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Welcome to the Create a Healthy Flexible Body Blog. There will be many updates from this section of the site. Please take advantage of the RSS feed to keep up to date with the posts. If you have any particular interest with health and fitness – such a huge area – I would love to hear from you. I hope you enjoy this blog and find it useful. All the best. Peter Maintaining posture is one of the most important skills to develop for yourself. So many people work hard at their fitness and then let themselves down with the way they walk, sit and stand – or shuffle, slump and slouch. As a bodyworker with the Feldenkrais Method one of the most challenging aspects to deal with is to teach clients to become aware of how they move and hold themselves. That is, to try and help them in maintaining posture. If there is one aspect of movement I have found to be consistently in common with great athletes, dancers and musicians it is the capacity for fluid integrated subtle movement through the torso. There is a way of doing this that doesn’t work though – or work anywhere near as well. That is to exhibit this style of movement but with too much tension in the body. I have known dancers to easily be able to do the splits for example but their muscles are like highly strung piano wire – twang!! Try this as an exercise with your friend / colleague. It is very useful to track your balance and rhythm at any given time. You can begin to lose this to a degree just by going through your day. Car seats demand that you overwork certain muscles just to keep your head up. Having one foot held on the accelerator introduces tension into parts of one leg. Carrying a bag. There are many ways to inadvertently introduce tension into your body and then tighten up to a degree. Given all this happens in the field of gravity these are compounded with every step you take. These tensions appear without you realising it and you tighten up without realising it as it is all so gradual and minor. It can add up though. There is a certain style of tension that seems to most interfere with a clear mind and a capacity to perform at your highest level – mentally and physically. For me, this is around the head / neck region. I can usually tell when a professional is about to drop their standards – on the field or in the office or on stage – as the tell tale sign of a tight jaw and stiff neck show up first. Very soon after that they start to fumble, miss shots, lose their line of thought etc. Move with grace, style, power and presence. A worthy intention. A study of the internal martial arts offers a clue as to how to achieve this. A Tai Chi practitioner may say something along the lines of:
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