As Spenser said in the last post , we have arrived to sandstone heaven. I could not be happier. Colo

As Spenser said in the last post , we have arrived to sandstone heaven. I could not be happier. Colorado has beautiful stone and a multitude of great climbs, but Joe s Valley is just easy . Especially after a summer consisting of driving an hour and a half, hiking another hour a half, climbing, hiking over talus for a half hour, climbing, and repeating. Free camping, boulders everywhere, and a town with everything you need just a short ride away. It’s been effortless getting used to life at Joe s.
But I’m getting carried away. The point of this post is to talk about piercings! Let’s go back to where my curiosity with this began. Towards the end of our first climbing day at Left Fork, we met Mina Leslie-Wujastyk and David Mason . Mina and I started talking about physical therapy and the recurrent shoulder/neck injury she used to struggle with.
Mina s shoulder would act up, especially during training, much like my injury (similar neck pain with numbness down the arm). She went to a chiropractor in Britain misses dressy that was more on the alternative side of things and he told her that her piercings could be hindering her recovery. Piercings? Really?
Her chiropractor explained that because of the repetitive stress on her body from traveling, climbing hard, training, and so on, her immune system was already working overtime. To add the piercings on top of all that was possibly the straw that broke the camel s back, in a way. Since her immune system was constantly working to fight foreign bodies (her piercings), it was unable to properly heal her shoulder.
They followed up this discussion with proprioceptive muscle strength tests measuring how strong her arms were at opposing force with or without the specific piercings. Apparently, the difference was striking especially for the tongue ring (Mina said she had a tongue, nose, and earlobe piercings at the time) initially. Then, after a relapse, it looked as if her nose stud was also a problem. misses dressy One by one, all the piercings were gone. Since then (around the beginning of February), she was finally able to take her training to the next level and the rest is girl crushing history I m sure many of you have seen Mina’s recent sends of Tetris and Mecca .
So I know this is all sounds like airy-fairy stuff, as Mina s boyfriend, David, likes to say. But can there be some truth to it? I decided to get on the laptop at the good ol’ Food Ranch and do a bit of my own research.
I did a bit of online scouring prior to getting my tongue pierced. At that time, my research led me to the conclusion that the worst I could really end up with was a chipped misses dressy tooth or lisp. I was willing to take those chances. misses dressy As most of you already know, the exact words that you Google make a huge difference. When I started researching piercings and the effect they can have on the immune system, I was given a completely different world of information.
What Mina’s chiropractor was saying apparently makes complete sense. Piercings stress out your body and cause increased cortisol (the stress hormone) production . Pumping out cortisol is your body’s natural misses dressy reaction to a threat, but sadly our body’s flight-or-fight response can’t differentiate between a real threat (a bear attack) versus a perceived threat (a really bad day at work or a piercing). misses dressy Too much cortisol in the body is linked to weight gain, depression, and high blood pressure . Sure, I’m not worried about weight gain, depression, or high blood pressure necessarily, but continuously elevated cortisol levels inhibits the immune system while also leading to an overall cortisol depletion in your body. Low levels of cortisol can lead to low energy. A lowered immune system AND low energy?! Now this is very bad for climbing. Especially for a climbing misses dressy road trip. This just skims the surface of what elevated cortisol levels do to your body, for more check out the Wikipedia page on it.
I then did a little more digging into tongue and navel piercings misses dressy specifically, since those are the two that I am attached to, or that are attached to me, I guess. This is where we get into the more “airy-fairy stuff.” In acupuncture and related practices, such as acupressure, the tongue and navel are high-energy zones and metals (body piercings) are supposed misses dressy to be avoided because they impede energy flow . What acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine refer to as “energy balance” can be related to the balance misses dressy of our body’s misses dressy endocrine system , for those of us who do not like to use words like “energy” and “flow.”
Acupuncture regulates our body’s Qi (pronounced chi) by improving energy flow through 14 meridians, channels that carry the Qi to various organs to keep our energy fields in balance. Before many of you start to dismiss this altogether, let me remind you that acupuncture is now recognized by NIH , the W