Unlock Your Mind and Body

Here is my online diary of all my Alexander Technique learnings and discoveries as a student and teacher. Learn the benefits of the Alexander Technique and the pitfalls to avoid when learning it yourself...

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Are You Looking After Your Back?

Today is the end of the annual back care week from the www.Backcare.org. This years focus has been on teacher's and school children. Back Care are concerned that young backs are at risk from heavy school bags and badly designed chairs. They also are concerned that primary school teachers are suffering back pain in silence.

I've had the opportunity to teach groups of teachers including those at primary school. They can find it very hard and uncomfortable to sit on the small chairs to work with the young children. With a few lessons looking at how to move and sit at low level it became a lot easy for them.

How we sit on chairs is important and we need to remember our posture and to stop using unnecessary muscular tension. Looking at how we carry out our activities can make a significant improvement to how easy they are to do. But we all still need to pay attention to lifting objects safely and keeping within our physical limits. For more information see: lifting safely

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Friday, October 14, 2011

New research into neck pain

Stat and Arthritis Research UK have just started a £700k, 3 year research project to investigate the effectiveness of the Alexander Technique Lessons at improving chronic neck pain.

This comes after the research into chronic back pain showed Alexander Technique lessons significantly reduced pain experienced by those with chronic back pain.

Having spent years, before starting Alexander Technique lessons, with chronic neck pain that didn't go away, I know personally how successfully AT can reduce the pain and discomfort of neck tension. The major difference for me isn't just that the pain was reduced but I was able to learn how to prevent creating the tension and therefore the pain and discomfort in the first place.

However, I understand that for acceptance of complementary therapies by the medical community formal research needs to be carried out. My only minor gripe is we have to wait 3 years for the results!! I look forward to seeing them... To read the press release: http://t.co/zXKfzBnO
 
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