Many of us do some kind of regular exercise, whether for general health and wellbeing, enjoyment, strength, flexibility and range of movement, or for all of these reasons. Sadly, the exercise which we hope will improve our health, can also occasionally lead to injury, pain and discomfort.
As an Alexander Technique teacher, I often help people discover how to do their exercises more effectively and more safely. Whether it’s running, gym, swimming, or exercises from a physiotherapist – when we do anything repetitively with force, it’s easy to put unnecessary stress and strain on ourselves.
A significant proportion of the effort that people make during exercise tends to be wasted and even counter-productive. To give one easy-to-see example, when lifting a weight, screwing up the face doesn’t directly contribute to effectiveness, so why do we do it? Much less obvious is how we tend to ‘over-do’ with most of our muscles, or at least all those that are primarily there for ‘moving and doing’, and in pretty well every activity, not just exercise. In other words, we tend to ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at everything we do. How much effort does it take to turn a key in a lock, or to type on a keyboard? Most people will use considerably more than needed. Partly this is because if you do more than needed, then you’re guaranteed to get the job done – you don’t need to think about it. If we’re constantly tensing ourselves up more than is needed, it’s going to be putting unnecessary stress and strain on our joints, spine and tissues. What we call muscular tension is simply too much muscular tone for what is needed at that moment.
From an Alexander Technique perspective, we’re interested in using a more appropriate amount of muscular tone throughout our whole self for whatever the task in hand is. Through Alexander lessons we can achieve a better balance of muscle tone throughout and this usually involves developing our postural muscle tone, while not leaving the main ‘moving and doing’ muscles in a permanent state of over-doing. Even small steps towards restoring this balance can make a big difference, both in terms of effort and injury prevention.
It is usually a surprising and intriguing experience for someone in an Alexander lesson when they find they can carry out an activity with less effort than they would usually put into it. In fact, this is one of the reasons that learning the Alexander Technique requires quite a mind-shift. We are used to ‘working hard’, so if we don’t feel like we’re making effort it’s really hard to believe that we’re exercising properly. If it feels easy then we’re clearly not trying hard enough! So, it can be useful to question what ‘trying hard’ means? It generally translates into a lot of muscular tension. Of course, to do any kind of action requires muscular tone but we tend to over-do. Of course, once you start applying the Alexander Technique to exercise, it doesn’t actually make it effortless, it can just feel that way because you’re noticing the difference from the old way of doing it. So, for the same amount of work put in, you’ll get more out.
Another mind-shift that we make in learning the Alexander Technique is placing more emphasis on how we carry out an activity – we’re used to putting all our focus on the task in hand but not so much on what we’re doing with ourselves in the process. We learn how to look after ourselves better in whatever we’re doing, whether it’s lifting weights at the gym, walking up the stairs or drinking a cup of tea.
When we learn the Alexander Technique, we discover how to restore our natural, inherent coordination of ourselves. Underlying this improved coordinated use, is the dynamic relationship between our head, neck and torso. Like any other vertebrate, this constitutes our central coordinating axis but as humans living in the today’s world, we are all unintentionally interfering with this relationship through our habitual ways of moving and responding. We tend to over-use most of our muscles. We can sometimes experience this as tension, particularly around the neck and shoulder area but, because it’s something that is always there, we often remain unaware of it.
Through a course of Alexander lessons we discover, through the hands-on practical experience combined with our own thinking, how we can enliven our postural support and let go of unnecessary muscle tension elsewhere. It is this unique combination of practical experience during an Alexander lesson, with new thinking skills that enables us to begin to own it for ourselves, translating what happens in a lesson into our daily lives, including when we exercise.
For me, the best kind of exercise is the one or ones that you enjoy doing. With the Alexander Technique exercise we can stay fit and enjoy our exercise even more!