Are You Exercising or just beating up your body

Are You Exercising or Just beating up Your Body?

by Noeline Levinson, a qualified Alexander Technique Teacher, talks about re-educating your body to improve your posture


Are you exercising or just Beating up your body?

I was very lucky that I met my husband, like so many people do, at work. He arrived on my doorstep for Alexander technique lessons. He had a few lessons, and as he was a personal trainer he then attended my course for personal trainers. He had studied in America on a rugby scholarship in a very well known and respected college for chiropractors. During this time, he was over adjusted by a fellow student. When I met him, a few years after he left the States he still had tremendous problems with his mid to upper thoracic area of his spine. Being over adjusted is a very serious matter, and although that student got a telling off, it did nothing to rectify what had happened to my husband’s back. The Alexander lessons really put him straight, and we became firm friends. He also applied all his new knowledge from the personal training course to all his clients and raved about the excellent results they were getting. If your body is badly aligned when you start exercising, then the mal-alignment is exaggerated, and people end up injuring themselves. To quote  Alexander  “exercise exaggerates the alignment you already have in the body.”

I had the pleasure of working with a big body builder who was also a personal trainer at the gym where I taught.  Although somewhat resistant to the technique at first, but once he started to see that he could achieve better results without risking injury he was convinced.

The key to using the Alexander principles in exercising is to to keep the movement slow and deliberate and also to isolate the muscle group, i.e. when exercising the stomach muscles, the neck and back must not be involved.  This seems most simple but you would be very surprised how many people are unaware of how to do this. We are taught to rush along and do a thousand reps of this or that, without realising the repercussions of how that movement will destroy our joints, and create problems in the future. Exercising effectively is a passion of mine, I could really write about it for pages and pages. It is so very important. In the first blog I wrote about walking correctly, well, today, I am emphasising how important it is to be mindful of how we exercise. We think that if we are doing something, that we must be doing good. So few trainers are aware of the neck and head connection and how important they are. There are some sports out there that just lend themselves to very poor posture, but for the most part, you should be able to exercise your whole life, carefully, mindfully and with great respect for your BODY, since you only get one!

Step lightly and be spritely

http://www.alextechnz.com/exercise-with-alexander-technique.html

Noeline's articles:
Flexibility + Mobility = Longevity
Stand up for self esteem
Sit up and Listen
Does education ruin your posture or can it fix it?


About Noeline:
Wisanow contributor, Noeline Levinson qualified as an Alexander Technique teacher in June 1990. She had studied in Israel, Tel Aviv for 4 years. Noeline taught Alexander technique to Opera students at the Cape Town College of Music and then taught at the Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg, teaching aspiring actors and running workshops for professional actors. Noeline has been teaching privately for the past 21 years and has taught a variety of people from all types of performers, to people who work in companies and sit all day in front of computers. Noeline was asked to go to a number of companies to assess their staff in terms of their seating arrangements.  A number of staff suffered from headaches, neck problems and repetitive strain injury. All of which were assisted with The Alexander Technique. Noeline started out her career as a dancing teacher and then became interested in The Alexander technique and went overseas to study. Dance and exercise have always been a passion of hers. However, while she was teaching she noticed many people miss-using their body without really being aware of it. Noeline then devised a training programme for personal trainers called S.E.T. (Safe Exercise Training), which was accredited by a big gym group in SA at the time. Its aim was to exercise the body effectively and safely without the threat of injury.  Her husband is a personal trainer and used this technique with his clients and they had amazing results.

Back pain ranked very high on the list of reasons for employment absenteeism. It is a very real issue, from which many people suffer.

Noeline Levinson
email: noeline@family-focus.co.nz
09 522 8584
http://www.alextechnz.com/