Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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World class balance
Roger Federer
It's sizzling summer, it's late June and there is so much sport to watch on TV from the Football World Cup to Wimbledon tennis, it can be a difficult choice between staying in to watch the big matches or go out and get some sun and fresh air. If I were a cat my tail would wag in indecision.
I don't know about you, but when I watch sport played at such high levels, it's just wonderful to see the acrobatics and athleticism of the players. They move so fast, respond like lightening with reactions faster than a speeding bullet. They may fall over quite a lot, but by and large they manage remarkably well to stay on their feet despite the fast pace of action. It makes me think of what fine co-ordination they have. They are like athletic acrobats.
Have you ever been in awe watching an acrobat walk across a tightrope only using a long pole to help balance? The wire is only about an inch in diameter, yet, although it moves from side to side, he will go with the movement, compensating and readjusting his weight with split second timing. Obviously his reflexes are wonderfully quick and his sense of balance finely tuned. Maybe as a child you walked along the top of a narrow garden wall, and you could probably run along it without falling off because you were free in your joints and your balance was good. Well, this is the same agility that we still need as adults if we’re going to be successful at sport.
Wayne Rooney
Let’s create a new set of conditions for our acrobat and ask him to wear a neck splint, which sounds terrible, but is simply a neck support that prevents all movement by holding his head and neck in a fixed position in relation to his shoulders. Ask him to walk the wire again wearing the neck splint, and he’d find that he wouldn’t be able to maintain his balance and would fall off after only two or three strides. This illustrates the importance of keeping a free neck and allowing the weight of our head to freely balance on the top of our spine. This may seem like an extreme example, yet this is the sort of condition that most of us have all of the time. We are interfering with the balance of our heads by tightening our neck muscles in a habitual way, all day long.
Since an adult head usually weighs the equivalent of about 5 bags of sugar, between 4-6 kilos, it has a tremendous influence on the balance of our whole body. In a healthy person, and you can easily see this in two year old children, the head balances very freely, and it will wobble back and forth so that the weight compensates depending on the angle of the body underneath. The head weight acts as part of our whole balancing mechanism. If we tighten our muscles and lock our head position solid on our neck, it will prevent our head from righting itself with subtle and subconscious adjustments, and we will become unstable on our feet. Neck tension is not just the cause of neck pain and discomfort, but it actually affects the way we perform. It has a much greater effect on our bodies than we might at first realise.
Neck tension reduces the sensitivity of the small but highly important sub-occipital muscles deep underneath the skull. These little muscles work in conjunction with our vestibular mechanism of the inner ear and our eyes to send feedback information to the brain about our position and our overall balance. In other words they help to tell the brain where we are in space. As a sports person, we need these functions to be working one hundred percent.
To free our neck we must firstly bring our attention to it and our head balance. We must ensure that our head is not pulled backwards by muscle tension in the back of our neck. For most of us, it will be helpful for us to allow our nose to drop a few millimetres so that our head rolls forwards on the top of the spine. Don’t drop your neck forwards like a giraffe, nor tuck your chin in. Remain upright. We’re allowing our head to roll forwards slightly on the very top of our spine at a point between our ears. Gravity will do the job for us. Think of your head teetering, freely. You need to ‘wish’ it free. It should be a clear wish that has meaning and which can bring about a change. We need our neck to be free all of the time. There is normally no reason for us to be tightening our neck muscles. This isn’t a fixed position and we should not ‘hold’ our heads in a position that we think is correct. Let it balance freely like a young child.
We can free up throughout our whole body in a similar way, by ‘telling’ and intending ourselves to become freer. Habitual tension will remain unless we intervene. Tell your shoulders to free and loose, and also your arms and legs.
Whatever you're doing, you're likely to be able to do it better, more efficiently if you've got a free neck. If you're playing sport, then the slightest problem shows itself up and interferes with your performance. Even if the closest we ever get to sport is when we watch it on TV, we can avoid getting a stiff neck and tiredness if we can just loosen that top little joint between our ears. Just like a child's head....let it teeter. It won't fall off.
Now I'm going to toddle off for the weekend. See you next week!
:-)
