with the Feldenkrais Method®
By Eveline Wu, GCFP |
As snow dumps in the Lake Tahoe region, are you preparing to tear it up? Or are you gripping your sore back, tired knees, and aching neck, wondering if you’ll take up snowshoeing instead?
Good equipment, good technique, and good training are essential components of ski performance and comfort.
If you’ve covered these fundamentals with your bootfitter, ski instructor, and exercise program, your ticket back onto the ski hill may be the Feldenkrais Method®, a system to retrain how your body moves, through hands-on sessions and group movement classes.
Just as skiing involves a dynamic balance of the skeleton in movement, all your movements involve your brain’s capacity to dynamically balance your muscles and bones. After all, babies fall over. We learned to walk. The Feldenkrais Method® makes your basic movement patterns more easy and efficient, so that while skiing you can better sense and respond to subtle changes in gravity and terrain, and perform better.
Try this simple exercise (best results if you read it through once, before starting):
1) Lie down on the floor, legs long, arms by your side. First, notice that as you lie on the floor that some parts touch and some don’t. Get a good sense for where you lift off the floor, and how much. Feel asymmetries left and right. Notice how high your lower back lifts and whether your shoulders lift too.
2) Next: Bend your knees so your feet stand on the floor a comfortable distance apart, and very slowly drop only your LEFT knee IN towards the center and bring it back to neutral. Do this smoothly, never pushing your leg into pain or a stretch. Notice the “kinetic chain” or how the movement follows through your whole body. How does it change the weight of your hips, ribs, lower back? Does your head move? After several times you will improve.
One hallmark of the Feldenkrais approach is to never force your body, and instead use intelligent awareness to change your movement habits. As a skier, you know that subtle differences can make a big difference, so take the time to move slowly and patiently.
3) OK. You’ve let your knee go inwards several times. Lie flat and compare how you feel now, to how you felt before. Can you feel a change?
With this one movement you’ve already learned to connect your legs to your back better by using your attention.
4) Now, let’s add another variation. This time, let your LEFT knee fall OUT with the same quality several times. Sense how the movement draws through your hip and spine, and then rest. Is it different?
5) Now, take your right knee in and out and compare it to your left. Feel the difference?
Congratulations! In 5 minutes you’ve improved the flexibility of one of your hip joints and your rotary movements, and there’s more to come. What’s after that? Maybe…the hill?
Reference:
Awareness Through Movement: Health Exercises for Personal Growth. New York/London: Harper & Row 1972, 1977.
For more info, call Eveline Wu at 530-542-6269.
