medical examiner: Health and medicine explained.

Unnatural PoiseLearning the Alexander Technique.

By Laura Moser
Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007, at 12:01 PM ET

Alexander Technique. Click image to expand.

I grew up believing that success in life, or at least a decent report card, hinged on the ability to silence the body, to ignore its twitches and creaks. And so I seldom stretched when my back ached, or stood when my foot fell asleep. At first, I saw no connection between these habits and the shoulder injury I sustained in late 2004.

But even after the worst of my misery passed, my shoulder continued to act up, particularly when I worked at the computer. I whined to an actress friend about these flare-ups, and she suggested I look into the Alexander Technique. Because I set great store by this friend's advice—she had, over the years, introduced me to Gigi wax, Marigold vegetable bouillon, and enzyme stain remover—I contacted her teacher that same afternoon.

In the late 1890s, F.M. Alexander, then an obscure Tasmanian actor, fell victim to an inexplicable complaint that posed a serious professional hazard: Every time he went onstage, he lost his voice. When no doctor could figure out why his voice kept expiring at the most inconvenient moments, Alexander set about studying himself in mirrors. His observations astonished him. "I saw," he wrote, "that as soon as I started to recite, I tended to pull back the head, depress the larynx and suck in breath through the mouth in such a way as to produce a gasping sound." It was, he decided, the inefficiency of these movements that prevented him from projecting his voice across the theater.

Alexander spent the next decade answering one seemingly straightforward question: Could he speak without yanking back his head? His answer morphed into a broad, evolution-based set of principles that revolutionized the way people thought about movement. (George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, and John Dewey were among his earliest followers.)

Like other animals, Alexander preached, humans are born with what he called "natural poise." But gradually—over years of being shackled to desks and Adirondack chairs and laptops—most of us forget the proper workings of our bodies. Bad habits commence, and chronic pain ensues.

To learn the Alexander Technique, as the method came to be known, you must relearn the most taken-for-granted movements. Sitting. Standing. Walking. Speaking. Example: A good friend of mine, who gave birth to her first child in March, takes Alexander classes to learn how to hold her baby without pain.

While still popular in the United Kingdom (where Alexander Technique teachers outnumber chiropractors!), the Alexander Technique remains something of a niche market in this country. Actors and singers commonly study it to improve their vocal range, instrumentalists to avoid repetitive-stress injuries. Recognizing these benefits, the Juilliard School requires all students to take Alexander classes.

But among the general population, Alexander still lags far behind alternative therapies like yoga, Pilates, and even tai chi. It's not just that it burns no calories. The real reason, I'd wager, is the almost numinous subtlety of Alexander's teachings. He warned his students against acting outright to correct destructive patterns of movement—by squeezing back their shoulders, say, or lifting their chins.

Since repetition destroys perception, we lose the ability to "feel" what's right for our bodies. So instead of "fixing" our bad habits, Alexander tells us to simply observe them and think about inhibiting them. Sometimes, this involves little more than imagining the lower jaw moving forward and out, or the elbow rotating at three distinct points. This murky teleology lies at the heart of the Alexander Technique's allure—and also of its difficulty.

I readily appreciated Alexander's underlying logic and believed my teacher Julie's suggestion that the root cause of my injury was my height. I sprouted to 6-foot-2 at age 16 and without realizing it spent much of the succeeding years trying to shrink my way into polite society. Finally, after more than a decade of hunching forward, my poor shoulder gave out. (Short people, who tend to pitch their necks backward and up, encounter a different set of problems.)