“When he comes into my room at first, I ask him to sit down in the chair – and we all do that, it is a matter of etiquette – and when he has sat down in the chair, I have the history of his life’s use of himself. It is all there. It is a very simple way, ladies and gentlemen, of getting at the habits and peculiarities of a person, but we get at it that way.”(Taken from…
The Alexander Technique does not teach position. It teaches proper co-ordination in all normal positions. If the little extension of the spine that Alexander demanded is operative then it matters little what position the body adopts. That is not to say that positions have no importance. There are some positions in which proper co-ordination is difficult or impossible. For instance, it is difficult for anyone to sit in many so-called “easy” chairs without collapsing their spines. These chairs are much…
Having injured my back in a car accident, I had never been able to sit at a desk for any length of time without discomfort. Now I began to notice that whenever I leaned forward to read or write I displaced my head downward and allowed my chest to collapse so that my torso was a dead weight on my lower back. Since I had always done this, I assumed that there was no alternative except to make an effort…
I always take it from lesson to lesson and hope that, as a pupil becomes more aware of what the problem is – how every time they go to get out of the chair they stiffen the neck and pull the head back – it will gradually dawn on them that they do the same thing when they do all the other things in their life… The best a teacher can do is to give them the opportunity to learn…
There have been a few articles over the last few years which talk about the dangers of sitting, and comparing sitting to smoking. Here is a word in defence of sitting. While there is no such thing as healthy smoking, there is such a thing as healthy sitting. It is possible to sit comfortably for long periods of time without causing harm or damage. And while you can’t learn to smoke healthily, you can certainly learn to sit healthily and…
Roger Federer is quite precise about his tennis racquets. According to this article in the New Yorker, he has nine racquets prepared for each match, with “three racquets to be strung at twenty-six kilos, five at 26.5, and one at twenty-seven”; and he likes “natural gut for the sixteen main strings and polyester for the nineteen cross strings”. Federer knows how to get the most out of a racquet. He has thought and practised a lot, to be able to…