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

Does your bad back dominate your life?

Instead of your old pain-free existence, you’re now a person-with-a-bad-back. Life now revolves 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.

Then you probably want to know:–

“What’s happening to my back?” and
“Would the Alexander Technique help?”

Before I answer your questions, let me ask you something in return. If you find yourself tightening unnecessarily to do something, can you simply choose to stop the tightening?

If you think the answer is “yes”, here are a few things that Alexander Technique teachers know from their everyday experience, things that you need to know before I can help you:–

1. Posture problems and muscle tension are almost always the result of habitual interference with ordinary movement. This interfered-with movement loses its ease and spontaneity.
2. This habitual interference is never intentional. Usually you don’t even realise you are interfering with your natural movement.
3. You may, though, notice the resulting bad posture. If you do notice the bad posture and try to correct it, you end up interfering with your movement even more.

Far from improving things, your attempt makes matters worse. The worst cases that come through my door are people who have made a determined effort to correct their bad posture. 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.