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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Who's got a front problem?
How is your front these days? I am directing this question to the men reading here, just as much as women! I mean it,...how is your front? Have you any awareness of your front, other than the tie you may be wearing or necklace? Most of us do not have any perception of the front of our body. Let me rephrase the question...
How is your back these days? Now you know what I'm talking about! You may comment that your back is just fine, thank you! On the other hand, you might complain of pain, stiffness, aches or general discomfort; I hope you do not have spasms or even a trapped nerve! Around 80% of us have back problems at some time in our lives; for many it can be a recurring or consistent problem. It may surprise you that back problems are often caused by tension in the front of our body. Most of us do not have a 'Back Problem'; it is our Front Problem we need to sort out! By releasing tension in your abdominal and chest muscles you may allow yourself to come up to your full height and your back problem may just disappear. Let me explain...
If we have pain in an area of our body, say for instance in our back, then that is usually where we feel that treatment should be focused, to relieve the pain. However, while there may be problems with the way our back muscles are supporting us, or not, as the case may be; while we may have a trapped nerve, squashed, perforated or slipped disc, the CAUSE of the problem may well be else where. We just feel the pain in one part and think that is where the problem is.
Throughout our body we tend to have groups of muscles that work in pairs. We have Flexor muscles that make us bend and we have Extensor muscles that straighten us out. If you bend your arm, you flex your biceps. We may do this to show how big our muscles are! To bend your arm your biceps contract, but when you straighten your arm, you release the tension in the biceps and the triceps contract (in the back of your arm) to straighten your arm again. Similarly we have pairs of muscles in our legs; the muscles at the back bend our knees and the quadriceps in the front can straighten our leg. The alternate use of these muscles cause our legs to bend and straighten and this is part of the activity of walking; straightening and bending our legs alternately. If we tighten both the front and back (flexors and extensors) at the same time, we cause rigidity and stiffness; we will then be bracing our legs.
We also have flexor and extensor muscles in our torso. The flexors are our abdominal and chest muscles and the extensors are the muscles in our back. We can tighten our flexor muscles in front to make us bend forwards, to curl up into a fetal position and our back muscles can straighten us up again. If our back muscles are not working effectively we may be encouraged to strengthen our tummy muscles, to develop chore strength to support the weak back. This strengthening usually brings about a general tension around our middle to help keep us upright.
However, young children have wonderful posture. because they have not developed any bad posture habits. They are very free and upright, yet they do not have strong tummy muscles. Their tummies are soft; it is the muscles in their back that are doing their proper job of supporting them. This is also the quality that we as adults still need in order to have healthy posture.
I asked the question, "How is your front?" because tension in the abdominal muscles and other muscles right up our chest causes contraction and can remain contracted, causing problems in our back; They may be constantly contracting and pulling us forwards and down. We do many activities that can cause us to become tight and contracted in our fronts; desk work, bending forwards to clean, fix, write, vacuum; we may also go to the gym and do 100 sit ups that tighten up our abdominal muscles. Unless we stretch ourselves out again, these muscles can be distorting our posture. Most people I meet at my Alexander Technique practice have tensions in their front that are shortening their stature and distorting their posture.
Tension in our 'front' is extremely common and has an effect on posture for most of us. There is no way that we can have a healthy back if we are constantly shortening in front. Muscle tensions in the front of our torso pulls us forwards and downwards so we become bent like a banana. We need to release these tensions so we can come upright again.
With Alexander Technique we can think to release tensions and 'send' our head upwards to lengthen our back. But although we may think of lengthening in our backs, we can easily forget that we must lengthen in front too! The distance from our groin to our throat should be lengthening too. A good stretch may help, but we must avoid just pulling and holding ourselves in a fixed and stretched way as this will cause other tension problems. Good posture does not require effort, at least we should not perceive it as effort. Young children don't make any effort of this kind, so nor should we as adults.
The answer is to 'think' upwards with our heads, but also think of our sternum coming upwards too, so the distance from our groin to our sternum and our throat becomes greater. Care must be taken though to avoid unnecessarily lifting our chest as this will also cause problems. Alexander lessons will help you with this subtlety. As we come up in front, out back will become more upright too and will allow more lengthening. We need the lengthening in our front and our back to take the pressure of our intervertebral discs and allow our spinal curvature to restore itself to normal. The spine should not be straight like a ruler, but curved; not excessive nor straight. Thinking upwards will allow it to sort itself out.
Many back problems are caused by us shortening in our front. If we can allow ourselves to come more upright by lengthening in front, then we are helping to reduce the strain on our back.
