Age, Mobility and Posture: How to age comfortably.

The Alexander Technique is well known for its benefits to performers. Actors, singers and musicians rely on it to ensure they can deliver their best performances in even the most challenging circumstances.

Yet this life-changing technique can also affect everyone’s performance on the smaller stage of everyday life. Individuals who practice the Alexander Technique will attest that it brings benefits to many aspects of their lives. It improves the way they perform everyday activities at home or at work: this includes activities like simply sitting in a chair, or using a computer, giving a presentation, standing, walking or bending to pick something up, playing a game of tennis, and the list could go on.

As we want to look after our health, and plan to continue to do so in order that we can enjoy a long and happy older age, we try to follow advice given to us about lifestyle, diet and exercise.

It ain’t what you do…

But what isn’t often explored is exactly how we go about our exercise or how we carry out our day to day activities. It’s in these daily tasks that Alexander Technique can really help us. It reveals how we can take better care of ourselves by taking better care over these seemingly small things.

The lesson that you can learn, and it is a crucial one, is about the harmful, habitual patterns of ‘misuse’ that are unconsciously repeated in most things you do every day. The cumulative effects are to your posture, balance, breathing, ease of movement and sometimes debilitating conditions of pain and stiffness.

“All too often, harmful habits of posture and movement that may have become an inconvenience in one’s 40s and 50s become serious impediments to physical functioning in later years. Learning how to release these harmful habits is precisely what the Alexander Technique is all about.”
Robert Rickover, ‘Ageing well with the Alexander Technique’

It’s the way that you do it.

By having lessons in the Alexander Technique, and learning to identify and prevent the harmful habits that interfere with your good use and functioning, it is possible to regain balance, reduce pain and improve posture and breathing and enable greater ease of movement. It leaves you freer to pursue the hobbies and activities that bring enjoyment into your life and improve your health and wellbeing as you grow older.

Fo more information go to Alexander Technique.

By Madelene Webb