Quin

Test it: sit on the floor with your back against a wall and your legs straight out in front. If you cannot sit with the low back touching the wall and the pelvis upright without bending your knees, hamstrings are the limiter. If you can sit upright there easily and still round in a standing fold, it is more about how you are moving than how long anything is. Six months with no change usually means you are stretching at the wrong end — most people hang passively in the fold, which stretches the low back rather than the hamstrings. Hinge from the hip with a flat back and stop where the back starts to round. That point is your working range and it will move.

Then work there: seated, folded blanket under the sit bones to tilt the pelvis forward, and hinge. The blanket is what turns it into a hamstring stretch instead of a back stretch.

Mine went from needing a rich conditioner to needing almost none within a few months and no product change explained it.

Blocks and a strap, and given you mentioned not being flexible it is not close. Blocks are the most useful prop by a distance because they bring the floor up to you in half the standing poses, and a strap replaces the belt for anything where you cannot reach your feet. A bolster is lovely and you can fake one with a rolled duvet or two firm cushions almost perfectly. You cannot fake a block with books, because books slide and have no grip.

It is a books problem. Cork blocks grip both the floor and your hand, and it changes how confidently you can lean into them.

They mask the symptom without changing the load distribution, and you carry the same habits into every other pose. Fix the alignment first.

Spreading the fingers is only half of it, and the half people miss is where your weight sits. Most beginners are too far forward, so the shoulders end up over the hands and everything lands in the wrist crease. Try these in order:

• Walk your feet back until your ears are between your arms and your hips are the highest point. If you look like an upside down V rather than a plank with a raised backside, weight comes off the hands immediately.
• Press the base of the index finger down deliberately. Most people press the outer edge and the heel, which loads the joint directly.
• Rotate the upper arms outward slightly so the inner elbows face forward. That engages the shoulder to carry load instead of dumping it into the wrist.
• Bend the knees. Tight hamstrings tip the pelvis and push weight forward into the hands, and almost everyone bends the knees far less than they should.
  If it still hurts, spend two weeks doing it on your forearms in dolphin instead and let your shoulders get strong enough to hold the weight where it belongs.

It is the opposite of cheating. Straight legs with a rounded lower back is the compromised version. Bent knees with a long spine is the actual pose.

There is also a transition period where you are still washing out the previous product's residue. The first two washes after any switch are usually the worst ones, and people quit at exactly that point.

Bleached hair does genuinely benefit from protein, so do not swear off it forever. The mistake is frequency, not the ingredient. I do one treatment every fourth wash and moisture in between, and my ends stopped snapping.

That is the whole pose. From here it is only holding it longer and rounding the upper back more.

It is almost never strength, it is that you have not shifted enough weight forward and your body knows it. The second foot will not leave the floor while your centre of mass is still behind your hands, because from there lifting it means falling backwards. Two changes: get the knees higher up the arms, closer to the armpit than the elbow, and lean forward until you feel the heels start to lift on their own. Fear of face planting is what stops the lean, so put a cushion in front of your head — once the consequence is embarrassing rather than painful, most people find the pose within two sessions.

You are disturbing it while it dries, and the fix is to stop touching it entirely until it is bone dry with a hard cast. Apply product to soaking wet hair, not damp. Scrunch once. Then do not touch, do not fluff, do not check — the gel needs to form a shell, and every touch before that breaks a clump permanently. Once fully dry, scrunch the cast out with a little oil on your palms.

Which is why a diffuser matters more than any product here. Low speed, medium heat, hover until about 80 percent then let it finish — 20 minutes for me instead of three hours. The longer it stays damp, the more time the cuticle has to swell.

Measure something specific rather than going by feel. Fingertips to floor distance, or how far up the shin your hands reach, first thing in the morning under the same conditions. Feel is unreliable and it makes people quit at exactly the point where it starts working.