Movement Asks A Question

AKA Why most Alexander Technique teachers hate the word "exercise"

Last week’s post Feel the Squeeze, was a fairly important one to check out (if I do say so myself). It is my feeble attempt to describe what happens when we start to rush and our old habits kick in. If you missed it, I strongly urge you to give it a read.

That post is heavily tied to this week’s topic.

This week, I’m going to do my best to describe what the heck an exercise is in the first place (or at least what I think an exercise is) and how we must prevent the Squeeze while exercising¹.

What Is An Exercise?

To get this thought experiment going, I’ll just throw the interweb definition of exercise at you:

ex·er·cise

/ˈeksərˌsīz/

noun

1. activity requiring physical effort, carried out to sustain or improve health and fitness.

   "exercise improves your heart and lung power"

2. a process or activity carried out for a specific purpose, especially one concerned with a specified area or skill.

   "an exercise in public relations"

Both of these definitions are completely valid as far as I’m concerned. Who the heck wants to argue with the dictionary anyway! But what gets a lot of us into trouble is that we exclusively think of exercise in the context of definition 1; we believe that exercise only means physical effort. Instead, if we are practicing the Alexander Technique, we want to either use definition 2 OR definition 1 and 2 simultaneously.

That is, we never want to forget that the technique is a process that can help us develop skill.

Ugghhh WTF Are You Talking About?

If you haven’t caught on by now, the Alexander Technique can be used to help you break old habits. Those habits could be personal and complex (e.g. a left ankle break coupled with a stutter) or general (i.e. the Squeeze). Oftentimes, our habits are both of these.

In order to get to the bottom of these habits, we’re going to want to spend some time thinking and exploring with our Inner Sherlock and we’ll want to spend some time Moving (and thinking and exploring). We absolutely need to do both of these things, but what we DON’T want to do is abandon our thinking when we go to exercise.

We do not want to flip our attitudes from definition 1 to definition 2. EVER.

Why? If something starts to hurt or just feel off while you’re doing an exercise, I want you to recognise that feeling and STOP. 🛑 Something in that activity has asked a question of you and you’re starting to get an answer from the movement. If you ignore the answer you’re getting, there’s a good chance you’re going to either injure yourself or at the very least persist with your old habit.

YOU CAN’T UNSEE THIS

A Movement Example

To try and make this question and answer analogy land, I’d like you to think about the simple exercise of sitting in a chair and pitching the head down. If you’ve read a lot of this blog you will have seen a few videos on this activity starring Mr. Blue and Mr. Yellow. I’ve even gone to the trouble of describing how the skull moves on top of the fulcrum of the atlas.

If you’ve been playing with these exercises on your own, you may have noticed some of the things I have pointed out in my drawings. Maybe you felt the front and back of the helicopter moving about? Maybe you felt parts of your neck softening up? I would consider both of these to be answers that you got from the question of pitching the head down.

Are these the only answers you could have gotten from this movement? NOPE!!

If you’ve been sticking to the idea that this is a process rather than purely physical exercise, then maybe you’ve noticed that the entire area of your throat and voice can be mushy while you pitch the head down! If you’ve been holding tension around your voice habitually, then you won’t be able to pitch the head down smoothly if those vocal muscles are hard as rocks.

Noticing the quality of the throat while pitching the head down will ask more of your attention than simply thinking about the skull moving. I would not expect a beginner student to sense both the movement of the skull and the softening of the throat at the same time. But the more you play with this particular exercise - pitching the head down - the more answers you may get about yourself and your habits.

One Exercise - Many Questions

In this act of pitching the head down (question), you could theoretically get answers on the following things:

• Did the neck move forward or remain balancing upright?

• Was the breath holding during the movement?

• Was the throat flexible and soft?

• Did the jaw tighten?

• Did the facial muscles clench?

• Did the upper back brace?

• Did the X brace?

• Did the arms begin to drop down into dead weight?

All of these are posed as questions but really your movement of the head will give you an answer to these questions if you’re quietly alert.

I do not expect you to pitch the head down and specifically ask one of these questions of yourself. Instead, I’m hoping that you will slowly build a growing sense of your whole self and discover that there are all sorts of observations you can make beyond simply nodding your head up and down.

Ask A Question

In this sense, every single movement or traditional physical exercise that you can think of is asking a question of you - all of you. There are certain movements that you can explore that will help you decrease back pain - rolling forward in the chair and squatting - and there are other movements that can help you decrease other pains or even build strength and flexibility. All of these are helpful things and these movements are asking some big questions of our whole selves.

Just remember, you don’t want to make yourself nuts with 29348734598634598 questions and answers. Sometimes you just need to go for a bike ride and enjoy the fall foliage! You’ll probably pick up some answers along that ride without even trying.

Get In Touch

If you’re in NYC, you may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com.

If you’d like to book any lesson time with me, you can find my booking link here.

1. Heck, you could say that the act of preventing the Squeeze IS THE EXERCISE and that the more you practice THAT the better you will feel overall!