End the Neck Pain! or, Thank Goodness for Wrestling Gloves

For a week or more now, my neck and shoulders were beginning to ache again the same way they had right before I strained my neck several months ago. I'd been doing some stretching when it hurt the most, but it didn't do much. So on Monday when I woke up and could barely turn my head from side to side because I was so stiff, I was fed up*.

Mozart-Man took me to Sports Authority and I bought a pair of wrestling gloves. Yes, wrestling gloves. They're a men's small, so they fit my rather large female hands in a nice, comfy fashion. Then I went home and began to teach myself how to juggle pins**.

Now, others might disagree with me, but I find juggling pins to be much different and more difficult than juggling balls. Balls are one shape, they go up and come down relatively the same way, they are smallish-sized, and they cause little injury to oneself, surrounding furniture, or local bystanders. Pins, on the other hand, are shaped like the weird things one knocks down at a bowling alley, they flip end over end when tossed into the air (usually much more rapidly than one would like them to), are unwieldy to handle, tire out the arms much more quickly, and hurt like the dickens if you miss catching them.

That is why I needed the wrestling gloves; if you don't catch a pin in exactly the right way, the palm of your hand or your fingers or your wrist or the end of your thumb is going to smart like a sudden volt of electricity hit it. It literally tingles and makes your appendages go numb. The wrestling gloves are nice and thick, but leave the ends of your fingertips free for proper gripping. My thumbs are really the most vulnerable part of my hand now, because they often catch the brunt of the force if I mishandle a pin.

However, the gloves do not prevent any other part of my body from being damaged by an errant pin. So far, I have bruised all ten of my toes, my shins, my knees, my arms, my shoulders, and my right eye, plus given myself a bloody lip twice. These things are dangerous! Thankfully, no household items have been broken yet. I practice juggling over the couch, which catches most of what I drop, and I keep all breakable items safely away out of pin-reach.

Besides juggling, I also needed to start doing yoga again, or else all the new exercise would really kill me. So I'm doing yoga in the morning, a twenty-minute session that isn't really so much of a work-out as it is a wake-up. I'm always surprised at how much it helps ease tension and stiff/sore muscles. So the yoga, combined with the juggling, has really helped me feel better after only three days.

Maybe it's also because I'm building upper-body strength that causes my neck to not hurt so much. Now I just have to make sure I continue to do yoga/juggling several times a week in order to keep receiving the benefits. It feels weird to be juggling while there's still snow on the ground; I've always juggled in warm weather before, mainly because juggling seems more like an outdoor event. Oh well!

In other unimportant news, I'm rediscovering how amazing frozen berries are. Throw a cup of berries into a blender with some yogurt, a banana, and a bit of orange juice, and you have the best breakfast ever. Mmmmmm. All gratitude here goes to my wonderful mom, who made probably a gazillion morning smoothies for me and my sister when we were growing up : )



* My neck gets sore because I teach children six days a week, most of that time being spent bending over little guitars to fix little hands, or leaning over a music stand to point out notes. I know that some music teachers can teach while sitting down; I, unfortunately, am not one of them. Also, I get next to no exercise in the coldest winter months because I refuse to work out in a stuffy, indoor gym. If I was smart, I'd sign up for some dancing classes or something at a local studio.


** I've had the juggling pins for over six months. I intended to learn how to use them when I originally bought them at a tiny magic shop by the river running through St. Louis, but realized very quickly that I would render my hands useless if I didn't have some sort of protection. They've been sitting quietly in a corner in my living room ever since then, biding their time...