can clench and the hip tilts posteriorly, then it makes a force to propagate up the spine through shiverings and bendings, then reaches the jaw and makes it clench or open, and this pulls the traps up (shrug), which makes the arms to rotate in a weird way, which makes the fingers to do a finger pose. The finger pose can then make a change at the shoulder, which lengthens the pecs or lats, which makes you expulse air and tightens the core, and then goes down to the legs and ankles. And from there it can come up again, and it can run in circles in all your body. Every time this happens, the relaxed state is reinforced more and more, and the weak muscle chains get very activated. In a big part, you could say that it is the thorax muscles holding the air pressure that eventually form a sort of bracing or vacuuming support, that reinforces this tremendously. And it is with this that the thing becomes strong enough to do weightlifting. Once again note the importance to have all the pieces: if one is missing, say if you clench the pelvis, let it propagate up the spine by shiverings and bendings, but then don't know that the jaw should open and keep it static, then the propagation dies there, and quickly this state collapses and is useless (it's still a cool thing though!). If you have all the pieces, it can keep propagating around, reinforcing the relaxed state a lot more.

To finish this stimulus section, I have to explain how it looks in the end in an actual setting like the gym. The strategy consists of triggering the relaxation mechanism just before lifting a weight, try to get the stronger effect, and as soon as you have it, lift as strongly as you can without losing the effect. The window to do this is really, really short, because the relaxed state tends to collapse fast, but with practice it's something you can always do, it's just a bit tricky. Compound exercises like dips, chin ups, squats, deadlifts, bench press, rows and so on, are the best for strengthening. However, they're all two-handed, and we said we need a pressing point for stimulus, so one hand has to be free to do the rub. You could get away with this by trying to pinch with a hand, getting the stimulus, and then very quickly putting it back to the bar and lift, but it's too awkward at the gym and not too practical. So I thought to circumvent this, you are only left with rubs of the tongue and lips using the teeth (I tested it and worked just the same, of course it had to!). In this way you can grab the bar with both hands and pull as soon as you get stimulus. This also looks really awkward. However, since the strategy inevitably involves stupid face grins and things like your tongue pulling out while you squat, you have to wear a mask anyway, and that will cover everything. Unless you don't care about other's opinions, I don't know, I don't have that much balls! Luckily, for a good while wearing a mask was common because of Covid, so this was very easy to go unnoticed. Nowadays almost none wears them and I'm the only douche wearing one. They may just think I'm very scared of viruses, so it's fine :D 

So let's see how it finally looks, finally our instruction manual :) Let's say we do Back Squats in this style. We load the bar, and put yourself below the bar as you would for a normal squat, gripping the bar, but without lifting it yet. Now here you start the relaxation thing: let all joints move in whatever way or angle and all that (I already wrote it up there). When you include a bar though, there's the addition that now your back can press against the bar, and the hands can grip on the bar or push on it a bit too, so those are new force entry points (just like the floor is a support that allows the feet to arch or flex against it). Generally, as part of our "try different combinations of joints" philosophy, also comes trying different grips and bar positions on the bar (High, Normal and Low bar). Sometimes a low bar gives the best effect, sometimes the high, it depends and is always unpredictable. Trying all these may take 30 seconds if you get it right a first time, but may take a minute or more too. 

When you get the effect, you know because some part of the body will tend to strengthen or maybe vibrate in a shaky way. A common one is that the tongue will start rolling up with strength with an open mouth, the eyes look up stupidly like this, and correspondingly the stomach starts doing a vacuum (it feels as if the tongue rolling pulls on the stomach vacuuming). When you get it, you start unracking the bar (if you got the tongue roll thing, it'd look like trying to unrack at the same time that the tongue rolls the strongest, and then keeping it rolled up the whole set) and see if the state doesn't collapse, because the greater weight sometimes does it. If it doesn't then you walk back (being cautious not to brake the state, so the least you walk the better) and proceed to Squat, trying to hold this state in all the set (which means you Squat with a vacuumed stomach and rolled up tongue in this example, and you feel a really good hit at the inner core muscles and/or tissue). The best sets are those in which this holding is the most constant. However, the state can also collapse partially mid-set (a sign is that the stomach vacuum stops, or say a joint subluxes suddenly, and then the reps feel cranky instead of smooth), so it's not that perfect, but mostly it's still good. If the state collapses when you lift the bar (you know because say, the tongue stops rolling and your belly stops vacuuming, so you miss the synchronization with lifting the bar), then you just rerack and try again until you get it. 

We're pretty much over, since the rest is just spamming this same trick over and over. Doing many sets with whatever routine you want, just doing this small ritual before each set. The tricky thing is that the adjustments that you need to do can be different each time (it's not always the tongue roll and stomach vacuum thing). Sometimes the trick you used for the previous sessions is not as useful anymore. You notice because the quality of your sets worsens, the state collapses more frequently and your joints pop more, so you need a better adjustment. You just have to be playful and find a new adjustment. I guess there is much to talk about what set is the most optimum, or if it should depend on your imbalance (say if you should do more arms exercises if you have elbows issues, or squats if you knees or hip issues, or why if we should do specific exercises for a joint like neck or eye contractions). There's an endless debate on which routine and exercises are best and I won't delve in it. I just thought that since all imbalances are connected, a neck issue must be connected to a trunk or leg imbalance. So in the end it's better to tackle the bigger muscles imbalances, and these are the legs, trunk and arm ones. The other small muscles will be trained too anyway as they contract to assist the movement. So a routine that covers the major muscle groups is ideal. Squats are an easy choice since they cover the legs and spine the best. The other exercises need to include a pull and push to train the chest and back, so I just chose rows and bench press. These 3 do a good job but anyone could try different things.

Update

Phew! That was such a long ass explanation! So now I can go on, finally, to the update of what has happened in the last 2 months. This time I don't have such good news. I was going to write some weeks before, but my condition started deteriorating and I got in a rough situation a week ago. I felt that horrible fibro-like strain that I had not felt in over a year, the left body radiation worsened a lot, I felt that ugly brainfog again and I had to stop my language studies (it was impossible to focus), hanging out and everything to just rot on my bed once again. It genuinely felt like I lost a year of progress, I haven't felt so shitty in a long while (although it was still nothing like the bad flares of before, and I could walk just fine, so compared to that hell of December 2020 it's not much, but still). My mom got worried and I felt so bad for that, because I've always reassured her that things will be alright, but this thing is just so long and impossible, ugh, well just gotta be patient.

Actually this didn't start just a week ago. Looking back, it started to feel off roughly a month ago in mid-January. I started to get some body fatigue when going upstairs and also head dizziness which was quite odd, because I had not felt something like this in many months. But I took it as part of the process (sometimes thinks feel shitty for a bit but it improves later on). Around that time I had an appointment with a doctor because I needed a new justification (signed by a doc) to have a renewed medical withdrawal this semester (this is another funny thing, I almost missed the deadline because I'm an idiot, and could have lost my Visa, but it all went alright in the end. I literally got the signature the day of the deadline). She did many tests and to my surprise, her pressure of many muscle spots hurt (and she of course suggested fibromyalgia). This had stopped being a problem more than a year ago, I didn't have the strained/sensitive spots at the end of 2021, but now body was sensitive again. Over the days, focusing on languages (which was going at an intense pace until then) became harder and harder. It became more intermittent, I started feeling more brainfucked and then the last week I stopped studying them altogether, it was just impossible. I only realized there was something very wrong the last week when things became intense. Now this is something very odd, because since 2021 it had only been a consistent improvement without fail. I first thought that maybe it was some new exercises that I tried or that the weight was too high and harsh on my joints, so I tweaked it a bit, but overall the condition kept degenerating no matter what I did. So it was not the exercises. 

The answer turned out to be a really silly thing: my hair had gotten too long and it started rubbing my neck nerves, getting them all irritable (apparently disturbing all my nervous system or something). I've had this issue of a nerve-sensitive neck since way earlier (whenever it got rubbed it tended to get me all sick and fibro-strained), I already knew, but I got lazy with the hair, and how could I suspect it could have such a horrendous effect when compounded with the exercise? When I became convinced it was that, I cut it and everything started to feel nicer immediately. I went to the gym and the session had the same strong curative effect it had before. So I started recovering very recently, just a few days ago, and luckily it's quite fast, but still, it may take a week or two more to return to where I was before this disaster. The fibro thing is very decreased now and I'm much less brainfogged and sick, studying some languages again. I'm just saddened that I just lost an entire month and suffered unnecessarily for something so stupid. I get some consolation by the fact I know long hair matters a lot, I got an estimate of how many weeks the exercise is effective before it turns dangerous (around 12 weeks), the idea that women possibly may suffer more because they have long hair (so even if they tried this exercise, if they have the same hypersensitivity issue as me, it may turn out to be useless), among other things. A reminder that this is why the news of the clear EMG months ago wasn't so magic. The tests may be fine, but I know I still have neuropathy and am at the mercy of the nerves if I'm not cautious.

Aside from this, I mentioned last time that I had a red spot showing up at my front neck, and that it was a new type of circulatory event, the first in a very long time. Well, this trend continued in the last 2 months, more and more red spots appeared mainly at the front neck, sternum and upper core. They also became bigger and wider and cover a greater part of the trunk, but nothing is permanent, so far it feels like the skin gets flushed with that blood thing, but then disappears after a few days at most. Then a bit later, new spots (or better said, blood pattern) appear, and so on, appearing and disappearing in a kinda unpredictable fashion. The trend is that these spots have gotten bigger and wider (going from spots here and there to covering full areas of my trunk), and have gone lower and lower (it started at the neck, and now 2 months later they reach my navel). You can also see in the photos that the red flow mark from the neck follow the same lines as the carotid or jugular, which is super nice! I've taken photos whenever these show up, of course. Now, I used to think this "blood flush" was a good thing, but it coincided with with my health decay in the last month. So in the end I'm not sure anymore. When I started recovering recently, a big part of the brainfrog decrease was from a feel of bloodflow going to my left head through my left neck. So I wonder if what happened in the last month was that the blood that flushed my trunk in part came from my head, and the lack of head circulation ended up brainfucking me, so the red marks were not a good thing in the end. Finally, there was no red cheek improvement so far, I'm sad to say.

About the other thing I mentioned, being the hair growth, well, not much happened here actually. I had a realization from looking at earlier photos, that these new back hair spots were not recent. Two spots at the lumbar sides grew a year ago at the end of 2021(!!), and another spot at the neck hump grew a few months ago in 2022. It's just I only saw them recently when my mom told me and then took a photo, since I can't look at my back very easily :P I notice that these weeks there are a few hairs growing on my shoulders, and by now there are quite a few there (whereas before, I had nothing). It's interesting but it doesn't look nice at all. 

On the neuropathy, well, the lumbar nerves have kept unpinching just as before until a month ago when it started going to crap, so I'm still neuropathic. This makes it around 4 months since I have the clear EMG. What this means is that there is a lot of neuropathy that the test doesn't capture. There is a gap of neuropathic pain with clear EMG tests, and also with undetectable hypermobility (if I went to the doc right now, they'd say I have nothing), and it's turning out to be many months long. I was expecting something like this, because many people have neuropathic pain and then are dumbfounded when their exams come out clear, so all makes sense. 

To end this post, I must say I feel a bit anguished lately, mainly because it's 2023 and I feel closer to the end date of August, at which I'll have to come back to the PhD or lose it. It feels much more pressuring than last year where I felt I had all the time of the world. There's only 6 months left, I'm not sure if it's enough for this thing. If I'm still crappy by then I'll have to drop it (I don't want to return with neuropathy, it'll only be another disaster), and I don't know what to do in that case. What would I do in Peru? Hopefully I'm not too far. Time passes and it's also been years since I last studied physics intensely, I'm just so screwed, and getting rusty while I'm here all stuck. It'd be sad to lose the quantum gravity PhD, but well, who says life is fair? Maybe the anguish is just because of this temporary drawback and it'll feel better in some weeks, hopefully! 

And to close, a moment of catharsis. Fuck this disease, and fuck all doctors who say it's not real or it's psychosomatic. Of course there are a lot of compassionate and honest docs, even if they can't do much to help us. But some others just add to the stigma and makes the lives of us sufferers impossible. Just look at threads like this, so many treat us like fakers and Munchausens, have depression or a mental or somatic illness, or say it's just neurotic older women being paranoid (sadly for them, I'm a young male physicist :p). Just because they don't know how to untighten a tight muscle or unpinch a pinched nerve and they only give you Voltaren and charge you 500 bucks for that (wtf doctors, seriously?). When I'm cured of hypermobility and neuropathy I'll party the whole year and none will stop me, fuck it. 

...

I forgot to explain the title. It makes reference to the 8 Inner Gates in Naruto (a popular anime), as explained by Kakashi in the epic fight of Rock Lee vs Gaara. In this fictitious Naruto world, the 8 Inner Gates control the flow of chakra (a sort of energy, like Qi) across your body, and are located in many important points like the head, spine and heart. Someone who knows how to "open" the gates can obtain superhuman strength by making more chakra to flow around. You can only unlock them one by one from the 1st, then 2nd, and all the way to the 8th in order. Well, when I told some weeb friends about the Hypermobility syndrome thing, some would say "Dude, that's so cool, it's like the 8 inner gates!". I thought hey, that's a cool analogy! Just like the 8 gates, the Anatomy Reconstruction also has a step-by-step activation order, just of muscle groups and not chakras. There is also a skin red coloring from the increased blood pump/decompressed blood vessels, just like when you enter the Hidden Lotus in the Third Gate, the Gate of Life. Get rid of chakra and put nerves and electric conduction instead, and there you have it! 

Now we should wonder, in our version of The Gates, what would happen when you open all of them? (i.e. complete all the muscular structure). In the Naruto version, a person obtains superhuman powers, but then dies from the superhuman exertion. Our version has a much happier finale: you don't die (or well, so I hope), rather, I guess it should imply that all nerves and other structures are decompressed and healthy again. Getting rid of all those ailments, and ultimately, making you a normal person. Of course for you normal peeps this is nothing... but for a chronically impaired person like me, that is indeed superhuman! Right now I'm still crappy and can't wrap my mind around how being neuropathy-free would feel like. But at least I can be proud of what I've advanced, and it always feels awesome to shout

SARANI, DAI YON NO MON, SHO MON, KAI!!!

Point aside... the Gates analogy is because there has to be a way to brand this thing better. I realized I am just horrible at PR and marketing. How can naturopaths charge thousands for shit that doesn't work? Saying things like "Improve vision and cure your pain using this special Holistic Bio-Energetic Therapy" and people somehow buy it. Doctors are not much better, either. Here finally there is something that actually works and is free, but... none will do it. I thought maybe I'm saying it too straightforwardly. When I comment it to someone, I say it's a lifting trick or lifting algorithm. Or just a way or method to unpinch nerves. Maybe that sounds too boring compared to all the Holistic Energetic bullshit and none cares. If I try to push it, people actually resist it or get weirded out, every time I've tried to spread it. Wtf people? Hopefully the 8 Gates adds more mystical thematic that can resonate, specially for weebs.

Anyway, I think that's it for today.

Till next time !