Effortless movement
Those fortunate enough to have seen the Cirque du Soleil, will have seen a young Chinese woman skip effortlessly up an audaciously steep and long diagonal tightrope carrying a parasol. Her superb balance and ease of movement gave a fine example of the postural mechanisms at work. They can also be seen in happy children living and playing at ease in their light little bodies.

We are concerned here with a few basic facts which can help us to understand how the postural mechanisms work, why they often don’t and how they can be facilitated.

The stretch reflexes
The workings of muscle are intricate and complex and we need to understand certain of its significant properties. When stretched, for example, muscle contracts in proportion to the degree of stretch applied. Like a piece of elastic, the further it is stretched, the more it tenses. If you tie one end o f a piece of tough elastic to a door handle and the other end to the door frame next to it and then open the door to stretch the elastic, the harder you pull the door, the harder the tension in the elastic will pull the door back towards its original position.
That, very roughly, is how a muscle works.

It is this characteristic activity of skeletal muscle that holds us together. African women walking with heavy pitchers on their heads not only maintain their height, but their bodies actually lengthen in response to the extra weight. In the same way, the force of gravity weights us against the resistance of the earth. The skeletal musculature as a whole responds reflexively to this stimulus with a complex interplay of tension and release, constantly adapting to buoy us up. Astronauts living in space for any length of time lose muscle tone and can hardly walk when they get back to earth. Without gravity to stimulate the stretch reflexes, their skeletal muscles atrophy. It is the stretch reflexes which keep earthbound humans buoyant and elegantly supported all the time.

The remarkable spine
The supporting core of the skeleton, the spine, is a flexible column of
intricately linked bones (vertebrae). In humans it is able to hold itself erect because of its unique structure and the myriad of muscles interacting with and upon it, like guy ropes or rigging on the mast of a sailing ship. Moreover, the human spine contains four curves which, when healthy, give it its amazing flexibility, strength and buoyancy, thereby contributing to our anti-gravity capacity. An essential stimulus for the spine to maintain its length, is the heavy human head. Its 6 kilos of solid weight, when balanced atop the spinal column, stimulate the spinal curves to resist upward against it. This is also why African women lengthen so gracefully and walk so lithely carrying those enormous weights on their heads.

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The relationship of the head with the well-sprung backbone, the way the head is carried, decides for better or worse, the overall state of poise of the human body and whether or not, right now, you are shortening yourself by holding those spinal curves in a compressed state, putting undue pressure on your ribcage and joints, or, poised in the fully upright and gracefully expanding stature that is your natural inheritance.

Muscle fibre
Our skeletal muscles are made of fibres which have differentiated into two main types according to their function within the whole of the musculature. These are known as red (slow-twitch) fibres and white (fast-twitch) fibres.

Red slow-twitch fibres obtain energy by utilizing glucose in the presence of oxygen and that enables them to develop force slowly and to maintain contractions longer. They are relatively non-fatiguable.

White fast-twitch fibres are capable of developing greater force and faster contraction and are fatiguable. They obtain energy rapidly by utilizing glucose without oxygen. They tire quickly because the utilized glucose produces exhaust in the form of lactic acid. This by-product gives us aching muscles after strenuous exercise. The more fit we become, the more quickly the blood flow removes the lactic acid from our muscles and the less pain we suffer.

Red and white muscle tissue
We are equipped with three types of skeletal muscles. We are held together by postural muscles, moved by mover muscles and exert power with strength muscles. What distinguishes these types of muscle is the proportion of red slow-twitch or white fast-twitch fibres they contain.

‘Being’ muscle
The deeper postural muscles which hold us up and hold us together could be called ‘being’ muscles, because their purpose is to hold us in a state of being, whether or not we are engaging in specific movement. We need these muscles just to be – to sit on a chair or to lie down – to hold us together while we are not doing anything in particular. ‘Being’ muscles are made predominantly of red slow-twitch fibres. While their high proportion of red slow-twitch fibres enables them to work without tiring, they need constant, gentle activity to maintain their red fibre content. While they are holding us together, the deep core postural muscles of the trunk are also able to sense our orientation to the gravitational field and supply the central nervous system with sensory input which in turn enables it to co-ordinate appropriate responses from the rest of the musculature. A next layer of postural muscles stabilizes us. These supporting muscles act as anchors for the mover muscles of the limbs.

‘Doing’ Muscle
The ‘doing’ muscles on the other hand, provide instant, active power - to run us, lift us, save us from danger and enable us to engage with the world. Muscles which we use for strength are composed predominantly of white fast-twitch fibres for short bursts of intense activity and they fatigue quickly. These get bigger and tougher, the more they are used. Muscles we use for movement are composed of both red slow-twitch and white fast-twitch fibres. The mover muscles need repeated (phasic) exercise to maintain their red slow-twitch fibre content. If, however, they are subjected to high levels of prolongued activity, they tend to lose some of their red slow-twitch fibre content because their white fast-twitch fibres are being recruited more often.

Holding an upright military stance requires deliberate effort and the mere thought of having to exert effort will recruit more of the muscles’ white fibres. When activity of this sort becomes habitual, the proportion of white fast-twitch fibres being used increases, changing the structural composition of the mover muscles, making them more fatiguable. That is one of the many ways in which thought and habit can exert a direct influence on the matter of the body.

Some people are born with a preponderance of slow-twitch muscle and that makes them better at endurance sports. Those endowed with more fast-twitch muscle are better at sprinting. It is to build up fast-twitch strength muscle that some athletes, particularly those in the sprinting sports, take steroids.

Give-and-take
Whenever you decide to make a move – to stand, to walk, to lift something or to dance or play a musical instrument, the supporting (slow-twitch) muscles of your trunk and the prime-mover (fast-switch) muscles of your limbs and extremities combine in patterned responses to enact your decision. They are capable of an astonishing variety of actions. To do this, your muscles are paired into complementary groups, each group performing the opposite task of its counterpart. We have flexors for bending and extensors for straightening; abductors to lift our limbs away from our bodies and adductors to draw them in towards the body; rotators to twist our limbs in one direction and anti-rotators to twist them in the reverse direction, etc.

When one group is active it is called the agonist and its counterpart is called the antagonist and they must work in concert to move us gracefully and efficiently. They achieve this by working in what is known as a positive antagonistic relationship: a give-and-take arrangement in which every action of the agonists is balanced by a release of the antagonists. So when your bender muscles are active, your straighteners reciprocate by relaxing and vice versa.

When our use degenerates, what tends to happen is that unreliable sensing inclines us to apply indiscriminate force in performing our actions. Whether unscrewing a bottletop or hitting a tennis ball, our tendency is to mobilize the agonists and antagonists at the same time. The reciprocal relationship between the two gets out of kilter and we lose finesse in our movements. This can be seen in the musician who, under the pressure of performing, tenses the muscles of his neck, jaw, shoulders, buttocks and legs with less than desirable results for his wrists, hands and fingers. However, it is also something many of us do just standing up from a chair.

Chaos
When we slump while sitting and try to prop ourselves up with our arms leaning on the front of the seat or wait in a queue shifting our weight from one leg to the other to relieve the strain of standing, or brace our shoulders to hold ourselves upright, we are co-opting our fast-twitch muscle into performing the role of slow-twitch muscle. The rapid onset of tiredness demonstrates the inappropriate engagement of fatiguable muscle for these tasks. At the same time, the stabilizing and supportive slow-twitch muscles of our trunks, which should be holding us up, are weakened through lack of use because their work has been taken over by the wrong muscles. Their function is also to supply the central nervous system with sensory input to provide it with information about our orientation in the gravitational field. The feedback they provide in their weakened state becomes distorted. The central nervous system, responding on the basis of their distorted feedback, ‘thinks’ they need help to hold us up and a vicious cycle is set up in which our tired mover and strength muscles try even harder to do just that. Gravity wins, our postural mechanisms lose and we end up with muscles in some parts doing too much work and muscles in other parts doing too little. In other words, our bodies no longer have a balanced distribution of muscle tonus. The excessive tension in the musculature as a whole then exerts undue pressure on ligaments and joints.

Muscle length
At its optimal length, muscle is in a poised state ready to contract fully when needed. When we resort to using the wrong muscles over and over, two things happen. Their fibres become chronically shortened and the muscles lose some of their contractile power. The musculature in general shortens, pulling us down and ruining our posture.

Remedial treatment for chronic muscle tension and joint problems in isolation, will not alter the underlying pattern of misuse that produced them. That pattern is not just a matter of muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones and joints. It is encoded in the entire psycho-physical network. Competitive people suffer from over-tense muscles because thought (mental attitude) and feeling (strong emotion) are translated into muscle tension. That is why it is said that by the age of forty we get the face and body we deserve.

Consciousness and muscle
One of the unfortunate legacies of the Age of Enlightenment is the mind-set introduced by Rene Descartes : “I think, therefore I am.” The resultant ‘Cartesian split’ led to the valuing of ‘mind’ (more specifically, the left brain,) over ‘body’ emphasizing mental development and regarding the body as irrelevant. Nowhere is this more poignantly symbolized than in the bodies of school children being weighed down and damaged by schoolbags loaded with ‘knowledge’ in the form of heavy text books. Under the subtle influence of this mind-set we prefer to live ‘in our heads’. Amongst the catalogue of disasters such an attitude generates is radical loss of body awareness. The operation of our postural mechanisms happens ‘in the dark’. We do things on automatic pilot without registering how we are doing them, remaining unaware of muscular activity until something starts to hurt. The prematurely distorted bodies of book-toting school children is one example. Repetitive strain injury of the wrist, arm and shoulder incurred by computer operators using a mouse for hours at a time is another. Their attention is absorbed by what is happening on the screen while they make repeated demands on the fine mover muscles of the hand, forearm, upper arm and shoulder, without being aware of the feedback the fatiguing muscles are sending them. They just keep staring at the screen and manipulating the mouse, unaware that their muscles are protesting. A mouse weighs next to nothing, yet it only takes a few hours of this ‘careless’ activity for the muscles of the hand, arm and shoulder to become strained.

This can happen because most muscle activity goes on outside our awareness. In the average person the conscious activity of the brain constitutes about one millionth of all brain activity. When our minds are busy in the virtual world of the computer screen or the television, we pay even less attention to what is happening in the rest of us.

The Alexander Technique aims to bring this sort of activity into our awareness, to make what was unconscious, conscious and to broaden our field of attention so that we can have a direct influence on what is happening and we can make changes. All it takes is a choice to be aware and to apply some basic bodily common sense and we could eliminate most repetitive strain injury along with our faulty posture.

The organs of balance
On either side of your skull, inside the bone which surrounds the inner part of your ears, is an ingenious little device known as a labyrinth. The labyrinths together constitute your vestibular system. Its proper functioning is essential for motor coordination and postural control.

The vestibular system enables your body to sense whether it is upright or lying down and whether it is standing still or moving. It is designed to detect the position and motion of your head in space. It has two components, the otolithic organs and the semi-circular canals.

The otolithic organs sense your orientation relative to gravity. They contain hair-like sensory nerve cells in various orientations. Attached to these are tiny chalk crystals . When you bend your head forwards, backwards or sideways, gravity pulls on those particular chalk crystals which are orientated towards it. The pulled chalk crystals stimulate the hair-cells to send signals to your brain to let it know which way your head is positioned in space.

The semi-circular canals sense the motion of your head through space. These are three tiny tubes shaped like the letter C. One lies flat and the other two sit vertically at right angles to it and to one another so they can register all three dimensions of space. Together they work like an elaborate spirit level constantly monitoring the shifting position of your head. They contain hair-like sensory nerve cells and fluid. When your head moves in a particular direction, the fluid lags behind because it resists change in motion and puts pressure on the hair-cells, stimulating them to send signals to your brain keeping it constantly informed as to which way your head has moved.

The coordination of the rest of your body depends on the information supplied by your vestibular system. When the semi-circular canals are positioned correctly in relation to gravity, their basic orientation is such that the flat one at the bottom is horizontal to the ground with the other two being vertical. Dr T.D.M. Roberts, an expert on the physiology of the postural mechanisms, found that in over thirty different species of mammals which he studied, the head was poised in such a way that the bottom semi-circular canal was horizontal to the ground. However, when he studied modern humans, he found that for the most part, they carry their heads in such a way that the bottom canal is tilted at an angle to the ground. Interestingly, Roberts found that if he stimulated his human subjects to be alert, they brought their heads slightly forward and up, bringing the bottom canal back to horizontal and their posture responded accordingly.

The primary control
A century or so before Dr Roberts conducted his study, F.M. Alexander was busy studying his own misuse. One of his milestone discoveries was that a particular relationship of his head, neck and back to one another was integral to the optimal coordination of his whole body. He observed that his own head-neck-back relationship was disturbed. In particular, he noticed that undue tension in the muscles around his neck and the base of his skull was pulling his head back and down in relation to his spine. He noticed too that this break in integrity of the relationship of his head with the rest of his body had an adverse affect on his general posture as well as on his breathing and on the functioning of his voice.

The vestibular system described above is located on either side of the atlas joint where the skull pivots on the topmost spinal vertebra. It follows that constant interference with the poise of the head must affect the functioning of this sensory organ.

Because the head-neck-back relationship seemed to have such an effect on his body as a whole, Alexander called it the primary control and stated that good coordination and functioning could not be achieved unless it was working properly. It was his eventual success in being able consciously to release his head and neck from excessive tension, keeping his head poised freely on the top of his spine, that enabled him to move without strain. From that time, he began to enjoy a new quality of co-ordination, one hallmarked by lightness, ease and grace.

Science has not yet revealed all the secrets of neurophysical functioning, nor do we fully understand how the postural mechanisms work. What we do know, however, is that we can promote the efficiency of these mechanisms or we can ruin it. Thanks to Alexander’s pioneering endeavours we know that a satisfactory head-neck-back relationship is essential for good coordination and we know how to improve it to promote what he called good use of the self.

Good use
The Alexander Technique promotes optimal muscle length and restores reliable sensory appreciation. You learn to allow gravity to activate your muscle systems, replacing the habit which imposes excessive strain on your body. No extra force is needed, for example, when standing up from a chair. Just bringing the body up against the pull of gravity is enough to activate the stretch reflexes so that the body lifts itself. To stiffen the neck or push hard with the thighs or brace the shoulders (which most of us do) is unnecessary and disrupts the natural mechanisms. This is like going uphill in a car and instead of allowing the engine to do the work, trying to push it from behind the steering wheel.

You can learn to trust and make use of your innate anti-gravity responses. You can release your muscles from habitual shortening and your joints from the grip of excessive tension. You can regain a balanced distribution of tension throughout your body and an integrated musculature. You can learn to carry your head in poise. You can change your basic patterns of misuse and engage with life, and its demands, without the likelihood of screwing yourself up or needing new hips by the time you are sixty. You can play a musical instrument or sport with freedom and accuracy without incurring repetitive strain injury. You can even sit behind the steering wheel of your car in peak hour traffic without losing your cool. All you need do is have a course of Alexander Lessons.