Be careful with hot yoga. I have had friends who felt so loosened up when it was hot that they overstretched and did damage to their muscles. I personally enjoy it, but am aware of that temptation to overdo it.
Balance always was and still is my nemesis — I was a gymnast and acrobat, and I could do a better job of balancing on my hands than I could on one foot. To this day I still feel a twinge of terror when I am in a yoga class and the teacher announces time to balance.
Ah, that Achilles tendon! I have been in the process of redesigning and rebuilding my right foot/ankle/leg/hip for several years now, and it has been a perilous process. The body is always changing, and if you give it the right inputs it can fix itself. Bunions? I wasn’t born with those bunions — years of the wrong inputs shaped my body that way, and if I can find the right inputs and apply them religiously then they can be shaped away.
Anyway, in the process of rebuilding my gait I have had numerous setbacks related to my various tendons in my feet and ankles as I have a tendency to go too hard too fast; something I think also characterizes you, so please be on guard.
My own Achilles has been chirping the last day or two — it gets a pretty extreme workout in ballet class, and then there was that 3 mile trudge up 1000 feet yesterday — and I am going to give it some rest today. Sometimes that is all you need to do, and if you had just taken a day off here and there from your kick-boxing you might have not had to quit.
That being said, each of the times that I have overdone it or had setbacks have, in the long run, had positive effects. It’s the getting up when you are knocked down that makes us stronger in the end. You know that!!
Here’s my last debacle related to going too hard:
