How Babies Healed My Hip

For the past two years the tweet pinned at the top of my Twitter account read “I know this is so LA but yoga is the best thing ever.” A few days ago I unpinned it.

Doing yoga with bad form for years and years is not the best thing ever. In fact it resulted in a hip injury that sidelined me from all exercise for six months. As I wrote here, the injury was pretty awful and I did not handle it well at all — especially when doctor after doctor sort of shrugged and said they didn’t know exactly what was going on but that it might (might!) go away one day.

So I was pretty desperate when I went to see Dr. Yoav Nagar a few months ago. A neighbor swore by the Israeli chiropractor/physical therapist and the office took my insurance. As we started to talk about my injury I couldn’t help but be distracted by this poster in his office.

Frankly — it looked ridiculous. This woman is imitating the baby? I was so fascinated by the oddness of the poster that I had a hard time really concentrating on what Dr. Nagar was saying until I realized he was talking about the poster.

The babies are the entire basis for his physical therapy practice. Basically, the idea goes like this: Babies across all cultures learn to sit, crawl, stand and walk the exact same way. There is something in our DNA that tells us to do these things when we’re little. Those movements put our body into perfect alignment. Our brains learn when to fire which muscles for which tasks.

And then we spend the rest of our lives fucking that up.

By going back to these baby movements and working on them as grown ups, we can fix our aching bodies, get back into alignment and learn to avoid future injury.

This idea made a lot of sense to me so I was game to try it. The first exercise he gave me involved me being on all fours and pulling my left knee forward just a tiny bit very slowly. Then doing the same on my right side.

I know — you’re laughing at me right now. But try it. The trick is — don’t move your back at all. Hold it completely still and flat so that the movement is only coming from your hip.

Chances are it’s not as easy as you thought. For me, at first, it was almost impossible. A friend summed it up by saying it was like trying to wiggle my ears. My brain was telling my hip how to move but it was not listening.

I practiced diligently every single day. A week later when I went back he was impressed by my progress and gave me some more, equally tiny exercises.

Every week I went home excited to work on my physical therapy. And the best was — I started to feel better. The pain, that had been ruling my life for so long, started to go away. I was a believer. As time went by I went back to hiking, swimming and even doing weight training, all without pain.

When a friend in another town said he had hurt his back I recommended finding someone who uses this form of therapy. But right now there aren’t that many people who do.

I feel pretty sure that’s going to change. Too often we address our physical pains without tackling the underlying problems. We stretch and move and rest and none of it does much good. By going back to the beginning and rebuilding our brains and our muscles, we can start to really heal.

I finally went back to yoga a few weeks ago but the next day my hip started hurting. When I went to Dr. Nagar he asked me to show him what I did in class. I moved into a crescent pose and twisted my upper body to the left.

“This is a very advanced move,” he said. “You will be able to do it but not yet.”

I have to admit I was crestfallen, but I couldn’t deny that the class had caused me pain. He gave me some exercises that he said would help me get into this position and I went home and started working on them right away.

I know I’m still healing and that’s something I just need to deal with. But I now feel hopeful that I’ll one day have a pain-free yoga class — thanks to the babies.