Now we are
looking at the ribs, and how they are involved in lengthening and widening the
body.

Spending too much time at the computer? Feeling aches and pains after staring at the screen? Noticing tension in your neck, back or other areas? Improve health, wellbeing and productivity with Jim Crosthwaite, privately and for your workplace. _________________ NOW TEACHING ONLINE TO INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS. Clients learn : self-observation and body mapping skills; how to change bad habits; how to better coordinate actions like typing and reaching; and many tips based on Alexander Technique.
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Slumping and your ribs at work
Here is the
second post that relates to slumping as we sit. In October 2013, we explored
how to gently lengthen between the pubic bone and the lower ribs, and up to the
head.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Slumping and core strength while you work

Then in correcting a slump, we’re likely to thrust our ribs up, and tighten the lower back. Our abdominals aren’t doing their work, and this can lead to lower back pain. Over time, slumping can greatly affect the lungs (Jenkins et al. 1988, Lin et al. 2006) and other organs.
Maintaining good length in the front of the body can help restore the role of a critical abdominal muscle – the transverse abdominus which is an important stabiliser of the back and pelvis ( Hodges & Richardson 1996). More upright sitting postures also involve more recruitment of pelvic floor muscles in resting activity (Sapsford et al. 1997).
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Is your head well balanced?
Balancing your
head is a fine art, one that can help us avoid and relieve neck and back pain.
ACTIVITY 1 -
Point a finger at an earlobe, and touch it. Now nod your head; that’s where you
find the joint between the spine and the head. It’s the atlanto-occipital
joint. Please check this in a mirror.
THOUGHT BUBBLE 1 - Let tension go – allow the weight of the head to release down the body.
Allow the weight
to freely fall – out to the shoulder tips, and down the front and back of the
body – down to the pelvis and then to the chair or your legs. The more grounded
you are, the more effortlessly you will find an erect posture.
THOUGHT BUBBLE 3
- Think of a gentle cloud on a long string attached to your forehead and gently
leading your head above and to the front of you. Is this what the giraffe is
thinking?
Lessons or classes are really worthwhile to get you on the right path. Please ring or email me to discuss options suitable for you.
More information
On the head-spine relationship, see my blogpost Look up and Down with Ease.
Click here for a summary of all blogposts up to February 2013. Look to the right for more recent ones, and the most popular.
It requires an
accurate mental image of how the head sits on our torso. Releasing tension in
the neck muscles is also important.
Consider a big
heavy ball swaying on top of a pole, with guy ropes from underneath for
support. The pole is our spine, and the guy ropes are the short and long
muscles running through the neck.
For most of us,
our head weighs from 4.5kg to 5kg.
… that’s more
than two big bags of sugar (lifted carefully) at the supermarket.
Where the
head sits
Fairly obviously,
the ‘pole’ supporting the head has to be central.
That pole is the
spine, which is mostly deep inside our torso and not right at the back as we
tend to think. It ascends centrally from the tailbone through the core of our
torso, dodges back behind the heart and lungs, and returns to a more forward
position up through the neck.
Some activities
and thought bubbles
Please try these.

Most people have
an unconscious image that the joint is at the back of the head. Were you one of
them?
THOUGHT BUBBLE 1 - Let tension go – allow the weight of the head to release down the body.

If you
experienced a release of tension, then your head is likely to be balancing a
little more freely. Now try Thought Bubbles 2 and 3.
THOUGHT BUBBLE 2
- Think of your head as a seedling reaching up to catch the sun, gently
leaving behind the rich soft soil that nourishes it.

Wrapping up
The key to Alexander Technique is stopping what’s wrong – it is often hard to find what’s right. That’s why I’ve used thought bubbles. Please reflect on them – they ask you to use your mental capacity, rather than making muscular movements. This is the starting point to changing away from our habitual patterns of movement. We emphasise ‘non-doing’ rather than ‘doing’ so that you don’t immediately replace one set of inappropriate tensions with another. Lessons or classes are really worthwhile to get you on the right path. Please ring or email me to discuss options suitable for you.
More information
On the head-spine relationship, see my blogpost Look up and Down with Ease.
Click here for a summary of all blogposts up to February 2013. Look to the right for more recent ones, and the most popular.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
How do you sit - when driving? – part 2
How you sit is
the focus of this blog. The principles and tips are relevant for any seat, not
just a car seat.

In this picture, the driver looks relaxed. But notice the curve in his lower spine. How should his sitting bones be involved?
Let’s look at how
to be more comfortable when sitting and reduce the likelihood of pain.
Our aim is to be
able to move our limbs freely, without affecting the naturally free uprightness
and width of our body.
Seat design
Sitting in car
seats is not straightforward:-
they slope backwards, affecting how we sit,
- support for the lumbar spine or head is often poor, and
- adjusting them for different people can be tricky
Sitting squarely
on your sitting bones
The shape of the
car seat makes it too easy for us to sit on our tailbone (coccyx). Our spine is
not designed for this. The weight of our upper body should ideally be
transmitted directly to the large and strong pelvic bones – think of these
bones forming a cradle or basin.
Under the basin
are the sitting bones, which should carry most of our weight when sitting in
the car. Of course, a little weight will be transmitted to the car seat via our
back, our fleshy buttocks and our thighs. But nearly all goes through the
sitting bones.
Tip : while
standing and then sitting, use your hands to feel your sitting bones – find the
large and bony prominences at the base of the pelvis.
Lengthening up to the head
Do you tend to slump over the wheel, or hold yourself rigidly back against the back rest?
These tips may help you find a more natural posture.
- Imagine lengthening up from your tailbone to your ear lobes - yes, between them is where your spine connects to the skull. Imagine this length along both the front of your body, and then along the back.
- Imagine the head really moving freely forward and up – towards the front of the car roof.
- Give yourself permission to occupy or ‘own’ the air space above your head, as well as behind it and to the sides (idea from a Robert Rickover podcast).

In this picture, the driver looks relaxed. But notice the curve in his lower spine. How should his sitting bones be involved?
Overall driving
posture
I really like this description:
“This fully
upright mobile posture balancing on the sit bones, gives the shoulders and arms
of the driver a balanced torso to float on, so that the driver can effortlessly
turn the steering wheel with free arms and shoulders” (blog by Ethan Kind,
accessed 23 May 2013).
Other resources
on sitting and driving
I have looked at
sitting in several blog posts, including Towards a better way to sit and Why the hip joint matters while sitting.
In a previous
blog, I introduced driving and gave you practical tips that focus on hands,
arms and breathing. In that post, I
cited a survey that found most drivers experience pain while driving (here is a
link to a different report about it -
http://www.carpages.co.uk/motoring-news/repetitive-driving-injury-23-05-06.asp
accessed 23 June 2013).
In his blogs and an e-book, Ethan Kind explores driving in great detail from the
perspective of Alexander Technique.
Cranz, G. (2000)
The Alexander Technique in the world of design: posture and the common chair
Part I: the chair as health hazard. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies.
Vol 4, Part 2, pp.90-98.
Monday, May 27, 2013
Fix me please … will I get pain relief?

Alexander Technique may help your pain disappear in just one or two lessons. No guarantees, but it can happen. However, depending on your needs, there is much more to be gained.
Pain relief experienced by recent clients
- Diane in Adelaide felt great relief having had excruciating back pain for two days after a long reading session, followed by some heavy gardening.
- Greg in Fitzroy found that his lower back pain ceased after a workshop in which I gave advice on adjusting the chair seat so it tilted forward rather than back.
- Ruth in Carlton came to me with excruciating shoulder pain. It went after one lesson, though she came for many more lessons to address underlying tension.
-
A worker in Southbank told me that she could stir food on the stove without pain – after following my advice to her and her work colleagues at their monthly work meeting.
What do we teach?
Interestingly,
teachers of Alexander Technique do not try to ‘fix’ the pain. We aim to teach
you :
- how to sit,
stand and move in new ways,
- an awareness of
the habits that pull you down,
- to work towards
a mind-body unity that makes all this possible
Education or
health therapy?
So is Alexander
Technique a form of education or is it a health therapy? FM Alexander, the
founder, always insisted that it was a form of education – addressing
psycho-physical coordination. Interestingly, Alexander used this term or others
such as use of the self. The term ‘Alexander Technique’ was popularised after
his death. Since then it has also become known as a health therapy, written
about in books and websites dealing with holistic health, and recognised by
health insurance funds.
On a recent visit
to Australia, American teacher John Nicholls suggests the distinction between
education and health is not very helpful (Nicholls 2012). I like the
description of Alexander Technique on his website (http://atnyc.us/). Here are
some extracts (in inverted commas):
“The Alexander
Technique re-organizes patterns of chronic tension that have unconsciously
become a fixed part of how we move, breathe, and act in the world”. It doesn’t
rely on relaxation or exercising to release this tension. It focuses instead on
“consciously addressing the primary coordination of postural support, movement
and breathing”. By this means, “tension could be transformed into available,
coherent energy”.
“All activity
then becomes far more energetically efficient. Physiologically, the specialized
guidance of an Alexander teacher’s hands and verbal instruction can
re-distribute tone between the support muscles of the neck and back, the
breathing muscles of the trunk, and the movement muscles of the limbs. Psychologically,
this brings about a whole new awareness of what it means to be supported, to be
breathed, and how to allow appropriate effort to arise from this
self-sustaining background without interfering with it.” (my italics)
This involves
learning new skills, which may take several, or many, lessons. Increasingly the
skills can be applied in daily life. Nicholls also argues that “this heightened
awareness of physical coordination can bring with it that greater ability to be
in the moment, consciously present, grounded and uplifted, which is sought
after in so many psychological and spiritual disciplines.”
References
John Nicholls
(2012) Keynote address. Annual Conference of the Australian Society of
Alexander Teachers, April 13- 15, Canberra.
Images - copyright Auremar
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Is it me … or the chair?
Adjusting or upgrading our chair can really make a difference to our comfort and pain levels. The same goes for the desk, bicycle or backpack we use. In this post, I explain what Alexander Technique teachers say about our chairs. But first, here’s a short story to illustrate that great equipment is only part of the solution - how we use it is equally, if not more, important.
How my friend sits over a meal
I have just had lunch with a 65 year old, who I haven’t seen for a long time. As we met, this tall man walked towards me with a distinct stoop, his head forward but craned up. 20 years ago, he stood proud.
Over our meal, he chose to sit on a soft cushiony bench seat, instead of an upright chair. He slumped appallingly, saying this was his preferred type of seat. His lower back was strained, his chest compressed, and his neck pulled back tightly. He sat like this for nearly an hour as we ate. (I didn’t know him well enough to gently tell him!)
Can you picture how he sat? It is his mental picture of himself that is most at fault here.
What is wrong with his thinking?
He feels most comfortable when his spine is constantly in tension, and is in fact shortening. He has no intuitive sense of lengthening and broadening his whole torso, so that the limbs move freely and the head is balanced on top of the spine
His body map is telling him “instinctively” that the right places to bend are in the lower back and base of the neck. If only he understood that the hip joints are much lower, and that the spine meets the head very high up – as I explain in earlier blogposts.

The pose adopted by the ‘thinker’ pictured to the right shows us graphically how our body and mind are a unity.
Does the chair, table height or back pack matter?
Yes, they do. We’re not all the same. There is a huge variation in body height and length of our limbs. Furthermore, habits vary from one person to the next. Uniformly designed furniture does not suit all our needs.
Our patterns of chair use build up over many years. Alexander teacher Richard Brennan has campaigned for years to ban backward-sloping chairs from schools in Ireland – see http://www.alexander.ie/chairscampaign.html. He points out that the National Back Pain Association in Britain reported that such school chairs are a major cause of back pain in adults.
Michael Stenning and Leonie Johns, two Alexander teachers based in Canberra, Australia have even designed their own chair, and they give a concise picture of what can go wrong with our sitting. See http://freedominaction.com.au/resources/sitting-without-strain-2/

Professor Galen Cranz is both a design expert and an Alexander Teacher. She has written a book about the chair in human culture. In a short powerful article available on-line (Cranz 2000), Prof Cranz uses illustrations to highlight the effect on our bodies of different sitting positions and chair design. She shows how efforts by chair designers to solve one problem affecting the head, pelvis, hips and spine have only led to others. She makes impressive statements about ‘the inherent instability of the seated posture’ but balances this by criticising a cultural assumption that it is ‘too tiring to sit upright without support’.
Prof Cranz emphasises five principles from Alexander Technique and relates these to problems with the chair and how we sit – the statement I like best under the first principle is : ‘disorganisation at the head-neck joint will ricochet throughout the body’. The next four principles cover : recognising the force of habit; acknowledging the subjective nature of what feels good; the power of simple thoughts (based on a scientific understanding) to guide our movement; and finally saying no to our old habits.
Her arguments are also summarised and well-illustrated in a 2008 article - http://bodyconsciousdesign.com/uploads/interview_galen_cranz_portland.pdf.
In summary
How you use the equipment around you is critical. Helping people address their ingrained habits is the key contribution of Alexander Technique to our well-being. Not everyone can tilt their chair forwards, adjust their desk height, or buy a new backpack. But getting the right gear is also important.
References
Galen Cranz (2000) The Alexander Technique in the world of design: posture and the common chair Part I: the chair as health hazard. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies. Vol 4; Part 2, pp.90-98. (available http://alexandertechnique.com/resources/JBMT-alex.pdf).
Galen Cranz (2008) The Chair: It is time to rethink ergonomics. Portland Spaces. Oct-Nov 2008, pp.103-108. (available http://bodyconsciousdesign.com/uploads/interview_galen_cranz_portland.pdf).
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Principles and tips for self-care
A
quick glance at the titles shows that Alexander Technique is holistic, and
emphasises how the mental and physical are inter-connected. It truly involves
a“psycho-physical re-education” – as it was once named.
I hope that you find the listing
interesting, and useful.
The Alexander approach
The Alexander approach
Observation is
the starting point to improving our well-being. Observing ourselves in the chair -
1 (September 2012)
Mindfulness. A personal
experience of pain led me to explore the use of Mindfulness and managing pain (February 2012)
Body awareness, the
effects of tension and releasing it. Your body and mind on holiday (December 2011)
and in Work, rest and play - an Alexander
principle (November 2012)
What to do each day
-resting the back. Resting the back is great for desk-bound people (December
2011) – it really does release tension, allowing the back to lengthen and widen,
and softening our breathing.
Our bodies (and minds) in action
Walking and feet are covered in As we were walking (October 2011) and My big floppy feet (October 2011).
Sitting and our hips. Why the hip joint matters when sitting (October
2011) and Towards a better way to sit - 1 ( January 2012)
So are our arms. Go easy on your muscles,
especially when typing
(March 2012)
Our necks are the
fulcrum for the whole body.
Look up and down with ease - at
the computer and elsewhere - 1 (April 2012)
Our backs deserve a break. Learn to bend well (June 2012)
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