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exercise
& habit Could
your concept of exercise be preventing you from experiencing the real
benefits of participating in physical activity? Is the controlled,
repetitive nature of popular exercise methods affecting your quality of
movement to the point of restricting performance or even leading to
injury? I suggest that if you could stop thinking of exercise as purely
a way to get fit you will find far greater rewards. I suggest a subtle,
but fundamental shift in your approach to exercise could not only help
to reduce injury and stress, but also enable you to realise your true
potential and learn more about yourself in the process. The
art of performance
approach can take you on a journey of self-discovery through practical
experiments that could radically change your approach to fitness and
personal development.
The
problem as I see it is with what we mean by the word ’physical’ as
it suggests an activity requiring little or no ‘mental’ input. I
have met many individuals that regard exercise as a way of taking a
break from their intellectual pursuits and train their ‘mental’ and
‘physical’ self separately. But can we really perform at our best by
splitting ourselves in two? Does taking the ‘mind’ out of physical
activity result in mindless action? Here
is an example. On my drive to work I would see an elderly gentleman
walking his dog. He first caught my attention because in spite of his
age, probably around eighty years old, he moved with a wonderful
free-flowing action. Day by day I observed his effortless style and we
soon began to acknowledge one another with a polite wave. However, one
day I noticed a change in his gait, in place of his usual stride was a
contrived march accompanied by a fixed facial expression and stiffness
throughout his body. I initially thought he must be in pain but the
reason soon became obvious, it was not physical but one of attitude - he
was wearing a tracksuit. Instead of enjoying his morning walk he was doing
his daily exercise presumably to get fit, perhaps following medical
advice. Yet his notion of exercise apparently involved making a natural
activity harder to guarantee a good workout to help him get fit. I
believe this extra effort succeeded only in adding unnecessary tension
to his frame and strain on the joints and perhaps in the long term
changing his concept of what free movement feels like. In place of
enjoying his morning stroll, whilst keeping fit in the process anyway,
it had become a chore because it was now exercise. His
approach is by no means unique. Exercise is universally accepted to be
the only way to improve fitness and essential for sporting success. Yet
the reason there are so many exercise and fitness books available is
much the same as why there are so many books on diet – ultimately they
do not work. Whether you began training to work on your fitness, lose
weight or improve sporting performance there are more fundamental issues
that need to be considered first that exercise will not begin to
address. Exercise may achieve short-term gains, but long-term success is
determined by factors that are present before
you begin training. My
point is that conventional training and exercise systems do not
recognise the role of the most fundamental factor influencing
performance. This factor is habit. It dominates life and determines all
our actions yet we are barely conscious of its presence, because we
are the habit. The way you stand, walk, run, breathe, feel and think
are determined by what you have done and how
you have done it previously. For example, how much effort you use in all
your activities becomes habitual until you know of no other way (see
experiment 2 in 'How it Works').
The more you use yourself in this way the more ingrained it
becomes. Exercise does not change habits – exercise re-enforces them! Self-improvement
is essentially bringing about a permanent change for the good. If
physical activity is your chosen route for self-improvement then
something within you has to fundamentally change in order to make it
happen. To allow change for the better it is necessary to go into the
unknown, to somewhere different, because otherwise you remain the same
and therefore do not change. It is not possible to go somewhere
different if you keep doing the same things. Business guru Roger
Milliken once said: "Insanity
is doing the same thing you've always done and expecting different
results." The
problem with the exercise approach to improvement is that it encourages
you to do exactly this and worse still you may not be aware of it. You
may see results from your efforts but how can you be sure that the
results are beneficial or that they could have been achieved another
way, perhaps an easier way with less stress whilst teaching you
something in the process. The barriers that prevent advancement are usually not what we would call physical, but ones created by attitude. For this reason I have refrained from using conventional types of exercise, as these can conversely cultivate performance-limiting habits. Neither is it a ‘mind-training’ approach promoting the concept of a division between mind and body and therefore proceeding to train the two separately. I hope this integrated method will help you to approach exercise in a more informed and inspired manner. The path to fulfilment is not through trying harder and doing yet more of the same but in learning to reduce effort by training smarter. This approach will give you the opportunity to observe what you are doing and make informed decisions on your activities. Whether professional, amateur or weekend athlete, you probably commit considerable time and energy in your pursuit of fitness or excelling in your sport. You therefore need to ensure that the effort you do put in is directed in a way that promotes the best conditions for improvement whilst not undermining health or compromising performance. To achieve this you must first become aware of how you apply yourself and not be content with just achieving the desired result. You will need to develop an ‘awareness in action’ to become aware of the moment you choose to react and give yourself time to think before and during activity, something most of us repeatedly fail to do. The methods I use contain the means to start this process by encouraging you to go beyond the physical and utilise previously untapped resources to help improve awareness, reaction, and as a result, the quality of your movement. By applying the principles of a unique (and much misunderstood) method known as The Alexander Technique you will learn first how to recognise performance-limiting habits and then how to successfully break them. This will help you achieve higher levels of performance, regardless of your present ability, that may have previously appeared beyond your reach. The
late world-renown sports scientist, Dr Mel Siff wrote: - “
…it may well be that the greatest advances may not result from the use
of physical devices, secret strength training methods, the latest
training fad, pharmacological agents or genetic engineering. Instead,
neuro-scientific research combined with the application of mind
developing methods learned experientially by sages over the past few
thousand years may well produce regimes of mental preparation that will
massively enhance overall sporting performance.” I believe that F.M. Alexander, founder of The Alexander Technique, discovered a practical way that could enable Westerners to appreciate what the Eastern philosophers discovered many centuries ago. I also believe the latest neuro-scientific research endorses Alexander’s work, which began over one hundred years ago in the field of thought, action and reaction.
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