Arthritis and the Alexander Technique:
quick relief or lasting solution?

Osteoarthritis is simply wear and tear of the joints. This doesn’t need to happen. It can be stopped if you know why it’s happening.

Arthritis is hardly ever the result of over-use. Few people move too much. If they did, the right prescription would be to conserve movement: stop taking exercise!    

No, the real problem isn’t moving too much, it’s moving badly. Mis-use, not over-use

Misuse: the way you are moving is putting too much pressure on your joints. In osteoarthritis, the arthritic joint parts are rubbing together too hard. Gradually, more and more of the surface rubs off. The joint wears out. (Rheumatoid arthritis is more complicated but this wear and tear is an important component of all types of arthritis, including rheumatoid arthritis).

Let me show you how it happens.

Make a fist with your right hand and rub it gently against the palm of your left hand. Done that?

Now rub again, pressing a lot harder. Notice how quickly your skin rubs raw.

The joint surfaces in your neck, back, hands, knees, hips etc. are just the same. With light pressure, the body is able to replace what little cartilage does wear away. (Just as the body also grows new skin to replace the old as it wears away).

So, if you rub lightly, you can rub all day long with no ill effect. If you rub harder, you soon have to stop to avoid rubbing your skin raw.

The problem is not the rubbing: it’s the pressure.

Work a joint lightly and, as fast as the cartilage rubs away, it is replaced. It never wears out. With heavy pressure, new cartilage can’t grow fast enough. The joint physically wears out. Eventually you get the scrunch of bare bone against bare bone. Osteoarthritis is wear and tear.

Only tense muscles can press your joints together like this.

Simply put, you develop osteoarthritis if you are too tense. Every little thing you do, you are trying too hard.

When simple actions become a painful effort, it’s hard to believe there is an easier way to do the same thing. Do you feel you are only using the effort you need to do a job? Fortunately, this is an illusion — a very convincing illusion but still an illusion.

Objection: “How could I possibly use less effort and still get the job done?”

Let me show you.

Let me give you an example

When you get out of a chair, you need to push with your knees don’t you? If you have trouble getting out of a chair, you know your knees just aren’t strong enough any more. So you push as hard as you can.

Younger people don’t: they just jump up with no effort at all. Can that be because they have much stronger knee muscles than you?  No, not at all. They don’t think they need to push with their knees, so they don’t. The fact that they still get up proves that the pushing is unnecessary.

So why do you have to push? Answer: you don’t.

If only you could leave off pushing with your knees you would simply fall off the chair and on to your feet. You would get up with no effort at all. No effort: no strain. No strain: no osteoarthritis.

“Ah”, you say, “get up without pushing? that’s impossible!” Indeed, I know it’s impossible and I know that if you try to do it now you simply won’t leave the chair. If you take a leap of faith and literally “fall on to your feet” as I suggested you will only land on your nose!

And yet, every day, as an ordinary part of my work as an Alexander teacher, I show people how to do exactly that. Far from falling on their noses, they fall UP onto their feet.

I know it sounds impossible. That’s because you haven’t done it yet. As, guided and encouraged by an Alexander teacher, you begin to do the “impossible”, all movement gradually becomes as easy as it once was. Then you will remember that you too never used to push with your knees.

Now let’s find out how to do the “impossible”.