About the Alexander Technique - frequently asked questions
General questions
• What is the Alexander technique?
• Does it work?
• What ailments or problems can it help with?
• How do you learn it?
• What happens in a lesson?
• How many lessons will I need?
• Who invented it?
• It's all about “good posture” isn't it?
• Are there good books to read on it?
• Is it similar to Pilates? Or yoga?
Ailments
• Can it help with a bad knee or hip or ankle?
• Can it help with chronic fatigue syndrome?
• Can it help with asthma or respiratory problems?
• Can it help with stress or anxiety? What about mental illness generally?
• Can it help with high blood pressure?
• Can it help with rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis?
• Can it help with multiple sclerosis?
• Can it help with recovery from stroke?
• Can it help with RSI?
Improving performance
• How can it help me improve as a musician?
• How can it help me improve as an actor?
• How can it help me improve as an athlete?
Principles of the technique
• Is muscular tension necessarily a bad thing? Surely we need it if we're going to do anything strenuous or demanding?
• What's is "end gaining"?
• What is "unreliable sensory appreciation?"
• What do you mean by "use"?
• What are these “postural mechanisms”? Are they acknowledged in the medical field?
• What is “inhibition”?
General questions
• What is the Alexander technique?
It’s a set of principles that can be used to help you un-learn, you might say, bad habits of movement and posture.
Most of us, it seems, by the time we reach adulthood, have acquired some unhelpful habits in terms of the way we use muscles and the way we organise the different parts of the body during everyday activities, whether it be walking or using a computer.
Generally people veer between being too stiff and rigid – especially when trying to adopt what seems like “a good posture” – or a state of collapse, as when someone gets home from a day’s work and just wants to “switch off” in front of the TV for a few hours (not that there’s anything wrong with that, just that it’s not especially rejuvenating for mind and body either).
Many people find that lessons in the Alexander Technique reveal a fascinating terrain between these two extremes, a place where the body seems more poised and balanced, with a more even distribution of muscle tone (see “scientific research”, later in this section), and where the mind feels calm and unhurried, the senses heightened.
It seems reasonable to assume this is more like the way wild animals move around, or the way we all were as very young children. And indeed, observing a very small child trying to walk reveals a lot of common ground with these principles. The head is free to balance on top of the spine (rather than being held in a fixed position) and the whole muscular system seems very alive, making minute adjustments to itself to keep the person upright in a way that requires far less effort than most adults use when doing things like walking or sitting.
You may well walk out of an Alexander Technique lesson feeling freer and lighter (and taller, oddly). But ultimately it can be more than just a therapy or a pleasant experience. The potential is there to learn to change your postural and movement habits on a long-term basis.
• What ailments or problems can it help with?
Relevant conditions include back pain, neck pain, knee pain, hip pain, RSI, frozen shoulder, multiple sclerosis, Parkinsons, stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, recovery from injury, stress and anxiety, high blood pressure, sciatica, asthma and respiratory problems, digestive disorders, chronic fatigue and pregnancy.
• Does it work?
A great many people claim to have been helped by Alexander Technique (see ‘What people say?’ for examples). And a number of clinical trials and other scientific investigations have been conducted in recent years, with the results being published in well-known journals.
For example, the August 2008 edition of the British Medical Journal published the results of an NHS-funded study into the effectiveness of Alexander technique in helping people with chronic and recurring lower back pain. Those participating in the trial who received 24 lessons in the technique experienced a reduction in back pain of around 85% on average, results which appeared to hold over the long term. And 6 lessons also produced a noticeable result. A mini-documentary by the BMJ looks at the results of this study in more detail.
Another recent trial looked at the effectiveness of the technique in relation to Parkinson’s disease (see the journal Clinical rehabilitation, 2002). Other researchers are studying the physiological changes produced by Alexander technique lessons. For example, a study published in the Elsevier journal Human Movement Science in 2011 provided evidence that Alexander Technique changes the muscle tone in the spine and hips, making it more dynamic. So it makes people less stiff in the spine and hips.
You can read about the latest scientific research into the technique here.
• How do you learn it?
Generally, to learn the Alexander Technique you need to take a course of individual lessons with a qualified teacher. It can’t be learned from a book or video (or at least I’ve never met anyone who managed it). But the technique gives you a self-help tool that you can use for the rest of your life.
For those who want to try learning it on their own, or who have limited access to a teacher, this article
contains pointers to useful self-study resources.
• What happens in a lesson?
It is taught using a combination of verbal guidance and gentle, hands-on contact. You are guided towards an improved awareness of where you are holding unnecessary tension, helping you to release it. At the same time, the teacher helps you re-establish the working of natural postural mechanisms that allow you to remain upright with little effort.
We call them "lessons" because the approach is educational rather than therapeutic (although it is highly therapeutic in its effects). The more skill you acquire in the technique, the better able you are to look after yourself, without the aid of a teacher.
• How many lessons will I need?
As few as 6 lessons can produce a significant improvement with back pain, according to the results of the trial published in the British Medical Journal in August 2008. While this study revealed an 85% improvement for back-pain sufferers after 24 lessons in the technique, it also showed that just 6 lessons was about 70% as effective.
But it depends on the nature of your problems and how you approach the lessons. A useful perspective on the “how many lessons does it take?” question is this essay by Christine Ackers.
It depends too on what you want to achieve. Many people continue to take lessons long after their pain has subsided because they are fascinated by this new awareness of themselves, and the possibilities it opens up.
• Who invented it?
F.M. Alexander (see image, above right), an Australian actor born in 1869, developed the technique. He had been suffering from a persistent loss of voice, which threatened to curtail his career as an actor, and which doctors could do little to help him with.
His first crucial insight arrived when he said to himself: "I lose my voice only when I perform, not when I speak normally, so it must be something I do differently on stage that is causing the problem. If I could find out what it was and stop doing it, that would be the end of the problem".
He observed in mirrors the way he moved and breathed while reciting, and compared it with his everyday pattern of body use. He noticed a tendency to pull the head back and down, depressing the larynx and gasping in air through his mouth (all factors likely to affect the function of the voice). He later realised this was part of a total pattern of tension in the body.
What followed was a seven-year period of trial and error experimentation on his own, during which he went about the task of learning to stop the wrong things from happening. He eventually figured it out and cured himself of his vocal problems, as well as the breathing problems with which he'd been afflicted since birth.
Word got out about his findings and doctors began referring respiratory patients to FM, who gained a reputation as "The Breathing Man".
He came to London in 1904 and taught until his death in 1955, aged 87. In that time he wrote four books and also trained many people to be teachers of this technique, which continues to evolve.
• It's all about “good posture” isn't it?"
The aim is more to improve overall mobility. If we get fixated on the idea of “posture” then we’ll almost certainly find ourselves tightening things and becoming more immobile as we try to adopt what we believe is a correct position. And indeed people’s idea of the correct position is often out of whack owing to unreliable sensory appreciation.
Alexander technique will often change a person’s appearance dramatically, and a person who has previously been “slumping” will appear to be more upright. But we do this via a subtle process of release as we become more aware of habitual patterns of muscular tension, not by trying to adopt a good posture or position.
• Are there good books to read on it?
There are a few books that introduce the technique in a helpful way. Body Learning by Michael Gelb is often recommended. An excellent introduction to the technique is How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning The Alexander Technique To Explore Your Mind-body Connection And Achieve Self-Mastery by Missy Vineyard, which also has plenty of self-study pointers and detail for advanced students.
And another accessible and modern guide is Body, Breath and Being: A New Guide to the Alexander Technique by Carolyn Nicholls.
Often recommended as a must-read for serious students is The Use of The Self by F.M. Alexander. The information in chapter 1 "The Evolution of a Technique" spells out in very precise terms the process Alexander went through himself when he was learning to cure himself of his vocal problems.
• Is it similar to Pilates? Or yoga?
Like Alexander technique, Pilates and yoga can be used to alter and improve your postural and movement habits.
One thing you’ll notice early on about Alexander technique is that there are no “exercises” as such. Instead we look at applying a set of principles to everyday movements like getting out of a chair, learning to do these things in a different way.
And rather than teach it in a group class, we generally teach it on an individual basis. The issues that interfere with balance, poise and co-ordination are very specific to each person. And most people seem to suffer from some degree of unreliable sensory appreciation, meaning they’re not always doing what they think they’re doing.
Often people are held back in their attempts to become proficient at sport or an area like dance, yoga or martial arts, and the reasons seem unclear. This kind of faulty sensory awareness is likely to be a factor since it is almost universal (especially in our sedentary world of heavy computer use), as is the fact that they might be using inappropriate levels of muscular tension or have an unhelpful way of thinking about themselves during movement (problems such as end-gaining, for example). These are all issues that the technique addresses quite explicitly.
• Can it help with a bad knee or hip or ankle?
Sometimes a joint will be vulnerable to injury or problems because of the overall pattern of body use. For example, if there is a tendency to put more weight through one leg than the other. Or we might find we are tensing the muscles around a joint excessively because we are using that joint to "hold ourselves up" whereas the muscles whose job it is to hold us up are shirking at the task.
The technique encourages the operation of deep postural muscles. These are designed to hold you upright and can do this job for long periods without tiring, if they are allowed to work. This encourages a reduction and rebalancing of overall muscle tension in the body, and means that joints like the knees or hips - which might have been overloaded previously - are now under far less strain.
• Can it help with chronic fatigue syndrome?
The technique helps us learn to do everyday things with less effort. This can make it a useful coping tool for someone suffering from a condition like CFS. It's worth noting that the neuromuscular reorganisation and change that occurs in many people when learning the technique can exacerbate problems like tiredness, in the short term. You might want to press on in this situation, knowing that such difficulties will work themselves out further down the line and be worth the temporary inconvenience. However, a CFS sufferer may decide to take things a bit more slowly.
Practicing semi-supine can be very restful and rejuvenating for someone in a state of extreme tiredness.
• Can it help with asthma or respiratory problems?
The causes of asthma are thought to be numerous. Some people are born with a predisposition to it. Others point the finger at environmental factors like pollution. An auto-immune or allergic reaction is often thought to be relevant.
Whatever the perceived cause, we can manage the problem more effectively - and diminish its hold on us - by learning to breathe more efficiently. That's not the same thing as breathing deeply. If the ribcage and diaphragm are not able to move freely during quiet respiration (i.e. when you're not doing anything in particular) then your breathing will not be functioning at it's best no matter how you try to control it or tinker with it consciously.
The workings of our respiratory and postural systems are very closely interlinked. Problems such as a tight neck or a shortened, compressed spine will tend to reduce the mobility of the ribcage, thereby diminishing the capacity and efficiency of our breathing. The Alexander technique has helped many asthma sufferers by improving the operation of the body's postural mechanisms. These bring about a lengthening response in the spine and allow the ribcage to move more freely in a sideways motion, making breathing much easier and more natural.
The technique also helps cultivate a calm state of mind, which can be very helpful in counteracting the anxiety that comes with being short of breath, helping the sufferer feel more in control of their condition.
• Can it help with stress or anxiety? What about mental illness generally?
Working with the technique gives you a heightened awareness of your physical responses to any situation, and an improved ability to control these responses. This in turn enhances your ability to remain clear-headed and calm.
This interdependence of mind and body is increasingly recognised as a factor that can inform our understanding of mental illness, and improve our ability to manage problems like anxiety and depression. Many who come to the Alexander technique with "physical" problems are later pleasantly surprised to discover this extra dimension to the work.
A recent newspaper article exploring the use of Alexander technique to treat mental illness.
• Can it help with high blood pressure?
Lifestyle factors believed to contribute to high blood pressure include stress, poor diet, excessive alcohol consumption and not taking enough exercise.
As mentioned earlier, the Alexander technique gives you more awareness and control when it comes to your physical responses to different situations. For example, in a stressful situation at work, having experience with the technique would allow you to notice if your shoulders were tightening and to release this muscle tension. The overall effect of learning the technique is to become more poised, balanced and at ease, which better supports a feeling of being relaxed and in control.
Of course nothing beats the effects of stress better than physical exercise, which is recognised for its ability to help lower blood pressure. Lessons in the Alexander technique improve mobility, co-ordination, balance and stamina, so they give people of all ages an enhanced ability to enjoy and benefit from physical activity.
• Can it help with rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis?
The technique helps us learn to move with less muscular tension and appears to encourage the operation of some natural postural mechanisms. We can be shown how to sit or stand upright with far less effort than most of us (adults) are accustomed to, and with a poise and balance that puts less pressure on the joint surfaces and spine.
Reducing the wear and tear on the body is particularly helpful when managing conditions like rheumatoid arthritis.
• Can it help with multiple sclerosis?
Balance is often an issue with MS sufferers and this tends to cause people to tighten up in response, which in turn causes further problems with posture and balance (not to mention state of mind), and a destructive cycle comes into operation. The technique can interrupt this cycle by helping a person improve their overall balance.
When we're working with the technique we're working with the subtle signalling being carried through the nervous system from mind to body, and becoming more aware of it. With a condition like MS, where this signalling sometimes appears to be struggling or failing to get through, the technique can be a valuable self-help tool for making the most of what is available.
• Can it help with recovery from stroke?
Many people have used the technique to rehabilitate themselves from the effects of a stroke. F.M. Alexander had a severe stroke in his eighties which paralysed his left side, and from which he apparently made a full recovery.
One of the most useful contributions of the technique in this situation is with improving balance. If a person's ability to balance has been undermined or damaged then they will tend to look downwards to a greater extent, while they walk. This will tend to exacerbate the "pulling down" tendency that is present in most adults anyway. And this in turn makes it even more difficult to balance well. The technique helps break this cycle.
The technique also heightens our awareness of - and ability to control - the subtle signalling being carried through the nervous system from mind to body. In situations where this signalling appears to be damaged, working with the technique can help us make the most of what is available.
Stress and anxiety are a natural response to even mild debilitation. This can increase the level of physical tension present when a person is trying to perform a task, especially one they are used to performing easily. Working with inhibition, we can diminish this physical response, and get on with things in a more calm and composed way.
• Can it help with RSI?
Terms like Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) - sometimes known as "upper limb disorder" -became common currency in the late 1980s as greater numbers of people began to develop the kinds of problems associated with heavy keyboard-using occupations such as journalism.
While the label "RSI" refers to a host of different complaints (affecting the arms, generally), they all have in common the presence of inappropriate muscle tension. Over-tensed muscles can compress nearby nerves, for example - as is the case with carpal-tunnel syndrome.
Furthermore, excessive tension - whether it's in the forearms and shoulders or anywhere else - tends to compromise the operation of our body’s postural mechanisms, which in turn feeds the build-up of inappropriate tension, and a vicious cycle comes into play. Working with the technique can break this cycle and help us learn to perform activities without these high levels of habitual muscle tension.
• How can it help me improve as a musician?
If you are an instrumentalist, the technique can help you work towards more skillful and expressive playing. With a reduction in the level of muscular tension, and a more poised, balanced playing style, the physical demands of playing become greatly reduced, and you are better able to concentrate on the artistic content. You can play for longer periods without tiring, producing a more consistent quality of sound and greatly reducing your chances of injury such as RSI.
For a vocalist - whose body is their instrument, in effect - there is huge scope for improving sound quality, expressiveness and other aspects of this kind of performance. With improved use, voice production can be more even, resonant and compelling to listen to.
A great book on the topic is The Voice Book by Michael McCallion.
Here's an in-depth article about the application of Alexander technique to singing.
• How can it help me improve as an actor?
Elements like breathing and posture are what define us, so for an actor looking to pin down the key aspects of a character, a knowledge of how these physical elements work within themselves is invaluable.
The almost universal presence of unreliable sensory appreciation can mean that an actor is introducing personal postural idiosyncracies (of which they are unaware) to a character they don't belong to.
The physical demands of acting also take a toll on many performers. If you are required to play a hysterical or angry character night after night, for example, you may find yourself succumbing to the physical ill-effects of such emotional states, such as habitually tightened or tense shoulders. In this situation, having the know-how to practice a process like semi-supine effectively - after a night's performance, for example - can be very useful.
The freedom, balance and centredness cultivated by study of the technique also frees performers to concentrate on the creative aspects of what they do.
The technique is also a great tool for working with the voice.
The Alexander technique has long been recognised as an important element in the skillset of performers, being a core element of the curriculum at drama colleges like RADA and The Juilliard School in New York.
Here's an an interesting article on acting and the technique.
• How can it help me improve as an athlete?
The technique improves mobility, co-ordination, balance, stamina and breathing. It can also prevent injury and is now clinically proven as an effective approach to relieving back pain.
Professional athletes have used the technique to improve their performance and help prevent injury. For example, the British gold-medal winning rowing team at the 2004 Athens Olympics were receiving lessons in the technique.
A book about the application of Alexander principles to running is The Art of Running by Malcolm Balk.
• Is muscular tension necessarily a bad thing? Surely we need it if we're going to do anything strenuous or demanding?
We definitely do need muscular tension. The problem is inappropriate tension.
For example, in anatomy a distinction is often drawn between "fast-twitch" and "slow-twitch" muscle fibres. The fast-twitch muscles are useful for tasks that require short bursts of strength or speed. However, they tire quickly and have relatively little stamina. The slow-twitch muscles have more endurance and are better suited to continuous, extended muscle contractions over a lengthy period of time (marathon runners find them handy, for example).
The slow-twitch fibres include deep postural muscles, which are suited to the task of holding us upright. They can do this for long periods without tiring. Unfortunately, these muscles tend to be chronically under-employed. But if we become accustomed to mainly using the fast-twitch, heavy-activity muscles to hold us upright while sitting at a computer, for example, then we will find ourselves more prone to fatigue and more susceptible to problems like
RSI.
One by-product of learning the technique is that the deep postural muscles become more involved in tasks like holding us upright - as they should - and we are able to release into a state of balanced tension. This means we are better able to sit or stand or move for long periods without feeling tired.
• What's is "end gaining"?
This is shorthand for the tendency to perform an activity with a fixation on the end result, losing sight of the process by which we get there (and often jeopardising the end result too).
Examples include pushing yourself past your limits in order to win a race, or continuing to play a musical instrument even though your arms are exhausted. Such activities are fairly universal in our results-driven world.
The Alexander technique encourages more of a focus on the process we use to perform an activity - the "means whereby", to use another piece of Alexander shorthand. This kind of orientation is generally far more conducive to achieving a positive result, even in a competitive or pressurised field like sport or music.
• What is "unreliable sensory appreciation?"
We tend to believe we can adjust our posture or position and rely on the sensory feedback from our joints and muscles (our proprioception) to tell us if we are doing what we think we are. Unfortunately, for most of us these kinaesthetic senses are a little befuddled.
We can think we're standing up straight until someone shows us a mirror and we see - often with complete surprise - that we are actually leaning off to one side.
Working with the Alexander technique, we are able to recalibrate this sensory awareness and get it back on track.
• What do you mean by "use"?
When we speak about a person's “use” or “pattern of use” we are referring to their overall habits of neuromuscular organisation in all their activities. The concept is psycho-physical in nature, in that we can't entirely separate the so-called “mental” and so-called “physical” components of use. For example, you wouldn't be able to un-clench your shoulder muscles while still maintaining an attitude of anger or grim determination (or it would be quite hard anyway).
• What are these “postural mechanisms”? Are they acknowledged in the medical field?
The idea that there is a set of automatic muscular responses to gravity, and that these play an important role in keeping us upright, has been acknowledged in the physiology field for some time (one of the first publications to do so was The Neurophysiology of Postural Mechanisms by TDM Roberts, published in 1967).
However, the physiological framework for understanding the nature of these automatic responses is still somewhat undeveloped, it seems, and appears to be an important direction of research for neuroscientists.
A good Alexander Technique teacher will be able to give you an experience of something that appears to be an automatic response of the body to gravity, an experience of an activity like sitting, standing or walking that may feel quite dramatically easier. So the idea is to continue to stop interfering with these mechanisms, as you go about your daily life, so you can enjoy improved posture, coordination and general health.
• What is “inhibition”?
To acquire better use and co-ordination, we have to begin to stop doing unnecessary and unhelpful stuff, like tightening particular groups of muscles when it’s not really necessary. This act of stopping is often referred to as “inhibition”. This is a natural facility of the nervous system anyway, but in the Alexander technique we acquire the ability to exercise it more and more consciously and judiciously, as we develop greater awareness of our unconscious habits.
Not to be confused with the psychological or Freudian use of the same word, often referring to the practice of withholding an emotional response, and which is perhaps not so desirable.
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