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FC2O Episode 15 - Lawrence Smith
22 Plays5 years ago
This week's guest, Lawrence Smith, is an internationally renowned Alexander Technique practitioner and barefoot runner. Lawrence shares his knowledge, insights and applications of Alexander's work in athletics, music, dance and performance.
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Transcript
The Joy of Running in Nature
00:00:00
Speaker
One of the interesting things about running in the woods is that you're looking around. You stay lively. Your feet are feeling the ground. Your eyes are seeing. You're balancing. Everything is mobile. When you're in the city and everything looks like shit and you don't want to look at it and you put on headphones, you can kind of disrupt a lot of little lively mobility. All the sensors are comparators. So in order to sense you're moving, muscles are changing length.
00:00:29
Speaker
This is what good posture is. When posture is good, opposing muscles are changing length. It's called myotatic reflex, right? That one is lengthening and the other is shortening and they alternate. And having opposing muscles set against each other, not a good thing. So there's something about, out in the woods, it looks good. You're looking around, your feet are responding to the ground.
00:01:03
Speaker
From chaos to order
Meet Lawrence Smith: Alexander Technique Expert
00:01:25
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another edition of FC2O. Today we have Alexander Teacher and Runner, Lawrence Smith joining us all the way from Montreal. Lawrence has worked using the Alexander technique as an actor and dancer since the 1970s, eventually training and qualifying as an Alexander Teacher in the late 80s.
00:01:43
Speaker
He directed the Manhattan Center for the Alexander Technique in New York City for over 10 years, before moving to Montreal in 1998, and has taught world-renowned dancers, actors, athletes and musicians, including the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Along with his private practice, Lawrence teaches dancers and musicians at the University of Quebec, Montreal, and gives private lessons at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University.
00:02:07
Speaker
But Lawrence isn't just a theory guy. He's been out in the trenches as a cross-country skier, swimmer and runner for more than 40 years applying everything that he knows and has learned from Alexander, winning numerous competitions. And as you may pick up from his very calming manner, he's also a practitioner of Tai Chi Xuan. So I hope you enjoy Lawrence's take on posture, function and everything, Alexander. Enjoy the show. Here we go.
Comparing Body Mechanics: Osteopathy vs. Alexander Technique
00:02:50
Speaker
Welcome to another edition of FC2.0. Today, I have Lawrence Smith with me, who is an Alexander Technique practitioner. And Lawrence, I've known of you, and we've kind of exchanged messages over an online forum for barefoot runners. I was just looking back, and I think it's not far off 10 years now.
00:03:10
Speaker
So I've had that awareness of your work, and I've always found your comments and insights very fascinating. Obviously, with myself coming from an osteopathic background, there's some kind of resonance between the way I think of the body and the way you're trained to think of the body. But also, I've noticed there's a number of differences as well, and I've learned a lot from reading your posts. So I'm really fascinated to learn what was it that took you into Alexander Technique in the first instance.
Lawrence's Journey from Acting to Movement Studies
00:03:38
Speaker
Well, you know, this is interesting because I was an actor and I was an actor kind of by default because it was the 60s and I hitched around and I didn't know what to do with my life. And I wound up in Boulder, Colorado in a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The director had been interested in me because I had some
00:04:04
Speaker
experience with my own mental illness. So he wanted me to be a consultant, and then he cast me in a role. And I thought, well, that's great. I'll do that. I get a lot of attention. And I did a little bit of university theater, and then I got into a little professional company. And one of the directors of the professional company had worked in France with Etienne de Cou
00:04:33
Speaker
He was a teacher of Marcel Morceau, but Morceau doesn't represent what he did. What he did was really teach people how to control their movement to show this all came from Francois Delsarte, which is also a link in Alexander. So at any rate, one of the
00:04:54
Speaker
She wasn't a director. She was an assistant that was brought in to help us with movement in this little theater company, this little government-funded theater company. And she had studied in France with Étienne de Croix. And Étienne de Croix taught a lot of, he taught Géron des Pardures, Jean-Louis Barreaux, even Jessica Lang studied with him. Oh, wow. Okay. So he was very
00:05:19
Speaker
He had a certain amount of respect, but he was insane. The idea being that you could control the body.
00:05:28
Speaker
to control exactly what you want it to express. This is a little bit like what we deal with in running. When you get in and try to position things and control things, you get into real trouble. It's the same thing when you're trying to express something as an actor. If you have the idea that you'll do a gesture that starts from your forehead and it will be intellectual,
00:05:51
Speaker
If it starts from your jaw, it'll be physical. All this stuff, and not only that, but the idea that if you're standing next to somebody and you rotate your head toward them, incline it toward them, and tilt it forward toward them, it says one thing that's affectionate. If you rotate it toward them,
00:06:10
Speaker
inclined it away and inclined it back. It's completely different. So at any rate, this stuff got very insane. I went to study with somebody who was teaching it and got into his company and his company was completely abstracted, abstract movement. This is a little bit what happened in modern art, that they stopped painting Rembrandt characters and they just said, well, let's do line and color.
00:06:38
Speaker
And you took took away the heart of it took away the meat of it and tried to just do the externals like control your stride length. It's, you know, it's really analogous. You know, there are things that will do themselves.
00:06:52
Speaker
You shouldn't get in there and try to do them. Allowing them is another
The Alexander Technique: A Healing Discovery
00:06:58
Speaker
thing. So at any rate, I got terribly injured doing this work. I performed all over the world. I've been in Edinburgh and London and Paris. By the time I was 32, I had a diagnosis of cervical arthritis. I had herniated discs. I had chronic bursitis of shoulders and knees. I had chronic tendonitis in the wrists and deltoids.
00:07:21
Speaker
I had arthritis in my hands. I was 32. A rheumatologist told me I should take a year off and rest, so I got on my bicycle and rode a thousand miles in two weeks. I was my response to that, which was okay for my knees, not for the neck. At any rate, I left what I was doing.
00:07:44
Speaker
And I was sort of stumbling around in New York and I had experienced FM Alexander when I was doing dance training. I did ballet training.
00:07:54
Speaker
Someone in New York was teaching these big group workshops, which I later learned was nonsense. And so I knew who he was. And my wife, who was a dancer, was in New York, said, oh, you should come and take some Alexander lessons. And I said, oh, I did that. And she said, you really should. And I went and it was a revolution. It was a revolution that many people will have a handful of lessons and not feel a thing. And I'm sure you know this in your work.
00:08:22
Speaker
Sure. You see the difference, they don't. But for me, it was a revolution that I felt completely different. I felt open. I had an experience of my mother. I was very curious. I entered training right away. It was a four-year full-time training, and I just signed right up. All my problems went away. I'm 16. What year was this?
00:08:50
Speaker
Uh, I started, it would have been 85, 1985. And, um, I'm now almost 69. I don't have a problem with my neck, with my back. I run, I ski. I don't have anything that hurts anywhere. I don't have any joint or any tendons, which is kind of like considering that, that when I had those problems, I couldn't run at all. I had knee problems. I couldn't do anything.
00:09:18
Speaker
except ride my bike a thousand miles. Brilliant, brilliant. That's some of the story and there's a ton more. Yeah, sure. That's how you got into the training. I know from reading a bit about you that you set up the Manhassen Center for Alexander's Technique. Now, was that shortly after you trained or was that a little while into your career?
00:09:47
Speaker
That was just the name I gave to my studio. As Alexander should be taught, I was teaching private individual lessons. So to call it the Manhattan Center for the Alexander Technique was something to put on. In those days, there was no internet, so he just went around tacking up photocopies. Center for the Alexander Technique, you have to say something because Lauren Smith means nothing.
00:10:16
Speaker
And so we'd go around to dance schools and tack up these little flyers. Excellent. And so, you know, where did this lead you in terms of, you know, obviously I know you're in that kind of acting world and I know also from reading your various posts over the years and a bit on your website that you've worked with a whole range of different performers from athletes to ballet dancers to musicians.
00:10:44
Speaker
So where did your career go from there? Were you straight in with that crowd, or did it take a while to build that reputation and that client base up?
Teaching Challenges in Montreal
00:10:54
Speaker
Well, in Manhattan, the Alexander Technique is very well known, like in London. It's taught at Juilliard. Actors all know about it.
00:11:05
Speaker
The dancers from Jose Nimone Company, Martha Graham, you know, they would come and that was sort of easy. And then I moved to Montreal. My wife is from Quebec.
00:11:16
Speaker
I had a son who had heart surgeries and we couldn't pay the $1,000 a month health insurance to make sure he was okay. Seriously, $960 a month. So we moved to Montreal, which is a great place, and the Alexander Technique is relatively unknown. To this day, it still is. And most of my students were people who had problems from sitting at the computer.
00:11:44
Speaker
They were curious, a Chinese physician who wanted to learn how to lecture better. I would go and give workshops at some of the 10 schools, but nobody's interested in taking private lessons. It's very much a French thing, right? That this master disciple thing doesn't really work. They like Feldenkrais, they like group stuff.
00:12:12
Speaker
Right. Right. Which is fine, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I know that Feldenkrais adopted some of Alexander's techniques, or at least I've seen you explain that to some degree. So could you elaborate on that a little bit?
Feldenkrais vs. Alexander Technique: A Comparison
00:12:27
Speaker
Well, Moshe Feldenkrais was an Israeli martial artist who blew out his knees and traveled around the world trying to find a solution to that.
00:12:38
Speaker
And he ended in London and studied with Alexander, one of Alexander's students, Walter Keaton, briefly. And then he wrote his big book. And when Carrington brought it to Alexander, Alexander thought, well, he's taken all my ideas. I got credit. And he called Feldenkrais in and said, what do you have to say about this? And Feldenkrais said, well, you're not a known... Alexander said, you shall have no more lessons.
00:13:09
Speaker
He sent him back to Israel. And Israel felt Christ built something different. He didn't know the Alexander technique. He kind of faked a bit of it. What he did was perfectly respectable in its way, but it didn't deal with the core postural issues in the same way. Right, right. So tell us a bit more about Alexander, because I'm not sure of his exact sort of timeline of when he developed the technique, but I believe it's the early 20th
FM Alexander's Journey to Vocal Recovery
00:13:38
Speaker
century. Is that right?
00:13:39
Speaker
Well, actually, a lot of his story isn't well known because he didn't talk about a lot of it, right? His parents were involved in agricultural rebellion in England and arrested and sent his convicts to Tasmania, as were a lot of people. And this was right after the Brits had killed every single Aboriginal in Tasmania.
00:14:09
Speaker
They had complete genocide. They wiped them out. The ones they didn't kill, they swept off and put in an island where they died of diseases that they hadn't been exposed to before. Anyway, that's another story. Alexander was brought up on that. They did these convicts because they couldn't leave Tasmania. They were given farms. Instead of sitting in prison, they said,
00:14:34
Speaker
farm this land and so his parents had a farm and Alexander grew up on a farm and he was somewhat sickly. This is also not too clear but a lot of time he wasn't in school and he was playing with the horses and out running around on the farm so he avoided a lot of the stresses of primary school education. You know as you know the first time we really see kids
00:15:00
Speaker
posture get bad unless they've had an abusive home life, is hunching over desks. Yeah, of course. And we see the evidence of the moral reflex, startle reflex, grasping reflexes holding on out of fear. And they take that pencil and group it. And so there's evidence that he escaped a lot of that. And then later went from Weinert and moved to Melbourne.
00:15:30
Speaker
educated himself and got interested in theater. And for him, the theater was doing monologues, doing Shakespearean monologues, and he lost his voice. And the physicians were not able to tell him what was wrong. And he said, it must be something I'm doing. And they said, yeah, that's it. So he set up this three-way mirrors and he studied himself for nine years. Oh, wow. This is a crazy person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really wanted to be on stage.
00:16:00
Speaker
And he saw things that he was doing, the way that he lifted his chest and pulled his head back when he took in a breath of air, preparing to project his voice. And he saw that when he tried to control that by positioning, he wasn't successful, that he had to really find another way of
00:16:27
Speaker
This is where it gets tricky because there's a difference between if your shoulder is curled forward, pulling it back doesn't stop you from pulling it forward. It just adds another tension to position it. How do you stop the pulling it forward? This is a tricky thing because I'd say that the motor cortex can do basically three things with a muscle. It can excite it and shorten it.
00:16:58
Speaker
it can isometrically contract it, just hold it in a position, or it can inhibit it, lengthen it. And that's an active thing. And so the ability to think
00:17:14
Speaker
in a way that lengthens the muscle is a very tricky thing because you can't directly address the muscles. So for him, it was a matter of really a Zen process of sitting there saying, okay, leave yourself alone. Don't try to do anything.
00:17:31
Speaker
no stimulus that you're going to contract to trying to do something and direct yourself to open. Let your head go forward and up, let your back length. He was not doing this at this point. This came later. But whatever he did, he solved his vocal problems and he had a career performing and started being asked to teach. And he taught a breathing method.
00:18:01
Speaker
which I, people say was very much like Francois Delsarte. Francois Delsarte, the Frenchman, and his, Francois Delsarte's brother was in Australia at the time. So he was the origin of all that, the crew stuff.
00:18:20
Speaker
of turn your head to the right to indicate this. What Alexander was teaching in groups was not really the Alexander technique, it was a breathing method. Over years teaching it, I think he obviously got frustrated that people weren't doing what he wanted and he started taking hold of them. He realized that that was a delicate process. That you could touch, as you know, as an osteopath,
00:18:50
Speaker
that you can impart some information to somebody through touch. That's not the same thing as pulling them and pushing them. It's quite, quite subtle. And once he had a method for working on people to get them to stop doing all this unconscious stuff, he wrote that it was wrong
00:19:10
Speaker
to directly try to control any aspect of respiration. The respiration was a reflex and that if global posture was functioning well, the breathing would be fine. And here again, we come to the problem with running because running is reflex.
00:19:28
Speaker
It's not learned. You don't look at somebody to do it. Kids simply do it. So then if you tell somebody, well, you should hold your elbows at 45 degrees or your torso should be straight, you're not going to make it better. Right. Yeah. And this is a real difficulty. And it's why I think Barefoot Running has kind of died out. Fortunately, it hasn't completely. We can still buy our
00:19:58
Speaker
Yeah, fascinating stuff. Now, one of the things that struck me as you were explaining the background to Alexander there is that, you know, he didn't go through the standard educational process that a lot of kids do, which of course, you know, when you look at the schooling and the critiques of the schooling processes, especially in our Western cultures, is that
00:20:24
Speaker
they often say that really the schooling system was set up to create a population that would essentially be happy following instructions and weren't designed to really think for themselves. So I thought it was quite fascinating that he, like several other leaders that come up with novel concepts, they often don't have a conventional training background or educational background, let's say. And there's something about that that seems to,
Innovative Ideas from Unconventional Paths
00:20:52
Speaker
you know, open their minds and let them see things from a different perspective. So that, that was really fascinating. What was it that the philosopher Heijo Eckhart said? He said the tool is a political, the chair is a political tool.
00:21:07
Speaker
designed to create a Dassault population. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. I haven't heard that before. You put people in rows and share, and you've got them. But the other thing for me is the, I always talk about moral reflex.
00:21:23
Speaker
The physicians will say that that disappears after a certain age, but I don't think it does. Should we just explain what that is for people that perhaps haven't heard of that before? I know a bit about it, but yeah, go on. Just elaborate. It's a reflex that can be stimulated in young children and in apes.
00:21:41
Speaker
that when they're stressed, they reach out and grab onto something and then they retract. So it's an ape holding onto its mother when the tiger comes, essentially, right? And it's a reflex, and it's not something that we seek to eradicate, but it's rarely appropriate in our world. So the child who is hunched over at his desk,
00:22:05
Speaker
gripping his pencil is afraid. He's afraid of not succeeding. He's afraid of not getting a good grade. And these, whatever you want to call them, these grasping reflexes are strongly stimulated. And when they are successful, the brain will eventually assume them as part of posture. So he gets a good grade contracting like that, or he plays his violin well.
00:22:33
Speaker
contracting like that. And the brain says, let's just do that all the time. So like other postural muscle actions, it's 24-7. It doesn't just appear when he writes, it's always there. Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that I've read about around the morrow reflexes that of course it's very much linked in with breathing as well. And when it's retained, it can impact on respiratory mechanics. Is that something that you, I guess you're alluding to there?
00:23:03
Speaker
Well, yes, and this is an interesting thing because I've recently had some disagreements with Alexander teachers about this, and you'll know more about this than Alexander teachers because you've had a lot of anatomy. The central tendon of aponeurosis of the diaphragm has strong ligaments attaching it to the cervical spine. The phrenopericardial ligament
00:23:30
Speaker
It's glued to the pericardium around the heart, which has two powerful ligaments that connect it to the neck. The only way it's going down is if you collapse. When there's good respiration,
00:23:44
Speaker
as in all movement, spinal muscles are active first. So the spine extends on inhalation and the diaphragm can lift the ribs, not go plunging down into the abdomen. And it's, it's, it's incredible in how many areas recently, uh, Mark Kukosela, you know, he wrote about a diaphragmatic breathing and running, which is a horror.
00:24:14
Speaker
Because you ought to be extending. You've made diaphragmatic breathing and swimming. Now, come on. You're lengthening like crazy, the diaphragm. It's just an absurdity. Right. Right. So when you say extending, we're kind of not just talking about sagittal plane extension, but like an axial extension. So actually lengthening the body. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know this better than anyone.
00:24:44
Speaker
when we move, movement starts in the upper neck and moves down the spine and out to the limits. So you don't move a finger without some preparatory muscular action in the spine. And you see this with the weight lifter. He's lifting a heavy weight. He doesn't even drag his arms. He lengthens like crazy against it, you know? And
00:25:07
Speaker
in studying, and this was also in born to run. This was brought up. Four-legged running animals inhale on extension, and they can't alter it. So how is it that in the Alexander technique there are people touring the world telling people to shorten and widen on inhalation? It's a surprising thing where you've probably done yoga,
00:25:36
Speaker
belly breathing, you know. I had the good luck to have an old Chinese Tai Chi teacher who said, no, no, you no breathe like that. Right, right. Okay. Okay. So he had a kind of a version of Alexander in his, in his
00:25:53
Speaker
sort of martial arts background. Yes absolutely and he would say and the people would say well should I direct my chi here he said chi is smarter than you it nowhere to go. You leave chi alone.
00:26:13
Speaker
Now, obviously, we've mentioned the Murrow reflex, but one of the things that I've seen you write about a lot is this idea of postural reflexes, particularly, of course, because we've been on a running forum, you've often related that back to running.
Natural Running: From Shoes to Barefoot
00:26:26
Speaker
So what have you been your insights and experiences with this whole idea of barefoot running, being able to feel the ground, the feet actually splaying on the ground and so on, and how that affects the way the body moves
00:26:43
Speaker
above the feet, as it were. Well, let me say a little bit more about my history. OK, yeah, go on. Because I did some running in the 70s. And then when I started all the ballet, I had knee problems. I couldn't run anymore for about 13 years. And then when I was training in Alexander, I thought, well, maybe I could run now. Yeah. And you know, I had a doctor tell me I needed orthotics and all this stuff. And I went out.
00:27:11
Speaker
running and I immediately felt myself picking up my toes as I picked my leg up. I thought, well, why would I do that? Why would I pick my leg up? I stopped doing it and I never had the knee problem again. After 13 years of it, when I started running, I was fine running in these Adidas SL72, these nothing shoes. Then I read Runner's World.
00:27:40
Speaker
and how to run. And I remember them saying, land on your heel and roll through your foot. And the way the shoes were made was they were beveled right in the middle. And so I thought, well, I should land on the middle of my foot and roll through my foot. Well, the only way to do that is to sort of lift the outside of your leg. And the perineus longus comes right up to the knee. So I was contracting this thing that shouldn't be active in running.
00:28:10
Speaker
And then I started, a friend of mine said, well, come to this race. I started running in Central Park races and I started winning them in my age group. Just doing nothing. I was running 25 miles a week and winning 10 kilometer races just by leading with my head, letting my spine lengthen, letting the movement happen.
00:28:39
Speaker
Not doing any of the things that I'd read. As I ran, the more I ran, the more I started running in racing flats and people say, you can't train in those. I said, well, I can run a hard 10K in them and they're very minimal heel. When the minimalist shoes came out, there were new balance and they still had a heel.
00:29:03
Speaker
And I realized that to run in them, I had to be very far up in my toes and my heel slammed down after my forefoot landed, which was unpleasant. And one day I was in the Dominican Republic and I would get up in the morning and run five miles on the beach while the sand was still wet, you know? And I got about five miles out and I had to go to the bathroom. The only way to get there was on asphalt. And I went barefoot on asphalt and I thought, wow, that's better than the sand.
00:29:33
Speaker
Yes. It's a solid response. People say, oh, you can't run on cement. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Easier than running in the grass, folks. For sure. Barefoot Ted says that, doesn't he? I think he's in the book Born to Run. He says that we kind of forget that the natural world is replete with all kinds of potential dangers for the barefoot. But when you run on asphalt, then suddenly he says like running on cream, it feels beautiful to run on.
00:30:02
Speaker
And there's a reflex in the Alexander technique that we talk about, which is the interosseous reflex of the positive supportive response. And it's a reflex that's stimulated when the weight is on the forefoot and the little muscles between the metatarsals are stretched. And the brain says, oh, everything's good. You can just lengthen now. You don't have to hold on. And it's tested in newborns. They push the foot and the leg extends.
00:30:31
Speaker
Right. So once you're there, you're not gripping and holding on in the same way. You're more just kind of extending and flying. Do you think that the lateral sort of border of shoes inhibits that in a typical shoe? The foot can't splay so much as it lands or is that not part of? Yeah, I absolutely think that's true. I think that having I take the laces out of the lower
00:31:00
Speaker
eyelids on my shoes, so my metatarsal isn't messed with. You don't need something binding it to control it. Another important thing, which you'll know more about than I do, is that there's a band of fascia underneath the foot, the plantar fascia, which is passive support. When you're standing around, it's supporting your arch. But once you start running, you need muscles, you need toe flexors.
00:31:29
Speaker
So take the place of the plantar fascia, or you just tear the plantar fascia. And if you are landing on your heel and rolling forward, you're just ripping that plantar fascia. If you land on the ball of your foot, your toe flexors are activated and they insert halfway up the calf. So they're parallel to the Achilles tendon. So they're huge assist.
00:31:57
Speaker
to the tendon and the gastrocnemius and these people start barefoot running and they get tendonitis.
00:32:05
Speaker
You know, maybe they're putting their heels down. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that you were just alluding to, and I appreciate you may not have finished your description yet, but it reminded me of, again, the Born to Run book. And I can't remember the name of the coach that went down to watch the Tarahumara run. But he was one of these elite running coaches that went down to the race that's covered in the book. Yeah.
00:32:32
Speaker
he observed the Tarahumara running and what one of his most sort of striking realizations were that these guys were running with smiles on their faces and you know it just strikes me that you know first of all as we know there's less muscle activation required to smile than there is to look miserable so that's that's one thing but but also a smile is a kind of um upward lift it's it creates levity in the body both emotionally but also physically
00:32:59
Speaker
And I'm just wondering if there might be a correlation there between what you're describing and what he observed in those. Alexander said, have a smile on your face. He said, when you're having lessons, first of all, see something, which means the eyes are moving.
00:33:18
Speaker
the saccades with the eyes. If the image isn't moving on the retina, you don't really see it. That's how we can see people are out of focus. We can see their eyes aren't moving. Well, he also said that it was important that you have a pleasant thought so that the temporal muscles lift the face, and that that was important to how the suboccipital muscles in the head sit down. He didn't go into it. He just said, have a smile.
00:33:48
Speaker
Right. The thing is, it's a little bit like one of the interesting things about running in the woods is that you're looking around, you stay lively, your feet are feeling the ground, your eyes are seeing, you're bouncing, everything is mobile.
Nature vs. City: Movement Dynamics
00:34:04
Speaker
When you're in the city and everything looks like shit and you don't want to look at it and you put on headphones, you can kind of disrupt a lot of little lively mobility. All the sensors are comparators.
00:34:18
Speaker
So in order to sense you're moving, muscles are changing length, this is what good posture is. Right, yeah, dynamic. When posture is good, opposing muscles are changing length. It's called myotatic reflex, right? That one is lengthening and the other is shortening and they alternate. And having opposing muscles set against each other
00:34:41
Speaker
Not a good thing. So there's something about out in the woods, it looks good. You're looking around, your feet are responding to the ground. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, you know, I ride my bike to teach at McGill. And I don't want to look at anything. I catch myself at the stoplight watching the numbers count down until the light changes. And I have to say, shake my head and say, come on, there's something to look at, Jack. You know, it's... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:35:09
Speaker
Exactly. Well, interestingly enough, you know, one of my mentors, a guy called Phil Beach, who I interviewed a couple of a couple of podcasts back, I think you might quite enjoy his his podcast, actually. So I'll send you the link. But he, he describes running on trails and he and he is someone who's run barefoot, certainly since the 90s. And, you know, he describes it as being like a kind of nutrition for the body and how
00:35:34
Speaker
all of the different contours and canvas and textures and so on, it creates a real neuromuscular kind of nutrition for the body, whereas running on a treadmill, for example, and we can maybe dive into that a little bit later, because of course that messes with the reflexes as well, but also just running on roads and on pavements and so on, they
00:35:59
Speaker
are more like fast food. He kind of makes the analogy, it's like fast food because it burns calories, but it gives you no other nutrition, just like fast food gives you calories, but there's no other nutrition associated with it. And I think that links back into what you were saying about using the eyes to look around and to assess this kind of very variable terrain that you're running over when you're trail running.
00:36:24
Speaker
You know, so one of the things I used to teach, which actually ties in a bit with Grakowetsky's theory of the spinal engine, which I know we had said we would probably have a chat about. But one thing I used to say was that, you know, when you're running along barefoot and you're making this transition to barefoot, you know, get someone who's been shod their whole life like most of us have, and sometimes that transition can be a little bit bumpy for them. And I used to say to them,
00:36:52
Speaker
you know if you're running in the woods you should absolutely be able to focus on the ground and tell from a reasonable distance away whether the thing you see let's say 15-20 meters away is a stick or a snake like you know if you're not sure whether that's a stick or a snake and you're running
00:37:09
Speaker
and you get within 10 meters, that's too late. By the time you've actually stopped and corrected your direction, you could be in serious trouble. And what Grzegorzewski talks about with his whole spinal engine theory is the idea that as you're running along, these ground impact forces are coming up through the legs
00:37:28
Speaker
And they are spinning each level of the spine, each segment of the spine, as the kind of loading goes into, let's say, you know, the L5S1 facet, then it spins that facet round a little bit, that then knocks on to the next facet, and it goes all the way up to the spine. And he says, by the time it reaches the head,
00:37:45
Speaker
all four should be dissipated and the point there being that of course essentially your head is riding without any impact and that means that you can see clearly right so I always used to say look if you're finding it difficult if you're running in the city and you're finding it difficult to read number plates on cars or perhaps road signs but more importantly if you're running in on a trail and you can't tell whether that's a snake or a stick
00:38:08
Speaker
before you're right upon it then there's something wrong with the running technique and it's an indication you need to kind of do some homework and get back to to a more smooth gate let's say. Yeah I think one of the problems with
00:38:24
Speaker
running barefoot in the city on the sidewalk, is that you can't see glass until you're very close to it. So instead of having that long view and noticing rock or branch, you're looking down at your feet, and this is not such a good thing. This is why, you know, barrel vapor gloves are my city's term, you know? Another thing that I'll tell my students when I'm working with my students
00:38:52
Speaker
and my hands on them and on their neck and arms, and they have a tendency to focus inward and try to fix something. I have to always say, see around you, feel around you, listen. Then your extremities are mobile. If your extremities are mobile, if your fingers can read Braille,
00:39:15
Speaker
your shoulder is probably freeing too. Everything, you know, the finger is leading the hand and you know, you don't read Braille with a clutched up hand. I don't think so. And I think that's a great thing with barefoot running is that, and it is why that people, you know, I've had runners who were on
Transitioning to Barefoot Running: The Physical Shift
00:39:35
Speaker
their parents brought them to me. They were on a high school track team. And I said, well, let's go out front and run down the street. And a big smile on their face. It just feels so good. And here's the danger, right? Because it feels good and you're not ready to do it. That's it. Yeah. I think my experience was going into it somewhat slowly.
00:39:58
Speaker
But I had enough knowledge to know that a tendon like the Achilles tendon can be very rigid if it's not used in an elastic way. And for it to change, to develop more elastic fibers isn't overnight. So people start barefoot running, they think, oh, I have Achilles tendonitis. And really it's changing.
00:40:23
Speaker
Give it a little massage and back off. If you run 50 miles a week with shoes and then you take them off and run 50 miles a week, you're going to be in trouble. Isn't it a hard thing for people? I say, do this two minutes at a time at first. Take the shoes off, put them back on, forget about it.
00:40:46
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Well, I think you're aware that we distributed the Bibram 5 fingers to the UK for 10 years. I stopped that in 2017. But for that 10-year period, obviously, I was very heavily involved in both the commercial side, but also educating a lot of the
00:41:05
Speaker
the distributors around the world and of course keeping up to speed with the research and so on but also of course interacting with the users and it was a very common thing to find that people would put on a pair of five fingers or indeed they might just decide they were going to go the full
00:41:21
Speaker
full sort of hog and I think the whole hog is the right phrase and go completely barefoot and the thing with it is that for most people it does feel great it feels much lighter they feel like there's more spring in their step as you were just alluding to with the toe flexors and the interosseous reflex
00:41:41
Speaker
I think that's part of what makes them feel lighter. And then, of course, they go and run sometimes, not even for as long as they used to, but even further than they used to because they feel so light on their feet. And then, of course, as you say, the adaptation just isn't there, especially for the connective tissues. We always used to say that
00:42:01
Speaker
You know, your nervous system will adapt almost instantaneously because you take your shoes off and run on something hard. For most people, they will switch straight to a forefoot or a midfoot strike. The nervous system kind of knows what to do. But the muscular system, that's going to take a good few weeks to adapt because now you're loading the system in a different way to the way it's been used to being loaded, particularly in the calf area. Of course, this eccentric loading of the calf muscles.
00:42:27
Speaker
But then, of course, the connective tissues like the Achilles tendon, like the plantar fascia, they are going to take a lot longer to adapt because they're slow adapting tissues. But we had a lot of people that just didn't heed that advice, unfortunately. It's interesting, you mentioned Grakovetski, I write about him, but I had a back and forth with him in exchange.
00:42:51
Speaker
Did you? Yeah. Yeah. Where I said, I think you're wrong when you say that it's all right to land on the hill. Yes. You're not organizing the muscular chains through to this one in the same way. You're just not. And, you know, the marvelous thing is that when you, when you get that, your joints are relieved of so much stress when you distributed, when you just distributed forces of
Understanding Heel Striking and Its Implications
00:43:19
Speaker
You know, running is jumping. You're going up and you're landing. It's not a heavy landing, but you know, your weight is coming over the leg and something's got to absorb that and the muscles can absorb it. You know, I'd say to people that say, oh, it's okay to put your heel down. I'd say try a jumping rope. Let's just jump rope and put your... Exactly. See how that works for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating, isn't it? You know, one of the analogies I use when people
00:43:48
Speaker
like to heel strike as they run. Because you can see these graphs going with what's called the impact transient, which is that kind of sharp spike that occurs on the heel strike. And the analogy I use is a bit like pole vaulting. So you're putting your leg out in front of you, like the pole. And then you're vaulting over the heel, which is OK. But the point is that you're going to get a jar. And that's what the impact transient is. That's the same jar that you get as you thrust the pole into the ground. And then you vault over the top of your heel.
00:44:18
Speaker
And, you know, what we know is that that impact transient is correlated with several of the stress injuries in the lower leg. And, you know, as you've just alluded to, in most instances, it's probably not the way the nervous system would choose to land unless it's been trained or detrained into doing it. Well, I've written and spoken a lot about how you shouldn't really land on your foot when people say land under your center of gravity.
00:44:46
Speaker
And you look at Carl Lewis and his ball of foot is way the hell out in front. But that's because he's still going up. He's still in the upper arc of his stride. The leg comes through. The leg, if it's not held, falls to the ground. And first the weight of the leg is taken and the weight of the body comes over. So there's no bam. You know, like heel striking, there's not really any way around it.
00:45:14
Speaker
And then when people will say, you land on the ball of foot and it's okay to put the heel down. Really? I don't. I missed that. Can you say that again? Well, there are plenty of runners running teachers who will say, yes, land on the ball of your foot and then you can put your heel down. But the whole point of getting weight on the ball of the foot is to prepare the muscles for extension. Yes.
00:45:43
Speaker
And if you come over there prepared, it's jumping rope. It's exactly jumping rope, you know, that's not as alarmingly fast.
00:45:52
Speaker
I'm surprised as I'm old and my health isn't good and I run really slowly. I used to run in Central Park and no one would pass me. Now chubby little girls pass me, you know? And I sort of have to deliver that and say, well, you're running. It's still the same thing, even though my stride is not as long, not as extended.
00:46:21
Speaker
I still don't really have a moment to put my heel down. It's really not there. Sure, sure. Now one of the things you were just talking about which reminded me of a lady that I know called Angela Kane. Unfortunately she died a few years back but she ran a website which is called voicetraining.co.uk and she had written a book called Voice Gym.
00:46:47
Speaker
She essentially had been in that field of professional singing and she was taught I believe to sing with her tongue low in her mouth. There were various various You know, you have to excuse the detail because I'm not really an expert in this field But but essentially the way she had been taught to sing and her whole mission was to change this she believed had driven a TMJ issue for her and
00:47:16
Speaker
the TMJ issue itself had caused her a lot of pain, a lot of emotional challenges and to the extent that she actually got sectioned and this is when she was a young mother and so she was unable to bring her kids up and so it was a very traumatic experience for her and
00:47:33
Speaker
It was her who managed to work out that this was all driven by a jaw joint issue and that the jaw joint issue was almost certainly driven by the way she'd been trained to sing. She had concluded that some of the key ways that you needed to
00:47:53
Speaker
utilized to optimize TMJ function was to smile, to lift the outer corners of the eyes, in particular using that temporalis muscle, that anterior fibers of a temporalis. And essentially to create this levity, this upward lift through the body. And I'm sure she probably read some Alexander technique, but I was just kind of
00:48:16
Speaker
interested to relate that back to what you were saying earlier and see what your thoughts were on that. Have you worked much with TMJ issues?
TMJ Issues and Posture: An Alexander Technique Solution
00:48:26
Speaker
I know you worked a lot with singers. A little bit. And one thing that I think is interesting is Alexander always used an exercise called the Whispered Ah, in which you have a little smile to lift the muscles you're talking about. You let the jaw sort of drop open
00:48:46
Speaker
and it'll cause a reflex in breath. You're preparing to say, oh, but you're not thinking about it. You just... And it always made me think, and you'll be able to answer my questions about this because we're always talking about the suboccipital muscles being primary and the nerves that feed them being. But what about the muscles around the skull and the temporal muscles?
00:49:16
Speaker
I mean, can you not harden the skull, you know, without hardening the neck? But I've had people come to me with temporal mandibular joint syndrome and the doctors want them to sleep with it. And usually we just do the Alexander technique and it resolves, you know what I mean? Just working on allowing yourself to lengthen, thinking of your bones moving apart, not placing anything, you know?
00:49:46
Speaker
And it's always tended to, I have a kid coming tomorrow night, actually a doctor wanted to sleep with a, with a device and he's a teenager and there's nothing wrong with his jaw. But, but, but I don't really know about the, I guess the, I guess the nerves that, that innervate the temporal muscle also are coming out to subacipital.
00:50:10
Speaker
Well, yeah, the interesting thing is, is that those muscles, so the TMJ muscles, the muscles of the lips and tongue, the muscles of the eyes, but also the muscles that turn the head. So in particular, sternocleidomastoid and trapezius, they're all innovated by cranial nerves. So these are nerves that are coming direct from the brain stem itself. They haven't actually come out through the foramen magnum and into the spinal cord.
00:50:39
Speaker
They're coming direct from the brain. So when you talk about them perhaps being more primary than the suboccipitals, I think you've got a good point there. It would seem to make sense. And I often think that one really useful way to try and understand these things is to look back to both
00:50:56
Speaker
the embryology, the evolutionary anatomy as well, but also how the child develops. And of course, these cranial nerves, they are retained right the way back through evolution into fish. And this is something that Phil Beach, who I mentioned earlier, he discusses this in some detail in his book and a little bit in the podcast as well.
00:51:17
Speaker
But some of those nerves just aren't present in fish. So some nerves like, for example, the accessory nerve that feeds stonocleidomastoid and trapezius, that's not present because they don't have a neck. Fish don't have necks. But the cranial nerves that feed the jaw and feed the eyes, they're really ancient and deeply embedded structures that are very fundamental.
00:51:39
Speaker
you know then you look at how our system develops as an embryo and into early childhood and of course you know what the child gains control of first is its eyes it doesn't gain control of its neck or its hands or that kind of thing because it's the eyes and the jaw you know so it can feed so it can breastfeed and so it can look around the room but then as it starts looking then this kind of reflexes optic what's it called
00:52:08
Speaker
Oh, it's called an oculomotor or other sorry, an oculocervical reflex. Yeah, the eyes. Yeah, the eyes initiating the movement of the neck. Then that starts coming to play and then the neck starts to come online. So and of course, the neck is online before the rest of the spine is online and then the hands, you know, you start to get control of the hands and the last thing is that the legs and the feet come online as it were.
Posture, Reflexes, and Anatomy
00:52:32
Speaker
Go on. On the other hand, when you talk about the eyes, the saccades of the eyes that move them back and forth when you're focused are affecting the suboccipital muscles. You know that it tells somebody... Yes, yes. ...the car drives by and you don't just follow it with your eyes. The head comes along. It's very hard to prevent it. So I'd like to think if there's that mobility in the focused eye, then maybe there's that mobility in the neck in the same way that people may have a problem with the jaw muscle
00:53:02
Speaker
But that may have fed back from something they're doing elsewhere. You know what I mean? Somebody has a tight trapezius. They're not tightening the trapezius. They're gripping with the hand. So what is the thing you do? Do you let go of the trapezius or do you open the hand and the trapezius is all okay? I think it's so much the case with barefoot running,
00:53:32
Speaker
liberate the toes, liberate the eyes. In the system, you know, you allow the system its full mobility. The sensors are all comparators. Without movement, we have no balance. The head has to oscillate. So that stuff is all, I mean, going barefoot is a pretty important thing.
00:53:53
Speaker
Yes, I agree. There's so many different ways we could go with that. One of the things that Phil Beach talks about is the idea that, of course, the feet are hugely sensitive and very large on the cortical map, on the sensory map in the cortex.
00:54:15
Speaker
that the soles of the feet, of course, are feeding information directly into the low part of the spine. So that the nerves that innervate the soles of the feet are L4, L5, and S1. And that's that kind of key junctional area right at the base of the spine where most of the forces that are going up the legs as you run and the downward forces coming from the head, arms, and trunk, they're all meeting at that. L4, L5, S1, and the sacroiliac joints
00:54:43
Speaker
And so the soles of the feet are really telling that part of the spine what it is that you're running over. And so that's another kind of key reason that it's so important to actually feel through the feet and use them as the sensory organs that they are.
00:55:03
Speaker
Now, Loris, I don't know if now's a good time to talk about the the uni versus biarticular muscles things. We've talked a bit about gates and certainly in my osteopathic training there was a lot of focus on this idea of uni versus biarticular muscles. You know, I'd read a bit around it and a few different concepts around of course the uni articular muscles being more stabilizer based and the biarticular ones or
00:55:31
Speaker
polyarticular ones being more mobilised abates. But I know that you have some thoughts on this. So could you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, well, as many Alexander teachers are very influenced by the work of George Cudgel, who studied the origins of locomotion in vertebrates. And he studied salamanders, ablastoma, because their egg cell is clear and you could see them start to swim before they hatch.
00:55:59
Speaker
And the swelling was an undulatory spinal movement. And then when they develop limbs, the spinal movement is still initiating the movement of the limbs, just like humans, babies crawling. You know, their pelvis and shoulder girdle are doing this alternate side-to-side movement. So it's not just an arm moving forward, it's the spine.
00:56:28
Speaker
Once the salamander starts to actually walk, the contact with the ground influences everything back, feeds everything back. You know, like Rachowetsky said, that the reflexes in the hand that take the body's weight tell the body how to respond to that point of contact, you know, in running. What do you have to do to extend off the foot? Well, you don't do it.
00:56:57
Speaker
It kind of does itself as the weight goes over it. The brain says, okay, we got to put this much work into it. You'll know much more about the anatomy of it than I do, but what was the point of this?
00:57:14
Speaker
Yeah, the universe is biarchical. It's fairly obvious that running animals don't have big lower legs. A deer. Everything is the butt. And when those Kenyan runners came out, they had no legs at all.
00:57:36
Speaker
And it's not efficient to use a muscle that's far from the spine to do your work. You want it close to the heart, you want it close to the spine. So we've evolved limbs to extend the movements of the spine. And therefore, in pure straight ahead running, the muscles of the legs have nothing to do with generating the action.
00:58:03
Speaker
They'd be like tendons. If you simply had tendons there, you could do a very basic run. And so when you have a muscle that crosses two joint, like the quadriceps, you fold the hip and the knee, that muscle hasn't changed length.
00:58:21
Speaker
Same with the hamstrings. You fold the knee in the hip. It hasn't changed length. Same with gastrocnemius if you include the foot in that. So the powerful muscles of the glutes, influenced or directed by the muscles of the spine, do the work, which isn't to mean the quads don't work, but they're not shortening or lengthening. So, you know, I was amused when I started running again.
00:58:47
Speaker
to get to races and everyone is stretching their hamstrings. And I thought, gee, a natural activity like running, why don't dogs and cats stretch their hamstrings? Why would the hamstrings get tight? Yeah. And I stopped running all day. I stopped stretching all together. I'd hurt myself a lot stretching in ballet and it didn't make any difference. And again, stretching your calves, that sort of push against the wall thing.
Stretching Myths in Running
00:59:15
Speaker
Really?
00:59:16
Speaker
And I realized those muscles aren't doing the work. They're not doing the work. And what I should do after a race is do a nice cool down and run around the block. But stretching them. And so I haven't stretched in, oh man, I haven't stretched in over 30 years. And am I tighter? Would it be good for me? If I used to squat a lot, I probably wouldn't
00:59:46
Speaker
be as sort of loud as I am. But you know very well that if you run, you don't want sloppy muscles. You need a fairly tight organization around the knee.
01:00:02
Speaker
And the last thing you want to be doing is a lot of lotus position. It's overstretch your ligaments. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I remember reading, I read a paper back in 1998. I was doing my master's degree. And it was the first paper that I read, which was actually really questioning the whole idea of stretching. And it was saying, it wasn't just a theory paper. They'd conducted research.
01:00:30
Speaker
what they were saying is that of course you know if you stretch a muscle and I think they were looking at the calf muscles and they were saying when you stretch the calf muscles what happens is of course you lose some degree of stability at the ankle you also find that you're becoming less efficient at running because you're not getting the recoil
01:00:49
Speaker
as quickly. And because the calf isn't as tight, then you're having to recruit the calf more to stabilize the ankle. And it's essentially the list of reasons why it was a really bad idea to have good flexibility in your calf if you're a runner was quite extraordinary.
01:01:11
Speaker
And I was reading this thinking, oh my god, that's completely counter to everything that I've been trained and have read so far, yet it all makes perfect sense. And then I was at a conference about four or five years later, which was a football association medical conference here in the UK, so soccer, of course.
01:01:31
Speaker
They had done a prospective study on all of the premiership teams. So these are the very top guys. And what they were particularly interested in was hamstring strain because hamstrings are the most injured tissue in professional football. And so they had assessed the stiffness of the hamstrings in every single premiership footballer at the beginning of the seasons.
01:01:53
Speaker
And then during the season, they essentially just waited to see who got hamstring strains. And these had to be reported into the football association. And what they found was at the end of the season, the guys with the stiffest hamstrings had the least injuries. And the guys with the most mobile hamstrings had the highest level of injuries. And so, you know, it's a, I mean, again, it's a bit counter narrative to what we've been taught for many years and the way we've thought.
01:02:21
Speaker
But it's about essentially having a tissue that will recoil effectively and it will stabilize effectively and that has these spring mechanisms within them. But that isn't overly flexible. I often, you know, when I have beginning students and they talk about posture, I say there's a muscular network that's like a three-dimensional spider web. And there's a little tension everywhere. If you put too much in one place, some areas will cause slack.
01:02:50
Speaker
If you relax and slack in some areas, others have to take it out. So there's kind of like a nice outward tension that binds you together. And if you relax, you're going to work too hard somewhere.
01:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. Now another thought that sprung to mind when you were just describing the whole thing around uni and bioticular muscles was this idea, you mentioned that of course
01:03:24
Speaker
Pretty much, well, any animal in nature, it has its muscle mass towards the hip or shoulder joint and less in the arm or thigh and even less in the forearm or lower leg. And of course, you know, from a physics perspective, that makes sense. But also, you know, I used to explain, because this is this is something that I've seen a lot in the rehabilitation world, is this idea that when people overpronate, which, of course, we know
01:03:49
Speaker
is much less likely to happen when you're forefoot striking. In fact, it's pretty difficult to overpronate when you forefoot strike, but it is somewhat possible still. And so often the approach that's used there is to get people trying to activate the intrinsic muscles of the feet and to do all kinds of crazy things like picking up towels with their toes and this kind of thing.
01:04:12
Speaker
That's presumably the way I see that is that the rehabilitation specialist is trying to build up the muscles in the feet to stop this overpronation. But I imagine that you would have quite a different take on that. So what's your view on that? Not really. You know, at some point, it's at some point when I was in New York, I had a it was to get health insurance. I had a physical and I went to the doctor and he said, well, I hope you brought your sneakers. You got over on the treadmill. And I said, no, I didn't.
01:04:43
Speaker
I'll just run barefoot. And I wasn't a barefoot runner then. I thought it's a treadmill. Why not? And he had me 18 minutes on the treadmill because my resting heart radius was 37. I was fit, you know. And about a week later, my plantar fascia started to hurt and I had plantar fascitis.
01:05:06
Speaker
both feet and I went to see the leading running podiatrist in New York and he said, Oh, your feet are collapsing. You need this regional orthotics. And I said, really? Really?
01:05:18
Speaker
And I thought about it, and you know what I did? I couldn't run. I could roller ski. I could cross-country roller ski. You know, that was fun. And so I kept doing that. And then I was in Montreal and I said, well, I need to strengthen the muscles of my toe flexure so that I'm not tearing my plantar fascia. And I ran out and I did uphill repeats.
01:05:39
Speaker
Okay, I just ran uphill that was it that was all she wrote it got better went away So the idea of strengthening the toe flexors isn't dumb But you need to strengthen them in the action that you're going to do
Strengthening Toe Flexors for Plantar Fasciitis Relief
01:05:54
Speaker
Well, exactly. I suppose that was what I was pointing to. Not curling up newspaper, go out and do a little uphill run. This is really nice, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I had another experience. I talk, well, this is to talk about me anyway, so I shouldn't feel bad about it. No, that's right. I was teaching a workshop in Switzerland to Alexander teachers on running.
01:06:21
Speaker
You know, I'm the big shot. I figured out the barefoot running, you know. So one guy said, well, I'm running up the mountain today and I'm running down. How do you run downhill? And I said, well, you don't want to lean back. You want to run a running downhill and you want to incline your torso forward so that when your leg recovers, it recovers low.
01:06:41
Speaker
You know, it's pointing down. You don't have as far to drop. And I explained it to him and everything. And he came back the next day and said, wow, that's really great. That really helped me. So I got back to Montreal and I'm running downhill on a trail on Montréal and I'm noticing my feet. And the right one lands on the forefoot and rolls in a little and comes back nicely. And the left one sort of landed on the outside and stiffly flies out. I wasn't doing what I was teaching. I wasn't allowing the pronation.
01:07:10
Speaker
So I said, Lawrence, allow the pronation. Bam. Bone shifted in my foot. I could barely walk. I went to see a doctor who said, oh, you dislocated something. You need blah, blah, blah, blah. You're never going to be able to run again seriously. Oh, wow. And I thought, well, no. All I did was stop holding on. Why should that be so bad? And it didn't hurt if I walked on the outside of my foot. It hurt if I rolled in a lot. And I said, well,
01:07:41
Speaker
So be it, let it hurt. And I insisted I could barely walk to the corner. It was really painful. All of a sudden, one day, it was fine. It was just fine. And I put my shoes on, and I realized that my left foot had been a half size smaller than my other foot ever since I had to get soccer shoes to play soccer in junior high school. And it was the same size. It was the same size. So why was I holding on to it?
01:08:11
Speaker
I have no idea what I did, what kind of injury I had. But that was at age 62. Right. You know, which tells you something, you know, you can change. It does. And that's why I'm really good for it now. Yeah, yeah. But you know, as far as being, you know, a smart ass and telling... Well, it's an interesting thing about teaching, because maybe you listen to yourself.
01:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I think one of the quotes I like to remind myself of, there's a guy called David White who I listen to from time to time. He's actually a poet, but he also works in the corporate world and goes in and kind of talks about these big company dynamics, but using
01:08:58
Speaker
you know, kind of classical poetry. He'd probably be quite up your street, I expect. But he says that the art of poetry is overhearing yourself, saying things you didn't know you knew. And I think it's the same with teaching, right? It's kind of, you know, you say something or someone asks you a question, you think, oh,
01:09:18
Speaker
Okay, I need to I need to find something here. So you start speaking and you gradually Unload a little bit of knowledge and you unpack the thing and then suddenly something comes and you're like, so that's it and you're like, oh, okay I didn't know I knew that but actually that does make sense. Yeah, you know what the playwright Ian Esco said I
01:09:38
Speaker
I write to find out what I think. All of my silly writing on running was when I was out running and thinking about stuff and trying to work it out and I'd come back and I'd write it down. Gradually I had all this stuff. I wasn't trying to build a theory. I was trying to work out what's happening here and at some point I had a student
01:10:04
Speaker
who I sent the stuff to a publisher who was going to do a book. And my student said, oh, you need an illustrator. Why don't you just put it on WordPress? And I said, yeah, yeah. Because then I can go and then every now and then I'll write something really dumb. Like Gordo, you know, Gordo on the. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. I wrote something about running on the treadmill that was totally wrong. Right. But the motor of the treadmill doing some work for you.
01:10:34
Speaker
He said, no, it really, you know, look at Einstein talking about walking on a train. And once the train's moving, walking forward and back is not affected by the motion of the train. No, relativity. There's a piece of relativity theory. He said, no, no, it's not true. You don't have a wind resistance, but
01:10:57
Speaker
the motor's not doing any work for you. So I took that down right away, that was really good. But interestingly it does change the reflex patterns because you're going from a, essentially when you move over stuff you're using a writing reflex but when something moves underneath you, you're using a tilting reflex and of course
01:11:19
Speaker
treadmill is moving underneath you. So it does change the reflexes. And also there's an interesting concept. I don't know if you've heard of the group from Prague called, well, their system is called dynamic neuromuscular stimulation, I think, DNS. But this guy, this guy, Kolar or Kolar, I think is how you pronounce it, he
01:11:44
Speaker
talks about what's called the punctum fixum and I don't know if that's a you know a standard medical anatomical term but essentially what he's alluding to is the joint that's fixed versus the joint that's moving around or the bone that's fixed versus the bone that's moving around the joint. So when you think of treadmill running then
01:12:05
Speaker
Essentially, it's the hip that's fixed in space. It's not really changing position. And the foot is moving underneath the hip. And it's kind of going in a cyclical pattern underneath the hip. But it's the hip that is essentially the most stable joint. But when you're running over land, then the foot becomes the punctum fixum when it's on the ground. Because everything's moving about the foot. And then when you're in the air, of course, the dynamics change. But so you know, I don't. This is where Goto corrected me.
01:12:35
Speaker
And I don't really agree with you. Imagine the treadmill is 20 feet wide and 100 feet long. The belt's moving under you and then you run on it. It's like the earth turning. The way that you run on it is not once you begin running, once you've overcome inertia,
01:13:05
Speaker
It doesn't matter that the belt is moving against you. You're not doing anything different. You're running in relation to the belt. Yes. And for me, the problem is that I've done some barefoot running on treadmills. For me, the problem is that psychologically, you're not looking around. Things aren't moving. Your eyes are, you know, you're looking at a TV screen, maybe. But the rails restrict your arm movement.
01:13:35
Speaker
Yes. When I've seen a video of myself running on a treadmill, my foot is almost coming off the back of the treadmill. It's not long enough. It's not wide enough. When you're running, you're not running in that straight line. You're wobbling around going back and forth. A big thing is the arm movement is that it's not so good to restrict your arm movement.
01:14:06
Speaker
I mean, so many runners talk about holding the arms, but when you start, when you initiate running or walking, you don't do it with the arms. The head, the spine, the legs, and the arms come in as an afterthought, but they ought to hang. I think you look at great spinners. You look at Carl Lewis. His arm is completely straight behind him, and it comes up.
01:14:35
Speaker
It's not like, but then there are runners, you know, then there's, and people will always say, what about Michael Johnson? Well, Michael Johnson, he was a bad runner who was stronger than everybody else. And eventually he burned out his hamstrings and lower back. And it's the same thing when you look at tennis, you know, you look at Roger Federer. Well, that's kind of a miracle that you're playing that game with your reflexes intact and why does
01:15:06
Speaker
that I'll beat him because he's strong, because he's seeing the ball sooner, not because he's using himself better, he's gripping and grunting. And Alexander used to say that just because you use yourself well doesn't mean you're going to be necessarily better at doing what you're doing.
01:15:28
Speaker
Sure, sure. Yeah, Nadal is always pulling his shorts out from between his butt cheeks, isn't he? Which is a short sign that there's something not contracting optimally in that pelvic floor region. The poor guy has, you know, he's a bit of a, you know, he's got a bit of a problem. He used to have all these ticks of having to touch his forehead and pull his... Yes, that's right. Not step on a line and he's been able to control those.
01:15:56
Speaker
What I think is remarkable about him is he sees where you're going to hit the ball before you hit it. Right. And that's the answer, right? And it's why Federer is not that fast. But, you know, somebody in their service motion betrays where they're going and he goes there and... Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
01:16:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, not to labor the point with the treadmill discussion, because I do see where you're coming from. I looked into this a fair bit at one point, because I'd had a similar discussion with someone else.
01:16:35
Speaker
One of the things I did was to look up a lot of the literature to see what it said, treadmill versus overground running. And what seemed to be the case is exactly as you were saying, is that all the papers were saying, well, there's no substantial difference. Therefore, it's totally acceptable to assess someone on a treadmill versus on the ground. It's not going to give you any additional information.
01:16:57
Speaker
But when you dug into the papers, you could see that there were clear differences in the timings because they often used EMG and this kind of thing to assess when different muscles were contracting. And sometimes they were out by as much as 20 or 30 milliseconds, which is quite a substantial difference. And it just kind of made me think, well,
01:17:17
Speaker
And I think also the experience of doing, you know, it's not quite the same as running over the ground. But anyway, you know, there's there's lots of sort of quite, I guess, people that have quite firm beliefs around these things. But I think some some of the the knowledge around these things is still very up in the air. Certainly, when you talk about running as a reflex, you see some place you want to go there.
01:17:45
Speaker
your eyes and your head and spine go there first. You're in the treadmill, you're trying to imitate that because you're not going anywhere. If I'm stuck in a gym somewhere, I'll get on the rowing machine, not the treadmill. You know what I mean? Or Nordic cracker and elliptical trainer. I said, oh God, I'm not going to
01:18:12
Speaker
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It's something you love doing and a facsimile of it is not... That's it. It's like it's traveling without moving, isn't it? It's something that doesn't feel quite right about it. I think that what you say is true and that running properly does itself.
01:18:35
Speaker
You're outside, you want to go somewhere, you extend somewhere. It's like it's a little weird swimming in one of those pools that moves the water. Yes, yes, right. And you see that you're not moving and it's rather a weird thing. You're doing something muscular to keep yourself extending but you're not like
01:18:56
Speaker
getting to the other end it's weird yeah it's strange yeah i've never i've never experienced that but i can imagine it's a bizarre thing yeah not not fun yeah um so look i know i know another area that uh we've exchanged thoughts on in the past and you've you've written about on your your blog is uh course stability and um you know i know you picked up on uh ail ederman's myth of course stability paper um and you know i was quite uh you know
01:19:26
Speaker
involved in reading around all that kind of core stability literature when it first came out and applying it with patients and so on. But I've also kept up to speed and watched how that whole field has developed. And I think your comments are really interesting around that. How would you sort of frame up that whole discussion around stabilization?
Rethinking Core Stability
01:19:49
Speaker
Well, you don't want to stabilize anything to move. You want everything to move.
01:19:55
Speaker
And the core muscles, there aren't really any. There are muscles in the center of your body, but they're not core to your movement. You know what I mean? You're still moving from the spine. And if you lengthen, you will not just be using spinal extensors. You will actually be using abdominal muscles, right? The abdominal muscles, the spinal extensors are thoracic spine, right?
01:20:25
Speaker
So the idea of allowing length from the base of the pelvis to the south of the head involves muscles in the abdomen somehow. But the idea that it's hardening them, you know, in fact, when you look at respiration and you look at a healthy inhale, the abdominal muscles will actually push up against the diaphragm to assist it to lift the ribs. So they're actually in a healthy inhale,
01:20:54
Speaker
They're not letting go. So, I mean, there's something about taking a look and noticing if they're not active, this isn't good. But then activating them, that's another thing. How do you activate them? Not directly. If you hold them, if you hold a muscle, it can't do what it should do in relation to other muscles. So, you know, you have to figure out a way of thinking.
01:21:22
Speaker
That's an outward opening thinking that allows all muscle groups to interact. You don't want anything to be not working. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. This is a... I don't know. It's a hard thing to get across.
01:21:45
Speaker
And, you know, I sort of lost friends in the barefoot running form because no matter what anyone said, I would say, no, I don't think so. Because all of these things about how to run, how your stride should look like, I don't know about that. And, you know, how to breathe is certainly...
01:22:07
Speaker
I don't know about that. It's reflex. There are a lot of muscles involved and you focus on one and the others aren't doing what they should.
01:22:16
Speaker
Well, one of the things that I know that you pointed out on that forum was because it was in response to Mark Cozella's discussion on abdominal breathing and running, you know, you kind of pointed out you only need to watch an athletics meet and you can see that when the runners are running, but also even, you know, when they've stopped running at the end, you don't get huge abdominal excursion. I mean, you may be a little bit more when they've stopped running and they're leaning over trying to recover, but
01:22:43
Speaker
certainly when they're running and obviously breathing hard for these long distance runners, it's not like they're abdominal walls protruding right out as they inhale and coming back in. No, never. They'll have a little skinny waist and nothing bulging out. And I think of something like swimming, which is so obviously the spine needing the movement and the spine needing to extend so that the lats and the strong muscles that pull the arm down
01:23:12
Speaker
are opposed by the spine lengthening. Show me a belly-breathing swimmer. Maybe you're doing the breaststroke, maybe you do something like that.
01:23:24
Speaker
Yeah, swimming is not a good example because there's nothing very natural about it. Yeah, I suppose not. So from my understanding, because I did write a paper on the diaphragm, partly because I just wanted to understand it better. And one of the things that was a bit of a revelation to me, and I think fits with your understanding, is that
01:23:46
Speaker
As the diaphragm contracts, part of what it does is it, because it meets resistance from the viscera, it expands the lower rib cage. So in other words, you know, a lot of the initial phase of inhalation at least is actually the rib cage opening out in response to the viscera being compressed and that drawing the air in. So it's not so much the abdominal wall excursion in that instance. Yes. And people will say, oh, the primary muscle of respiration is the diaphragm.
01:24:17
Speaker
Well, how about spinal extensors? How about scalings? How about sternocleidomastoids? In order for the lower ribs to lift and spread out, the upper ribs have to get out of the way. So the rib cage, the opening of the rib cage should begin at the top. And because in our culture we're sitting and fixed, we don't have that movement.
01:24:45
Speaker
We don't have the movement, we don't have the choice of opening the neck and letting the upper ribs move. So we get very involved in moving the diaphragm down. But working with classical singers,
01:25:06
Speaker
Let me tell you, you get different things, but if the diaphragm moves down, the friendo pericardia ligament will suppress the larynx and it will mess up the voice. So, you know, good bel canto singers are very, very up in their riffs and their diaphragm is not coming down. Although I, you know, when I first, I had voice strain problems in theater shouting and I went to an opera.
01:25:36
Speaker
an award-winning opera singer and teacher, and she had me barking. She had me doing this with the diaphragm. She said, oh, white men can't sing falsetto because they have tight assholes. So here is an opera singer who is talking about that thing of filling up the whole torso with air all the way down to the base of the pelvis. Yeah.
01:26:05
Speaker
I don't know, man. Look at a deer when it's running. Look at its belly. Look at your dog. If a dog is panting and his belly's moving, something's wrong. Yeah. Well, you know, what comes up in my mind as you're describing this is that the mechanism I was just explaining in terms of the diaphragm obviously starts bowed up. As it contracts, it pulls down or contracts down, pushing against the viscera.
01:26:33
Speaker
The viscera obviously can't go downwards because the pelvic floor is stopping them. So they go outwards and they create stretch. And the kind of classic story here is that the abdominal wall expands. So you get this big belly breath and the abdominal wall opens out. But if you keep tone in the abdominal wall, as you're describing there, and we see in animals, then of course that means the viscera can't go out either. So what it's going to do is it's going to increase the expansion of the lower rib cage.
01:27:03
Speaker
and get here in that way.
Breathing Mechanics: The Diaphragm's Role
01:27:06
Speaker
Exactly. The diaphragm is pulled up from above, pushed below, so its primary action of lifting is enabled. And I have some very good diagrams of the ligaments holding up the diaphragm and the pericardium. I mean, if your diaphragm is going to go down, so is your heart. I'm not sure that's the best breathing.
01:27:32
Speaker
But you look far and wide to find that anywhere. To me it was a matter of logic. Look at how it's shaped. Look at how it's, it's not just, there's an enormous amount of fascia binding the diaphragm to the pericardium. And then two huge pericardial ligaments holding it up. The only way the diaphragm's going down is, it all goes down, it doesn't make much sense.
01:27:59
Speaker
Like he said, especially if you're running, you're running, you're lengthening like mad, but not necessarily. Yeah. But I suppose that's different when you're laying down, right? So if you, when someone lays down to sleep, they don't have the, I guess the need to lengthen against gravity or the stimulus to lengthen against gravity. They don't, but they have the stimulus to lengthen against the contraction of the diaphragm.
01:28:27
Speaker
I mean, I don't belly breathe when I lie down. Oh, you don't? Okay. I was wondering if it did switch a bit. I paid a lot of attention to it and it's not obvious. Okay. It's not obvious to keep everything free and mobile, but the action of the diaphragm pulling down stimulates the action of the spine to oppose it. The same way pulling your arm down and swimming stimulates the action of lengthening more.
01:28:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It's funny, I do cross-country skiing, and cross-country ski coaches will all talk about poling. They'll all talk about the compression phase. You plant the pole, compress the abdominals. Right. Well, what's the muscle that pulls the arm down? The lats, yeah. It's the lats. Yeah. So if you compress, you're taking that out of play, and you're using your pectorals and your abdominals. It's just not... It's just... Yeah.
01:29:25
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things that Phil Beach talks about is the fact that, you know, again, he's very kind of suspicious of this whole focus by, in particular, the physiotherapists on the transverse abdominis and getting this to activate and so on. And he says that actually, you know, OK, so
01:29:46
Speaker
It's not sort of trying to dismiss the importance of the transverse subdominis and its role in stabilizing the lumbar pelvic region or allowing it to move, let's say, without aberrant, what would be a good way to phrase it. I mean, it clearly has some kind of role in keeping everything together. Let's put it that way.
01:30:07
Speaker
But the way he describes it is it's like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. So when you contract the transverse abdominis, that's like someone putting their hands around your waist and squeezing you and giving you lift. And so the way he would recommend training the transverse abdominis is to carry something on your shoulders and to walk or to run. And so he says, like a deer, for example, and he's not advocating you necessarily go and carry a deer on your barefoot run.
01:30:35
Speaker
But he's saying that's what our systems have evolved to do. And by putting load on the shoulder girdle, it's going to create that sort of downward pressure, which requires a reciprocal upward lift. Does that fit with your way of thinking?
Physical Therapy and Emotional Release
01:30:50
Speaker
Yeah, it does. I know that when I put on a good backpack, I remember when my son was a baby and I carried him in the backpack a lot, but of course with a good hip belt.
01:31:03
Speaker
It was telling me to lengthen. It was waking up a kind of passivity. A good backpack is not such a bad thing. Look at those wonderful
01:31:24
Speaker
photos of Africans carrying huge loads on their heads. It's amazing. Is it a good idea to put that on your cranium? No, probably not. I can remember in yoga, I did yoga when I was younger and hurt myself, staying in headstands for half an hour at a time. I thought that was a good thing.
01:31:49
Speaker
And that people would do unassisted headsets would just wait on the head and I thought, yeah, you don't know that the cervical spine is particularly well evolved for supporting. That's it. When you look at the size of those vertebrae and those discs compared to the ones in the lumbar spine, you think, yeah, maybe not so much. And you're gently getting the bones of the head to move a little bit.
01:32:16
Speaker
Do you really want to put 150 pounds on them? Probably not, probably not. I mean, most people, most people do not have that movement. Yeah. Can you get it back? Maybe, maybe not. Like an Alexander, you know, there are people that come and if they have some bad habits because they've sat badly or they're a little bit stressed or they sit a computer, I can deal with them. If they've been systematically abused as kids, they're not going to free their necks.
01:32:46
Speaker
They're not going to let go. They need something else. They need something more. When I was doing my training in New York, my teacher was a good teacher, but he was very manipulative. Alexander, I'd never worked with him, but I worked with teachers trained by him. They barely touch you, and there's a huge input from it.
01:33:11
Speaker
and there was a young dancer who we all saw getting more and more fragile. Niamh's excited to work with her because you could do a lot with her. He said, no, no, Ellen, come here. Oh, do this, do this, do this. She had a complete nervous breakdown. She couldn't even take a bus home. Someone had to go with her. She spent a year at home, which was probably not where she should have been.
01:33:36
Speaker
Absolutely. So is this an example of kind of embodiment of emotions and then by essentially training someone to let go of their protective postural holding patterns? Yeah. It emerges. You got to be careful of that crap. That's not our job. Yeah. Yeah. So do you work with, you know, psychotherapists or other people that, you know, counselors,
01:34:01
Speaker
people that can help with that kind of a case? What would your approach be? In Montreal, I haven't had that kind of busy practice. I was teaching at a music school and working with a lot of students. But there was a teacher in Israel, one of my favorite teachers, Rika Cohen. She had a psychoanalyst on call. And I think she knew because she was a bit nuts. She was an Olympic, is really an Olympic athlete.
01:34:28
Speaker
who trained with Feldenkrais. And Feldenkrais said, Rodrigo, you need to go to Alexander. This is an interesting story. And she went and trained and came back and became one of the best teachers. But she said, I need to do this. I need to do it all day. Because she was mad. She was afraid of elevators. She was dealing with something.
01:34:54
Speaker
Yeah. Well, one of the interesting things I picked up fairly early on in my career, I came to the realization that
Muscles: Gentle Guidance vs. Force
01:35:04
Speaker
You know, muscles are very much like people. And if you push them too hard or pull them around, and you can say the same for joints, et cetera, but, you know, if you push someone, then they tend to resist and they're, you know, it's like, you know, I'm not going to go that way. If you're going to push them that way, they'll push back. But if you very gently say, how about going in that direction or this direction?
01:35:27
Speaker
then they're much more inclined to go with you. So there's light contacts, which seems to be what you're saying that you tend to use with the Alexander.
Kinesthetic Empathy in the Alexander Technique
01:35:35
Speaker
Is that right? Well, the Alexander, the contact is twofold. You have to be doing what you want to happen in them. There's a kinesthetic empathy transfer. We learn a lot from being carried by our parents. We learn a lot about functioning in our system.
01:35:55
Speaker
So if you're hardening in your body and you put your hands on someone's neck, you're basically telling them to harden their neck. This is a difficult thing. On the other hand, there was something I wanted to say that I liked. What was it we were talking about?
01:36:13
Speaker
Muscles are like people. I had a Russian boxer appear at my door one day. This guy was six foot five, hulking, hunched over, and I thought, oh my God. And I started to work on him. He was like a child. He was completely naive. He came right up under my hands. I moved him up to standing. And I said, do you notice the difference? He said, well, yeah, but I can't stand like that. I said, why not? He said, because I will fall over.
01:36:42
Speaker
And that's very revealing. It's very tricky to ask people to let go of things that they think they need to survive. You know, it's why in Alexander's technique we work on people sitting first, because sitting, they're not as fearful of letting go. You know, we want them to be upright in dealing with gravity, but standing like this guy, I can't, I'm going to fall over.
01:37:11
Speaker
It's a very funny thing. On the other hand, I had a woman come to me one time who was a German. She only spoke German. Her daughter brought her. This is my grandmother. She was fine until she had a car accident. She hasn't been the same since. And I worked on her for about 15 minutes, and she started to move easily. And she said to her daughter, that's what I used to feel like. So she had an actual memory.
01:37:39
Speaker
of, you know, most of us don't. Most of you are five, you don't remember it. This woman, you know, was like a rural German and she knew what it was like to have good use and she had a whiplash or something and then her knees were bad. And I had another woman come, another woman who was going to have a knee replacement. And she said, oh, I can't, I can't do the chair work. And I said, why not?
01:38:08
Speaker
and she folded her knees to go to the chair and you could hear the grinding the whole way across the room. She said, oh, let's just work on the table a little bit. I worked on the table and I brought her up and I just sort of folded her knees and she went right to the chair with no sound. Why? Because she was pulling her knees together and her anterior cartilage was gone. The lateral cartilage, but she still had some
01:38:36
Speaker
cartilage in the inner part of the knee and when the weight was shifted there, you know. But once you get that grinding said, man, that's an unrelated story. It's just me telling stories of... Yeah, that's great. Well, so what you were just describing sort of brings up for me is the whole idea that
01:38:59
Speaker
kids often are in this day and age and you know in fact for probably 40 or 50 years have been often either accelerated through their infant development process and or put into buggies and push chairs and this kind of thing and so you know there's a kind of couple of aspects to this the first is that
Modern Gadgets and Infant Development
01:39:20
Speaker
We know that by going through that infant development process that it inhibits some of the reflexes that we've talked about earlier, in particular the morrow reflex, but a whole bunch of infantile reflexes that generally speaking should be inhibited by that infant development process.
01:39:37
Speaker
But then also, as we were just alluding to, kids learn from being moved and being carried. And of course, using pushchairs and buggies and these kinds of things, this is not a natural human movement. And I wonder how much of these kinds of contraptions that we've developed for little kids, for them to sit up and be propped up or to bounce around in or to be pushed around in, how much of that is impacting them from a kind of Alexander or reflexive
01:40:07
Speaker
perspective. Yeah, I think that my son is a perfect example. He had major heart surgery in his first weeks, so it didn't start well. His rib cage cut open, you know, you could see the tension. But today,
01:40:23
Speaker
He's 27, 28. He was never supposed to exercise. He runs in barefoot shoes. His heart is recovered. His aorta is recovered. But interestingly, he's never had an Alexander lessons. But what he had was an environment without sofas, with hard stools at the right height.
01:40:43
Speaker
with parents who weren't slouching, both of us Alexander teachers. I never put him in a slouch carriage. At one point I bought a running jogger, you know, thinking, oh, I'll take runs with him. He hated it. I sold it right away. Putting him in that slingback thing, I had an old style carriage where he'd sit up and hold on to the bar and look around, you know. And he's been a really interesting case because he
01:41:11
Speaker
He was not allowed to do exercise when he was young. They said it would kill him and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And gradually, he's been able to. And I bought himself some Meryl trail gloves at some point. I said, oh, just some sneakers. And he goes out and runs miles and miles with them. And he runs a forefoot runner. He's a beautiful runner. And it was, you know, seeing two parents who
01:41:40
Speaker
tried to use themselves well, no sofa, no slouched chairs, sit in a little stool, and your kid, of course, you can squat and sit on the floor. I can't sit on the floor, I can't sit on the floor anymore. I should be able to. But you know, I can still, I squat very well. I just, I don't stay in it very long, and I should, I should. It's a very, you know, for conditioning the glutes, you know, is monoarticular muscles lengthening them?
01:42:10
Speaker
Yeah. It's a good thing. We should be doing it. Well, that's part of Phil's whole sort of drive is to get people using the floor more.
Floor Resting and Muscle Tension
01:42:20
Speaker
One of his theories is what he calls archetypal rest postures. And that's the idea that
01:42:27
Speaker
of course across cultures multiple different peoples use the floor as you know their place of choice to rest they don't have chairs and so when you do that of course you only have a certain series of postures you can adopt and one is the deep squats and then there's the you know various kneeling positions there's the lotus position you mentioned earlier as a precautionary thing and sitting a long legged as well you know sitting with the legs out
01:42:53
Speaker
stretch along in front of you and what that seems to do from at least my understanding is it creates a series of different postures that stretch a series of different muscles and none of them are inherently that comfortable. So if you adopt one of them then the chances are that within a few minutes you're going to want to switch to a different one and you're going to keep changing positions and that helps. It's kind of a natural way of
01:43:20
Speaker
Optimizing the length tension relationships around around those lower limb muscles in particular Well, when I was younger, I did years of meditation you know, I'd sit twice a day for 45 minutes and You know, I've narrow hips I don't have a low disposition if I want to force the hell out of my knees, you know So it's you know my heels
Meditation Postures and Comfort
01:43:43
Speaker
Which put the back in a very good position, completely put my legs to sleep, really not very good for them. Later I got a size of bench. And then I thought, well, why don't you just sit in a stool with your hands in your lap, both feet on the ground. What could be better? Everything's connected and alive. You know, we do have a stool. Why not sit in one?
01:44:08
Speaker
And even in the Zen schools in the East here, they say, yeah, yeah, you can sit in the chair because people can't sit on the floor. And should you force yourself to sit on the floor to meditate? That's not the idea.
01:44:21
Speaker
And that sitting on the heels is cutting off the circulation of your legs. You're denying them as part of yourself. Sitting in the lotus position too, you can't be connected with them. It's kind of like you said, I mean, if you could sit with your legs in front of you, God bless you. I know that in Zen,
01:44:48
Speaker
You sit on a zebutan, you push yourself up a little bit so you're not... But you know it's so important when people talk about, and you know this, that people talk about alignment. Well, what's aligned? We're not aligned. We don't want an equal burden in anterior and posterior trunk muscles. We want the extensors in the back to be taking the work. And the muscles in the anterior to be free so you can breathe.
01:45:14
Speaker
the head doesn't balance on the spine. We don't balance on our hips. You can't draw a line through the ear, neck, you know, you know, all that crazy alignment stuff. You know, when you see good Zen meditation posture, they don't pull their jaws in.
01:45:31
Speaker
And that's what we do to try to be like them, you know? And that was a big thing with me that, you know, I was a 60s kid and a little bit slouch. So in ballet, they said, lift your chest up, pull your shoulders back, pull your chin in. And I got very good at doing that. Oh, even in film, I look sort of okay. And it ruined me. It just pulled me apart. Right, right. I was holding myself like that 24 seven. Wow. Yeah, yeah.
01:46:01
Speaker
That creates a lot of tension. OK. Well, look, Blanche, I know we spent a long time talking so far. And also, I think you're aware that the podcast is called From Chaos to
Mindfulness and Movement Freedom
01:46:11
Speaker
Order. And I think you've helped us to identify some order from the chaos. But have you got any sort of simple nuggets of wisdom for people that would like to explore some of your wisdom and experience of working as an Alexander practitioner for as long as you have now?
01:46:32
Speaker
stop and look around. I think it's the most important thing not to take the attention of one thing into the next thing, but to have a moment where you're just a dog on the porch. There's moments of, oh, there's a tree. Look at the tree. You have to have those moments because you're going to do things where you're hunched over at the computer, you're cutting off your
01:47:01
Speaker
your peripheral vision, you're going to do those things. You don't want to take it into the next thing. You want to have a space between, okay, now I'm here. And it's hard to shut the brain off. Isn't it? I mean, you can go for a good route and be thinking about all kinds of crap, you know?
01:47:20
Speaker
And I don't know, I would just say, look around. The connection is with the world around you, not something inferior, not closing your eyes and going deep in yourself. And they don't close their eyes when they meditate, there's a good reason for that. You want a free neck, you look around.
01:47:41
Speaker
Well, that's been brilliant today, Lawrence. Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it and for sharing all of your insights. Well, for me, it's been a pleasure meeting you online. You know, I've kind of spoken to you on the forum and, you know, I realized our views were similar on a lot of things and it's been fun to, it's been fun to talk. What have we
01:48:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it would have made for a really interesting forecast. That's fantastic. So, you know, I'd really, really like to thank you. And, you know, I'm sure our paths will cross down the line, but I'll certainly let you know when this is up. And, you know, feel free to share it with anyone that you think might be interesting. Thank you. Thank you very much. Fantastic. All right. Thanks, Lawrence. Take care. Bye bye.
01:48:32
Speaker
So there we go, that was Lawrence Smith Alexander teacher and barefoot runner among many other accolades. If you're like me there were several aspects of Lawrence's experiences and understandings that challenged my own beliefs. Plenty more that resonated and all of them were fascinating and have helped me to get a new perspective on human movement performance.
01:48:51
Speaker
Alexander's technique, just like many of these specialised movement disciplines, has continued to evolve since Alexander first suggested his ideas around a century ago. And often, with the benefit of hindsight, we can really appreciate others' foresight. Next week we have the amazing Bronnie Lennox-Thompson from New Zealand on FC2O to help us understand more about how to work with individuals who are experiencing a system of pain. I look forward to seeing you at the next show.