Posture and the Alexander Technique:
The truth about Posture

Since the usual stiff posture is bad posture the truth about posture is:–

A slumped posture is not really a slump at all.

It’s a pull-down.

Your own muscles are literally dragging you down just like a team of men hauling on tight cables fastened to the crown of a tall tree would bend it over.

It’s not just your neck. You are also pulling your chest and shoulders forwards and down.

What muscles are pulling? First, your neck, throat and jaw muscles, then your chest, abdominal and even your leg muscles. They are all joining in — like a whole array of cables attached to the tree at different heights.

What you need for good posture is to stop pulling yourself down in this way. Compare this with the usual, old-fashioned posture advice.

Good old-fashioned posture advice

Seeing your slumped posture, everybody, well-meaning, chips in with the same advice: Sit up! Stand straight!

It soon becomes obvious that this is a struggle. Hence the next juicy bit of advice.

“Do your back and shoulders feel too weak? Then strengthen them! Start a regime of exercises to strengthen your back and shoulder muscles!”

I hope you can now see what bad advice this really is. Your back muscles are already being worked too hard. That’s why they don’t feel strong enough.

Muscle is fighting muscle in a relentless tug-of-war. When you make the extra effort to be truly straight, the resulting appearance of good posture is a stiff, tiring and unnatural travesty — far less functional, even, than the slump you are trying to correct.

That’s why it ends in pain — often extremely severe pain. To get rid of the pain for good you need to sort this mess out.

Just building more muscle (so that it can stand more strain) may relieve the pain short-term, but it will also give you the strength to tighten yourself up even more.

The pain of permanently over-worked muscles is often unbearable. I’ve seen muscle pain officially labelled as nerve pain simply because the doctor could not believe that such intense pain could possibly be muscular. It can be and often is.

For instance, sorting all this out properly normally gets rid of frequent migraine headaches — for good. Often symptoms begin to respond quite quickly — as muscles are no longer forced to work quite so hard.

Next Page: Four reasons for NOT sitting up

Do your shoulders hurt? Then read “Why does not understanding your shoulders cause pain?”.

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  2. Repoise is our membership site for people who are serious about improving themselves (and getting out of pain as they do that). When you join, you will:–
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If you’re in Liverpool (or can get to Liverpool)

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

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  2. I suggest you also do the things I listed above for everyone:–
    1. Read my weekly articles
    2. Get direct day-to-day guidance from me by joining Repoise.
    If you’re having plain Alexander Technique lessons from someone else, you still need to learn the Smiling Back Method of the Alexander Technique. You’ll get a lot more out of your lessons when you do.


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Medical Study proves lasting effectiveness of the Alexander Technique for low back pain.

Published in the prestigious British Medical Journal on 19 August 2008, this randomised controlled medical trial compares Alexander Technique lessons, exercise and massage for chronic and recurrent back pain.

British Medical Journal video on the Alexander TechniqueBritish Medical Journal video

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