The Alexander Technique - A Gift For Sportspeople

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." Until recently there have been few Alexander Technique teachers in Australia.

The Alexander Technique is being increasingly adopted by recreational and competitive sportspeople. Athletes involved in sports as diverse as long-distance running, dressage, swimming, X-C skiing, hammer-throwing and clay target shooting recognize the benefits that come with a training in the Alexander Technique. For sportspeople these can be divided in to three categories:

1. - general fitness – how to avoid wasting energy
2. - technique – ensuring that you're actually doing what you think you're doing
3. - avoidance of, or recovery from, injury – not using yourself in a way which imposes stresses on joints or other tissue
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 teaches us how to move with an economy of effort and how to maximize poise and balance.

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, constitute a continual restriction on the working of these natural postural mechanisms. This restriction renders movement more effortful and less efficient and can predispose us to injury.

In any sporting activity we are coping not only with these constant interferences which engender our "base line" of tension, but also with additional interferences which arise from the situation itself, e.g. the challenge 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 movement.

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 of both our inner environment, (for example when we fail to notice that we are tensing our shoulders or holding our breath,) and of our outer circumstances, (for example, when distances seem greater or we feel we have insufficient time).

Enhancing kinaesthetic awareness – awareness of one's inner environment – and gaining greater command of one's processes of balance and coordination, are an enormous help in any activity. It is not just the elite who can learn to optimize their way of working with themselves to gain that competitive edge. Sportspeople who have trouble improving beyond a certain level also stand to gain. Technical imperfections are often unwittingly established as part of one's basic modus operandi, limiting further improvement. Who, at some time, has not said , "My brain knows what to do but my body won't do it"?

Discovering that trying less hard can actually 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 to 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.

"The Alexander Technique gives us all the things we have ben looking for in a system of physical education; relief from strain due to maladjustment, and constant improvement in physical and mental health."
- Aldous Huxley

Michael Stenning

Copyright: Michael Stenning. All rights reserved