Why lie down if you don’t feel tired?

I have to keep chasing people to do their semi-supine lying down more often, especially when they’re at work. They keep making excuses for not doing it.

Either they say: “I can’t lie down at work”. Or they say: “Yes, I will” and then don’t do it. I keep telling them and they keep not doing it.

Why? Why do people keep not doing the one thing that would help them progress so much further and so much faster? Let’s take a look at those excuses.

You say: “I can’t lie down at work”

Of course there’s usually some truth in this excuse. Often quite a lot of truth in it. However, if you think about it, you’ll realise that, if it seemed important enough to you, you would do it anyway. But it doesn’t seem important enough. So, despite all my urging, you simply don’t make the necessary effort to create a solution to the problem of how to lie down at work. You don’t even make the effort to overcome your sense of embarrassment. That’s the truth, isn’t it? It doesn’t seem important enough so you don’t do it.

Yet you would love to no longer have a painful back, neck, shoulders or arms. You know (at least you should know because I keep telling you) that, if you were to lie down a lot more often at work, your problem would soon go. Yet you don’t do it. You have your excuse - and you really believe your excuse. So you miss out.

What about the other excuse?

You say “I will” and then don’t it

If that’s you, then you still have excuses for not doing your lying down. It’s just that your excuses are a little less convincing to you. You’re a little less comfortable about admitting, time after time, that you still haven’t done your lying down anything like as often as you should.

That makes me part of the problem too. I want to help my pupils and I don’t want to them to feel uncomfortable. So I don’t press the point. I let you get away with your excuses.

And these are both just excuses. They’re not the real reason for you not lying down often enough.

The real reason why you don’t lie down enough

The real reason why you don’t lie down often enough is that you don’t really believe that your muscles are too tired to keep going.

And, you know, you’re right not to believe it.

They’re not actually too tired. You may get pain but, mostly, you can manage to get through a day without lying down and without your muscles feeling over-tired.

And that’s because, they’re not, actually, over-tired.

Then why do I insist you should lie down often?

I insist you should lie down often because, if you did, you would start to find muscles getting over-tired.

Huh? That makes no sense.

Here’s how it makes sense

In your practise with me, you learn how to allow your body to work in a better, less tight, more effective way. When, during a lesson, we really concentrate on stopping doing the wrong thing so that the right thing will do itself, you do indeed get tired. In fact, you get tired extremely quickly.

I can sometimes see you getting tired and so I get you to lie down briefly before continuing the good work. When you do that, you get much more good work in and, at the end of your lesson, feel like you’ve had a hard work-out. You feel like you’ve had a hard work-out even though all the movement we’ve done is a little sitting and standing and walking - and lying down. It’s those muscles that are not used to working that have had a hard work out. Our sitting, standing, walking and lying down has given those muscles a work out that even the most gruelling session at the gym could never produce.

If you hadn’t done the lying down, you wouldn’t have noticed any tired muscles because you’re used to that amount of tiredness. Since it’s normal for you and you’re used to it, you don’t even feel tired. And those tired muscles don’t get any more tired because, at that point, they pack up working. They leave the job to those other muscles that don’t tire because they’re used to doing the job. They leave the job to those other muscles that always do a bad job because they’re not really made for that purpose.

How to continue using tired muscles

Continuing to use tired muscles is something you can’t do. Why can’t you force your tired muscles to continue working anyway?

To get those non-habitual, unused-to-working muscles to work at all, you had to put your attention on stopping doing the wrong thing so that the right thing would do itself. That, after all, is the corner-stone of all effective work getting rid of bad movement habits.

The problem is that, when your muscles are tired, you can’t keep your attention on stopping doing the wrong thing so that the right thing does itself. Instead, your mind wanders all over the place. It does anything rather than concentrate on the job in hand.

Getting a really good work-out during a lesson does, of course depend partly on me giving you the encouragement to concentrate on stopping doing the wrong thing so that the right thing will do itself. I do that and, if you’re paying attention and working with me, things move along quickly. Then, inexplicably, the improvement comes to a grinding halt.

I used to think that was my fault.

What I’ve found is that, if, when things come to a halt, I get you to lie down, when you get up again, your attention sharpens once more. Things start really moving again and you end the lesson with a sense of real achievement - and the feeling that you’ve had a really good work-out.

Then you go in to work

At work, to begin with, you do really feel like you could do with a lie down. But you don’t lie down and the feeling wears off. You forget you needed to lie down. Or you think you’ve got away with it.

I know, I often do the same thing myself.    

But you haven’t actually got away with anything. Or rather you’ve got away with your excuse for not lying down. You’ve also got away with not making the kind of improvement you could be making. What you’ve done is gone back to sitting and doing things in your old bad, tight but familiar way. The way that has over-developed all those muscles so much that they rarely get tired any more.

By this time, you’ve lost the new-found ability to move well that you had at the end of your lesson. You’ve also lost that sense of lightness and ease. That sense of knowing the difference between good and bad movement.

What have you got in return for your loss? Just not feeling the need to lie down any more. So you don’t.

37 Hope Street, Liverpool, Merseyside L1 9EA, England
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The Smiling Back Method of the Alexander Technique
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Philip Pawley

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