Would you like to be able to perform your choice of exercise with efficiency and grace?
Would you like to ensure good “form” whether in the gym, jogging, swimming, stretching, walking or even in martial art forms?
Would you like to avoid strain on joints or other tissue when you exercise?
What have summer and winter Olympic athletes, marathon runners, hammer throwers, elite equestrians including Australian Olympian Mary Hannah and the entire British team, multi-disciplinarian Daley Thomson and many others in common?
They have all used the Alexander Technique to improve some aspect of the way that they function – breathing, freedom or efficiency of movement, balance, dealing with stress, aches and pains or injuries.
In the early l950s, Percy Cerutty, the celebrated and sometimes controversial athletics coach, wrote in a letter to his Alexander teacher, “Alexander is a “must” for all competing athletes. You have taught me a lot of interesting material about the correct use of the body which I have passed on in my training with marked results eliminating bad use.”
The Alexander Technique is being increasingly adopted by recreational and competitive Sports people. Athletes involved in sports as diverse as long-distance running, dressage, swimming, X-C skiing and hammer-throwing recognise the benefits that come with a training in the Alexander Technique. For Sports people these can be divided in to three categories:
- General fitness (how to avoid wasting energy);
- Technique (ensuring that you’re actually doing what you think you’re doing); and
- Avoidance of or recovery from injury (not using yourself in a way which imposes unnecessary stresses on joints or other tissue).
Economy of effort
The Technique is particularly relevant because it is directly concerned with the working of the “postural reflexes”, i.e. the mechanisms that enable us to support and balance our bodies against the ever present pull of gravity while we go about our daily activities. It addresses how to move with an economy of effort and maximise poise and balance.
How hard are you making it?
The tensions and distortions that most of us, over the years, build into our habitual way of being and which have thus slipped below the level of our conscious awareness, provide an on-going restriction to the working of these natural postural mechanisms. This restriction renders movement more effortful and less efficient than necessary and can predispose us to injury. In our sporting activities, we are coping not only with these on-going interferences, which give us our “base line” of tension, but also often with further interferences engendered by the situation, e.g. the challenges involved in learning a new skill or the pressure of competition.
In other words, we’re making hard work out of simply standing upright, before complicating things with moving.
“My brain knows what to do but my body won’t do it”
In training or competition this is often more so, at exactly the time when economy of action and an absence of tension would be most desirable. This interferes not only with our poise and coordination, but also with our perception both of our inner environment, for example failing to notice that we are tensing our shoulders or holding our breath, and of our outer circumstances, so that for example, distances seem greater, or it feels as if we have insufficient time.
Enhancing kinaesthetic awareness (awareness of one’s inner environment), and learning greater control of one’s mechanisms of balance and coordination are an enormous help in any activity.
It is not just the elite who can learn to optimise their way of working with themselves to gain that competitive edge. Sports people who have trouble improving beyond a certain level can also gain. Technical imperfections can easily be unwittingly established as part of one’s basic modus operandi, limiting further improvement. Who at some time has not said to themselves, “My brain knows what to do but my body won’t do it”?
Discovering that not trying so hard can mean moving further, faster and with less effort, often comes as a pleasant surprise to many people.
The Alexander Technique gives us some simple ground rules through which we can observe ourselves, in order to achieve a gradual general improvement in poise and coordination, as well as simultaneously supplying ourselves with conditions most conducive to the development of a skill and reducing the risk of injury.
“It’s great! It helps me keep working” B.L. – middle manager
“It helps me to think more clearly” W.G. – senior public servant
“I can control stress levels. It’s an immediate stress management technique” M.T. – mother and consultant
What creates stress in us is the way we respond to a situation, not the situation itself. Stress involves a loss of poise. Our response to a stressful situation can disturb our own balance and distort our perceptions so that problems assume greater proportions and available time appears to shrink.
How to keep a level head
The Alexander Technique provides us with a way of being conscious of our reactions and choosing when, where and how to give expression to them without being at their mercy. This enhanced awareness can help us to choose to behave differently at the moment of response to a situation. It helps us to maintain distance and perspective on a situation.
Balance, posture, muscular tension and awareness
Relationships between balance, posture, muscular tension and awareness, aspects not usually recognised as interrelated, are taken into account in The Alexander Technique.
It embodies a three-pronged approach.
It works first through the muscular system by recognising that there is a primary control of muscular tension throughout the whole body. This obviates the necessity for the individual to come to relaxation and stillness by trying to progressively and laboriously relax every muscle in turn. Then, by understanding how to make use of the “primary control” of muscular tension and releasing physical tension, one frees energy and attention. Finally, practising the Alexander Technique involves schooling one’s attention. The discipline of this centering (in the central axis of the body) helps to keep attention in the here-and-now. Furthermore, centred body awareness cues us in to when we are going off balance. The Alexander Technique offers the possibility of control in process, rather than a palliative measure in dealing with stress build-up after the event.
“You translate everything, whether physical or mental or spiritual, into muscular tension” F.M. Alexander
“People are not disturbed by events, but by their reactions to events” Epictetus, 1st Century A.D. Rome.
© Michael Stenning