The Alexander Technique and Sports Performance
In order to describe the ways in which the Alexander Technique can benefit athletes, let me start by telling my own story. I've been a life-long athlete. As a child in grade school, I played soccer and baseball. Outside of school, I rode horses. As I got older, I also did a lot of skiing, sailing, hiking and bicycling. During my high school summers, I participated in several bicycle tours with American Youth Hostels (during one of these, we rode from New York City to Seattle - coast to coast).
During high school and college, my favorite sport was rowing. At college, I rowed on the junior varsity lightweight crew. Because we won the Eastern Championships one year, I received a varsity letter (one of my most prized possessions!). I took a year off from college and lived in Crested Butte, Colorado; that winter I skied every day that I wasn't working. More recently, after a long period away from it, I've gotten deeply involved in horseback riding again, (specifically in the discipline of dressage), and I've continued to ski every winter.
As you can tell, I've always adored sports. And yet, for a long time, I felt that there was something missing in my relationship to them - something that I couldn't quite put my finger on. One aspect of this was that I was never quite as successful at them as I wanted to be. It was only when I started taking Alexander lessons that I finally was able to figure out what that "missing piece" was.
What I learned through the Alexander Technique was that, in many cases, I was putting more effort into a given sport than I really needed to, with the result that my body had a lot of extra muscle tension - tension that I wasn't even aware of! A central reason for this was that many of my coaches and instructors would say, "If at first you don't succeed, try it again - only this time put more elbow grease into it," or some variation on that theme. On the other hand, the Alexander Technique taught me that, if at first I don't succeed, the best thing to do is to try a different approach. To be more specific, this means doing less - subtracting effort - and then trying the activity again.
I was so impressed with this learning that I decided to train to become a teacher - a three- year undertaking. I've now been teaching for almost nine years. The results of this process are tangible: at the age of 41, I'm skiing and riding better than I ever have before. And best of all, I no longer have the feeling that something is missing. Or more accurately, if that feeling appears, I see it as an indication that I may be starting to overdo. Then I can catch the tendency and address it. As a result, I have much more frequent experiences of "the zone" - that amazing experience of ease, control and well-being when you don't feel as if you have to make the sport happen because it almost seems to be happening on its own, and you're just going along for an intensely pleasurable ride. (Who knows, maybe if I had had the knowledge that I do now, I would have made the varsity lightweight crew in college!)
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