Back Pain and the Alexander Technique: quick relief or lasting solution?

Does back pain and muscle tension dominate your life? Instead of a normal pain-free existence, have you become just a person-with-a-bad-back? Does life now revolve around avoiding pain (and pretending you’re ok)? Perhaps all you hope for now is pain relief, or to avoid a return of old symptoms.

Maybe there is a way out:–

“Tell me”

“What’s happening to my back? Why should the Alexander Technique help?”

Let me ask you something in return. When you notice yourself tightening unnecessarily to do something, can you simply choose to stop the tightening?

If you think the answer is “yes”, then you definitely need to read this:–

1. Alexander Technique teachers know from their everyday experience that posture problems and muscle tension are almost always the result of habitual interference with ordinary movement. Such interfered-with movement loses its ease and spontaneity.
2. The interference is not intentional: you interfere without realising it. If you notice the resulting bad posture, and try to correct it, you just interfere even more. Far from improving things, the attempt makes matters worse.
3. The worst cases that come through my door are those people who have made a determined effort to correct their faulty posture.
4. They are trying to use the very thing that spoiled their posture to put it right again. Let’s examine how this comes about.

Why your efforts fail

Your sense of movement, known as kinaesthesia, is not reliable. (Some people are blessed with reliable kinaesthesia. For them, all goes well: their actions work the way they intended them to. You were probably like that once.)

Since your sense of movement is not reliable, what you do is not what you intended. You mean to do one thing and end up doing something a bit different.

But… you still think you are doing what you intended. Your feeling, your kinaesthetic sense, tells you you are. (It never occurs to you not to trust it).

This is what makes it so hard to understand why your old, well-worn movements no longer work as expected. You fail, and can’t understand why you have failed. You try harder. The harder you try, the more attention you are paying to what you feel you are doing — to your unreliable kinaesthetic sense.

The more attention you pay to your kinaesthetic sense, the further it leads you astray. You end up repeating the same mistakes, only worse. Tensing up in the effort to control your wayward movements, your posture becomes tighter, stiffer and more badly mis-aligned.

This is how back pain and muscle tension come about.

Read “Getting rid of lower back pain: How to loosen your back up” for practical ways to help yourself.

Further Resources

Here are some ways I can help you further.

Wherever you live

1. If you’re not already getting my free weekly article delivered to your inbox, then go here to get it.
2. Repoise is our membership site for people who are serious about improving themselves (and getting out of pain as they do that). Find out more here: SmilingBackMethod.com/Repoise When you join, you will:–
   • have daily access to me. Together we will work out what’s going wrong for you and how to fix it
   • learn from reading other Repoise members’ questions and following their progress as they work with me
   • get access to all my articles, not just the ones that are published on my web-site
   Check it out and judge for yourself: SmilingBackMethod.com/Repoise
3. I’m writing a book about my work. It will come out on the 1st July 2010. The book I was going to write this year (on the Tube Principle) was a bit too specialised so I changed my mind about writing that book. This new book will still include a chapter or two on the Tube Principle — and, of course, much more besides.

If you’re in Liverpool (or can get to Liverpool)

1. I’m also running introductory workshops in Liverpool teaching you how to apply my work to improve your life. Go here for details of the next workshop: SmilingBackMethod.com/workshop
2. There’s no substitute for individual lessons. Ring me on 0151 708 6172 to book your initial lesson. (Leave your number so I can get back to you).

If you’re further away and can’t get to Liverpool

1. There’s still no substitute for individual lessons. Here’s where you can find a teacher near you in the UK or elsewhere
2. Remember to still do the things I listed above for everyone. Even if you’re having lessons from someone else, you will find these a very great help. They’ll help you understand your lessons better and get a lot more out of them. All my own pupils read my weekly articles and several of them are active members of Repoise.