Why core strength fitness trainers don’t provide the goods
(and what they can do to correct that)

You know the saying: “Only the wounded physician heals”?

This is so true for core strength fitness trainers. The trainer has never experienced what it’s like to lack core strength. If he did, he would never have become a fitness trainer.

So what is the reason for lack of core strength?

Core strength requires reliable kinaesthesia

Unreliable kinaesthesia makes core strength impossible.

What is this kinaesthesia thing?

Everybody has some sort of sense of how they are moving. People who move well depend on this sense being reliable. (If it weren’t, they wouldn’t be moving well). Most people have an unreliable kinaesthetic sense. They therefore move badly. But they don’t know their kinaesthesia is bad.

How would you know your kinaesthesia was bad?

Whatever your sense of movement is, that’s your sense of movement. You know nothing different, so you just get on as best you can.

It’s like being colour-blind: if you’ve never seen the colour red, how would you know what red was? If your kinaesthesia is unreliable, you don’t know what free, easy movement feels like.

Understanding unreliable kinaesthesia

How would somebody who does see colour know what it’s like to see everything as shades of grey? They can’t. So somebody with reliable kinaesthesia can’t imagine what it’s like to not be able to trust their sense of movement. So they don’t know what to do to help.

What’s this got to do with core strength?

Improving core strength requires re-training one’s kinaesthesia

Core strength is just one aspect of moving well. If your sense of movement is unreliable, there’s no way you can sense what to do to maintain core strength. Much less build it.

So nothing anybody gets you to do will help
…unless that something re-trains your kinaesthesia.

Since fitness trainers have never experienced unreliable kinaesthesia, they have no clue what it’s like, let alone what to do to correct it. Their fitness programs consequently ignore it—and fail to help their clients.

Since this is the normal state of affairs, the trainer doesn’t know that a solution is even possible. Not knowing, they wouldn’t recognise it even if it was placed right under their nose. What is the solution?

How to re-train your kinaesthesia

1. Recognising the problem of unreliable kinaesthesia is the first step. Once you do recognise the problem, two further steps are required.
2. The second step is to stop believing the mis-information that your unreliable kinaesthesia is sending.
3. The third step is to find and use an appropriate alternative way to guide your movements while re-learning what works and what doesn’t.

Steps two and three

This article will, I hope, give you the first step: convincing you that unreliable kinaesthesia is the problem. The Alexander Technique provides the second and third steps—and the third step is made much quicker and easier by my newly-discovered Tube Principle.

In conclusion

It is no accident that Alexander Technique teachers almost always got introduced to the work as a result of a physical problem they themselves suffered from.

First they suffered the wound. Then they found a wounded physician (another Alexander teacher) who was able to help them when nobody else could. Impressed by their almost unbelievable healing, they then went on to do the three year training it takes to become an Alexander teacher themselves. Healed of their own wounds, they became wounded healers themselves.

A message of hope to fitness trainers

So you see, if you’re a core strength fitness trainer, it’s no fault of yours that you can’t provide the goods. Does this mean you have to go out of business. On the contrary, if you recognise your limitations (and who doesn’t have limitations) you can earn your clients’ eternal gratitude by sending them for Alexander lessons while yourself help them to become fit.

Gratitude is all very well, but will they stay on as your customers?

They really should do. As an Alexander teacher, I’m a great believer in fitness and I strongly encourage all my clients to get active again straight away. How else can they practise the better mobility I am teaching them? I do this in the knowledge that I am providing them with the means to do be active without re-injuring themselves.

Alexander teachers would be a great source of business for an enlightened fitness trainer.

The next step

Learn more about unreliable kinaesthesia:–

1. The Problem of Unreliable Kinaesthesia: Why you keep getting in your own way — and why you can’t help doing it
2. What can a sailing ship tell you about your body?