Our national back injury disgrace

Today, the statistics tell us that about 200 workers, in Australia, will experience a manual handling type injury bad enough for them to take at least seven days off work and to seek a compensation payment from their employer. This will also happen tomorrow and the next and the next. Lifting, carrying and bending injuries are the most common type of injury in the workplace. In the worst instance sufferers spend significant time off work, endure constant discomfort and have inordinate stress placed on their life. Statistics tell us that those injured workers will have eight times greater chance of marriage breakdown and fourteen times greater chance of suicide, drug dependency,gambling addiction an so on.

I was involved in a Workcover NSW symposium in 2005 that was looking at OHS trends. Of 12 industry groups represented all determined that manual handling injury was their worst area of performance. SInce then money has been thrown at manual handling training, manual handling programs, manual handling equipment but the figures are still incredibly high. Why is this so?

My experience is that people move automatically in life. We don't stop to think about how we move-we just move. It is an unconscious and usually an unreasoned response to a stimulus. That's perfectly natural. Why should we be conscious of the way we move?

The answer is we should be conscious of the way we move because:-

1. We have an incredibly high injury rate amongst people who lift, carry and bend.
2. Occupational movement has to be different in character to ordinary movement.
3. The stats tend to indicate that there is an endemic problem with how people are moving unconsciously. (1 in 4 Australians will suffer a back injury in their life!) 

Most people I come across believe that movement either in life or in the workplace is just common sense. They say all you have to do is bend at your knees and keep your back straight and this will prevent injury. Yet, when you speak to people who have injured their back, neck, or knees they will rarely say that they failed the common sense test. They will quite often report that they are completely mystified as to what it was that caused their injury, or they will blame an inanimate object, "the chair hurt my back"; "it was my boss', I picked up a piece of paper" and so on. 

Over one hundred years ago, FM Alexander said that it was very important for people to begin to open their awareness to their movement. He claimed that on inspection the movement that people assumed they were doing often did not match up with the movement that actually occurred. Alexander observed patterns of pressure, dis-coordination and inaccuracy that he called mis-use. Mis-use not only affects the quality of your movement, it also affects your ability to accurately discern your movement. SO many people think that they are doing one thing when in fact they are doing something else entirely. 

We may give an employee a direction to bend their knees and keep their back straight but if Alexander is right we cannot guarantee that the instruction has been understood nor accurately translated into movement by that worker. This is a formula for continuing high incidence of injury and cost to our society.

Industry and society can no longer afford to ignore the discoveries of FM Alexander. Rather, it's time that those discoveries were evaluated, assessed and implemented to minimise the risk of manual handling injury in the workplace and to allow for the accurate rehabilitation of those people who have sustained injury and require a return to work.
Go to my website at http://www.backrescue.com.au

Alexander's Great Experiment

For over one hundred years FM Alexander has challenged individuals to take part in an incredible experiment of human awareness. Alexander Technique is not a belief system nor does it require conformity. Alexander Technique is an invitation to take part in a magnificent experiment where your role is to gather data, analyse the results and act on them. The object of the experiment is your self and specifically your movement. By beginning to observe your movement in the same way that Alexander did, you too  may find patterns that organise and disorganise your every move. You may become intrigued that with even the most delicate change to your pattern vast changes can occur to your awareness of movement and to the movement itself. Some patterns may concern you because they place an unnecessary pressure on the body, some may please you because they take pressure off tired parts and spread the load around the body.
People who are suffering from pain in the neck or back often will find that a strong awareness of their body and a focused experiment with new movement and movement organisation will create significant improvement in the way that they feel. I think of it as pressure coming off the injury site. By the constructive redistribution of weight pressure comes off of the injury site and great improvement is felt. As pressure continues to come off the site injured areas have the opportunity to heal.
Alexander experimenters should be happy with that result but they soon come to realise that awareness in movement brings about many other benefits. When an individual, who had been locked into a patterned response to a stimulus, can begin to determine their physiological response to a stimulus and break the pattern, this allows for a great degree of autonomy.
I think it may have been the American philosopher John Dewey who said of Alexander's experiment, "All human beings are born with the potential for freedom of choice, but to have this potential come to fruition we need to learn the skill of preventing our habitual response and applying our reasoning."
Please visit my website at www.backrescue.com.au

Hitting the sweet spot.

There are times in my life where things have gone SO right. It's as if I had suceeded despite myself. On the golf course, I might hit a ball and there's that satisfying sound "THWACK" as the ball hits exactly on the sweet spot. Then I'm looking and the ball is going neither left, neither right but beautifully straight ahead. Oh, dear reader, how rare that occasion is when that happens. Strangely, if I try to make the shot it never works out the same and I find myself traversing the creeks, the roughs and the forests of golf courses around Sydney.
I have had lots of these sweet spot moments in my life where everything just works. It's such a satisfying feeling when everything conspires to assist you to achieve your stated outcome. The trouble is that when I try to replicate that sweet spot feeling it rarely works out. It's that classic situation where you've done something amazing and you say  "Hey everybody, look at me!" and guess what happens next. @#$%!

Getting your mind and body to cooperate

What kind of a relationship do you have with yourself? It's a weird question to ask and yet for many people that I meet in Alexander class the relationship that they make with themselves is marked with negative internal dialogue. I was discussing this with a student today after the concept of negative self speak was raised and we were talking about all the influences that ask you to consider  that you aren't enough. Your not enough if you don't use this hair spray. You're not enough unless you have a six-pack.

Welcome to this blog about Alexander Technique.

At it's simplest Alexander Technique teaches you to be aware of the way you make movements. Sometimes you may find that you are overworking muscles and making effort that is far in excess of what is needed to achieve your goal.

Another way of saying that is that sometimes we are making a lot of tension and we don't realise it.

Making a lot of tension can throw your body out of alignment, introduce twists and pressure spots and make many tasks seem harder to achieve than they should be. Over-tension can also affect out mental state creating stress and it can exacerbate sore points where we have experienced injuries.

When a musician makes over-tension it can seriously affect the sounds coming from their instrument through a disruption of breath, an embellishment on the key stroke or on the fingering of a string on a fretboard. For the sportsperson, over-tension represents an inefficiency where energy fails to be directed into the activity and may in some circumstances get in the way of activity. The golfer's swing is affected, the tennis player's serve, the runner's gait and so on.

FM Alexander made some pivotal discoveries about how humans coordinate their movement. You can be shown quite easily how movement is organised efficiently or how that process is interfered with through over tension.

Please have a look at my Sydney Alexander Technique website and look out for more posts about Alexander Technique.