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Training for
the Athlete
Learning to
move in partnership with your body’s design
 Athletes know that winning
requires more than just building muscle mass and strengthening
their cardio-vascular system. Agility, balance, superb muscle
control, speed, eye-hand coordination, and split-second timing
are just some of the many talents of the skilled athlete. In
addition, preventing injuries can mean the difference between
a successful career and enjoyable free-time activity, and
being sidelined. But how to best train for these skills and
how to reduce the odds of injury?
The first essential task,
usually overlooked by coaches and trainers, is to unlearn
unconscious habits of tension and misuse when you move that
prevent your body from delivering its best—no matter how
strong you are, or how many hours you train. For example, you
may be overly tensing your neck muscles and pulling your head
backward on your spine as you jog. And, like Alexander, you
may not feel that this is happening. But if this is your
movement habit, you will coordinate yourself in this way
every time you move. And by pulling your head backward and
compressing your spine, you interfere with your balancing
mechanism and create undue pressure on your neck as well as
the joints of your arms and legs creating excess tension. This
reduces your speed and agility, and can lead to joint pain and
injury. It will also impede your ability to jump.
 Unlike any other system of
physical training, the Alexander Technique teaches you to
unlearn and then prevent such impeding habits. Combined with
existing strength training, regular practice, and conditioning
routines, knowing how to prevent such interfering habits
allows your body to perform with greater ease and fluidity,
and to achieve greater speed, height, and agility.
An equally important aspect
of the Alexander Technique is the way in which it also helps
you identify mental attitudes that limit your success. You
may over-focus on a specific goal, criticize yourself
unduly, over-analyze a movement, or simply misunderstand how
your body moves and thus stand in your own way, no matter
how much you practice. By learning to prevent such harmful
mental habits, you will experience a surprising new sense of
integration of your mind and body as you move.
You are not here to do
exercises or to learn to do something right, but to become
able to meet a stimulus that always puts you wrong and to
learn to deal with it.
F. M. Alexander
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