SELF-CARE FOR RUNNERS
Feldenkrais - Changing How You Run for Less Wear & Tear on Your Body!
If you are someone who is perhaps fiercely independent, driven, tense, but not especially inspired by the idea of taking on another exercise program what you’re looking for is a way to improve what you are already doing.
This unique method, known as Feldenkrais, can help you reorganize yourself so that the muscles you feel as tight bands can lengthen, no longer threatening your running with tears or pulled muscles, ligaments or tendons.
On the other end of the continuum from pure strength training approaches to balancing muscles, Feldenkrais is a form of movement training that teaches you how to balance muscles without stretching or straining. As such, it’s especially rewarding for people who are not necessarily inspired by the idea of cross training. Instead, you can learn a technique for focusing on improving how your muscles work together. The conventional approach to dealing with muscle strain is to strengthen the weaker, longer muscles. Muscles of equal strength tend to be of equal length and thereby exert more even tension on joints. This is what physical therapists are attempting to achieve when they give you exercises to balance your muscles.
Yet, strength is only half the picture. Imagine someone extremely strong – Frankenstein, perhaps? Imagine his lumbering, stiff gait – ever feel like that the morning after a good run? Not only is the coordination impaired by a variance in muscle length, but the unequal tension itself impairs the functional mobility of the joint.
Runners typically tune out to make the grade. There is a certain amount of really pushing past pain that is necessary to get into running. But an all or nothing approach is doomed to create problems in the future. All things require balance and the body is where we get to feel first hand if we are not in balance. The body is our gage and it’s vital that we listen. When we tune it out, we risk injury. If that’s what you had to do to make running a part of your life, fine, but it cannot go on that way forever. Once you are secure enough about running to know what you have to do to be competitive, you have to change your relationship with your body. You can only tune out for so long in safety and eventually, it’s vital that you learn how to tune back in.
The Feldenkrais Method is a scientifically based means of developing human potential. How does it work? By teaching you to tune back in. Most movement classes focus on movement as an exercise. Feldenkrais focuses on learning. It improves your ability to learn experientially, to figure things out. When you learn a physical skill - running is a perfect example - no end of reading about it will give you the ability to do it. You have to actually learn by doing. Feldenkrais improves on that natural ability to learn by doing and trains you to feel and prefer what is ergonomically more optimal. Equal muscle length is more comfortable. You feel less tense and more ready to move in any direction with the spontaneous grace of a puppy at play.
Even your posture will improve. How? As a natural evolution of learning to sense what is optimal. You gradually begin to feel better when you are standing with better alignment. Instead of trying to impose the idea of ‘good posture’ on yourself, you learn to feel your way into it. Good alignment becomes something you simply experience as more comfortable. Instead of learning about it as if it were a theoretical idea out of a book, you have a chance to experience it in a very solid, grounded, concrete way. This can be a really empowering experience for people who push through every obstacle using brute strength or sheer determination. Strength will fail if it is your only means of coping with extremity, and determination is often accompanied by a disconnect that can lead directly down the path of injury.
What controls coordination? Your nervous system coordinates your muscles to move in unison. In fact, your nervous system is exponentially more capable than any computer. It tracks both conscious and automated functions and responds to them simultaneously and, in many cases instantaneously. Your nervous system is designed to organize itself for optimal self-use. When it doesn’t happen, usually it’s because we have unintentionally been trained to tune ourselves out! Feldenkrais lessons give you an opportunity to capitalize on the amazing ability of your own nervous system to correct itself.
Most of what we do in our daily lives occurs below the radar of our everyday noticing. Feldenkrais classes are called Awareness Through Movement (ATM) precisely because each lesson creates a unique opportunity to see ourselves anew. Meditation is another medium that can establish what is known as ‘Beginner’s Mind.’ Feldenkrais is similar in that regard, however the medium is slow movement rather that sitting still. You to experience yourself with this same sense of novelty. You learn to use movement to make a shift in consciousness that brings life a new sense of aliveness.
Feldenkrais is especially great for people in recovery from rehabilitation or surgery because the emphasis is on learning how to sense when you are about to hurt yourself before it happens. Most lessons start lying on the floor, so that you don’t have to use your postural muscles to contend with gravity. This makes it less work to pay attention to what you feel so that you develop a heightened sense of what works and what doesn’t. All the movements are done with the primary intention of finding the easiest, most comfortable way to move in a safe, comfortable environment. In the same way that water flows down the path of least resistance, you learn to find the path of greatest ease. Imagine how this can improve your running!
In the Yuba City area, Spa Therapy is currently the first to offer Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement classes. The instructor, Gabrielle Pullen, GCFP, completed the four-year training in this unique Method in 2004, and also offers one-on-one sessions, known as Functional Integration. In a private Functional Integration session, she evaluates your posture and movement. In many cases she can expedite the process of learning to move in ways that are more comfortable, and more effective. Learn to move through injury, rehabilitation or postural dysfunction by focusing on what works!
For those of you in Nevada City area, Gabrielle has been offering Feldenkrais classes there since 2002, when she was first certified to teach group lessons (the Training stipulates two years of schooling for teaching classes and four years of schooling for teaching hands-on Functional Integration. The Nevada City Office is located at 305 Railroad Ave., Ste. 7 and classes are held at two locations and times for your convenience, see below.
Class Schedule FALL 2007
Every Friday 10:30-11:30 a.m. Wild Mt. Yoga Center, 574 Searls Ave., Nevada City
Wednesdays 5:30-6:30 p.m. Still Point Studios, 300 Sierra College Dr. Ste. 155 six week series Start Sept. 19, 26, Oct. 3,17, 24, 31, Grass Valley
Tuesdays 4:00-5:00 p.m. Spa Therapy, Live Oak Blvd., Yuba City opening to be announced.
Thursdays 10:00-11:00 a.m. Spa Therapy, Live Oak Blvd., Yuba City opening to be announced.
