so hello and welcome my name's Steve Nobel and I am speaking with Richard
Brennan on his book 'The Alexander Technique Manual.' now Richard has
studied the Alexander Technique since 1983 and has been teaching full-time
since 1989. He travels widely giving talks and courses on the technique he's
a director of training at the Alexander Technique Center based in Galway Ireland
and he's a leading figure in helping people resolve back and neck problems
his belief is the root cause of most back pain lies in poor postural habits
so he is the author of this book the Alexander Technique and we're gonna
speak with him now and that's a welcome to you Richard
not everyone's heard of the Alexander Technique can you just get a give a
description of what is it and what's it broadly for yeah okay it's a it's a
quite a profound technique but though simply throughout alive we develop
postural habits and we go about activities with far too much tension in
the body and it's a technique where make people aware of the tension and gives
you tool to let that tension go right brilliant how did it all begin well
Alexander was an actor reciter in the 1800's had he developed a voice problem
he on stage he started to lose his voice and he tried everything medication
exercise but nothing seemed to help and then he realized it was something he was
doing himself so he studied himself he looked and recited in front of and saw
that he was pulling his head back with quite a lot of force which was
depressing the larynx and affecting his voice and when he was able to see it and
change it his voice became perfect again he went back onto stage and he started
getting on with reciting again and then his fellow actors started saying well
I'm getting the same problem as you so he started helping his fellow actors and
then doctors got wind of it and then doctors started sending him patients
they didn't know what to do with amazing so in the book you took there's a
section here this is taking responsibility many people carry on for
years enduring unnecessary pain not realizing that anything can be done for
or them we need to face up to the fact that we have to take responsibility for
our our ailments and not expect other people to have all the answers
now of course modern medicine we people go there for the pill and you know the
bitter solution that they this is asking us us to take more responsibility yeah I
mean people don't advocate responsibility on purpose they don't
they just don't realize that they're doing something to themselves which is
causing the pain and I'm I have a pretty good example of that because I had major
back problems and sciatica for about seven years and it just got worse and
worse and worse my father's a doctor he couldn't do anything all the surgeons
couldn't do anything then I turned to alternative therapies and and they
didn't do anything either and then I realized it was a way that I was sitting
I was a driving instructor at the time and this way I was sitting in the car
which was exacerbating the problem so I would go to someone like a chiropractor
they put me back into place and then I would go back into my old habits and the
back pain will be back within two days it's only it's only when I realized that
what I was doing and it was able to change the way I was sitting that the
actual pain went for for good do you think this posture a major problem for a
lot of people do you think absolutely absolutely and the main reason is
everyone goes to school so everyone is bending over a debt between the age of
five and the age of eighteen so there's a lot of postural habits that get you
know you go into a classroom everybody is actually bending their back as
they're writing you know and they and then they just think that's normal after
it's actually fifteen thousand hours at school plus homework that's a lot of
time in a in a basically bad posture and a lot of people of course in me included
sit at a sit at a desk for long hours a day over a computer or looking at a
computer so again Alexander Technique is very
useful for that what kind of problems happen with this with with always it
kind of just manifests in many many types of ways well the most common is
back problems yeah forty-nine percent of the population in
UK and most of the Western world 49% that nearly one in every two people have
some sort of back problems every year okay that's huge but it can cause
breathing problems like people get asthma and people get other other and
that is posture related to but those are their knee problems hip problems ankle
problems and a whole range of shoulder and neck problems and you know it's part
arthritis is another postural you know after years of misusing the body
arthritis sets in which is basically wear and tear yet we're wearing we're
wearing ourselves out before time so back pain you mentioned is universal I
did I have suffered with a lower disc problem I had a MRI scan they said it
was some problem between the fourth and fifth vertebra I'm not sure if it was
carthage or whatever and that kind of produced sciatica which comes and goes
here and there which is incredibly painful which you've mentioned you have
it it does and if you've got this kind of condition is Alexander Technique
something that once you've got it you can actually alleviate well you know
when I had my back problem I I also there was no MRIs in those data sets
like in 1981-82 I had an x-ray they injected radioactive fluid in into the
spine they took x-rays and there was no disc left between l4 l5 and s1 so all
the three bottom vertebrae's was completely worn and what they did is
work they said look what we need to do is remove what's the left of the disc
and then fused to the last three vertebraes did you'll never be able to
bend again or but at least you'll be out of pain so I actually signed up for the
operation it was only after talking to my father as a GP he said whatever you
do don't have the operation because I'm seeing the people afterwards and they're
usually worse so I cancelled the operation and then eventually we'll I
got around to doing the Alexander Technique within six weeks my back was
absolutely fine well that's incredible and I haven't had it their back ached
ins I mean that's incredible isn't it do you think that this is something that
really should be in in every office and every score room yes I do
I do because you see with spending a vast fortune on the National Health
Service a lot of it is postural eaters so if you if you caught it early when
the children was at school you could have a much healthier population that
would save billions absolute billions and people ignore it people you know
forty nine percent of the population at bat print what are we doing about it
yeah we're just producing more and more pain-killing drugs someone should have a
word with the government and I'm not sure they're particularly listening this
particular government well Island the politicians are just basically too busy
right all right yeah yeah yeah so another massive area of the book
covers is stress now and I'm sure most of the listeners to this podcasts are no
strangers to stress and I've worked in the city for ten years you know it's
high pressure environment work money you know going home if the mind doesn't stop
thinking it's up for me stress is also not just a physical thing that's also
mental and emotional thing so how can Alexander Technique impact all those
levels okay well one of the major principles of the technique is the body
the mind and the emotions and the spirit are not separate but they intuitively
connected with one another okay so when I stressed myself if I feel stressed the
muscles are also going to be stressed and if I release the muscle tension you
will feel less stress it's as simple as that so someone would come to me I would
work with them for 10 minutes they would come in in their in a stress date and
then they would leave after half an hour completely unstressed so you work on on
the physical but most people will feel the benefits emotionally and and
mentally as well though they go out feeding karma it's stress again with the
you know the NHS must deal with a lot of stuff around stress Shirley sure a lot
of mental issues are stress-related coming back to posture I've done yoga
and Pilates and martial arts and they all have their own view on posture what
does Alexander Technique say about there's anything radically different
than yoga Pilates and martial arts I mean you can apply the elect under
technique to yoga and you can apply the elegante to Aikido or she going or
whatever so it's something you actually apply to an activity so it's not an
activity in itself you can't go and say well I'm going to go and do my Alexander
Technique like I gotta go and do my yoga it is it is an awareness technique and
the philosophy behind the technique is we all started with perfect posture go
and look at any three-year-old child they are moving beautifully they're
standing straight they're not standing up straight they're not tensing their
body they just are straight so that that posture is already inside us so all we
need to do is let go of the if the muscular tension that's actually pulling
it down into ourselves and then the the perfect natural posture just comes
through so what you do with the technique is not you don't do anything
you stop doing something you stop doing your postural habits and then when you
stop doing your postural habits the the right posture is there already we have a
whole series of postural reflexes which are just dying to work if we let them
and now the book covers a whole range of things one of the things I was really
interested in it which I was surprised about was it covers walking yeah sure I
would have thought that walking naturally we have a good posture is that
not so no not at all at all when people walk when children
walk they actually walk fairly straight if you look what your child walking
towards you they're very upright in a very straight if you go to a shopping
market or shopping mall and you watch people walking down a corridor they're
actually walking kind of like a pendulum they're going from one side to the other
types just like you're walking when you get off a boat and what you're doing
there is actually walking you're pulling yourself down into a hip and then you
lift a leg and then you pull down into the other hip and you're just wearing
your hips out another one that it's very interesting I mean a lot of people drive
you can listen to this now you say car seats cause back problems how can we
what can we do about driving well I I use a wedge I put a wedge on the seat
but if I drove his tii with the driving structure so it was a seats in the car
that gave me my back problem because I was sitting ten years pretty much all
day in a car seat so then I realized that the cars rigged back that seats
right back maybe as much as 15 degrees so I just get a wedge and I put it on
the seat and I make the chit the chair flat if I don't know how old you are but
if you went back to 1950s all the cars who had kind of bench seats and they
were much more l-shaped yeah now now our car seats because of the
shape of the car they're more v-shaped so you need to get back to the an
l-shaped kind of seeds because that's much better for your posture now I'm a
writer and you say in the book it's amazing how many people hold their pens
when writing in how it creates muscular tension what can we do about writing so
Ali Alexander had has his own school he actually formed his own school because
he he said we teach children lots of things but we don't teach them how to
hold the pen and you talk the computers you taught Java you're tall and
Microsoft's but you'll never taught how to sit at a computer so you're missing
the kind of basic you know the basic thing so you're actually looking at the
way you do something a good friend of mine there's a Alexander Technique
teacher and I used to work with him I says whenever I was sitting opposite him
I always used to sit a bit more upright or when I was having tea with him you
know I was always much more aware of my posture but one thing he told me it was
about the neck and I know in your in your book you talk about the kind of
freedom of the neck and again this is a big problem isn't it around the neck
that we create all kinds of tensions around the neck don't we yeah I mean the
hair Duchy weighs about 12 pounds of weight that six bags of sugar but that's
a huge amount of weight now most people carry their head more forward than their
body so the neck is actually under quite a little strain even when you're sitting
watching TV even when you're driving using computer yeah what about the
swimming because I noticed because when I heard about this I was thinking when I
swear my neck is kind of head in a very
strange position you know especially doing breaststroke well and I couldn't
think of a way of how I can't change that
yeah it's more you you pay attention and you just think of the neck becoming more
relaxed you just think of the neck muscles softening really on there and
then you're not holding the head with so much tension now obviously if you're
swimming you have to hold your head out of the water because if you relax your
neck completely your head falls in the water and then you can't breathe yeah so
obviously there's common sense here but maybe you can hold your head with not
quite so much tension as before so just thinking of the neck muscles softening
can help that there's a guy called Stephen Shore and he specializes in
using Alexander Nick for swimming know you this whole section is a book on
sports who mentioned swimming now I was a great football fan and very into
playing football and tennis no I I did have a knee injury from a very young age
right knee dislocated what walking yeah I wish I'd have had some advice like
this when I was a young kid I had endless problems with my right knee what
can we what can be done about things like football well I'll just give you a
story of my son he was a keen tennis player yeah and he ran a lot and every
time he played tennis he sprained his ankle so he had some aliens on lessons
from me but also from somebody else as well and they worked how that actually
was wearing he well he he would run differently when he had his shoes on so
what he did he started playing tennis barefoot and then he went to the Royal
kazoo bar in London and he designed the shoe accords the BB Beaubourg foot shoe
and then when he was very leave he never got any problems with the ankles so he
realized that it was the way he was reacting to his shoes that was causing
the problem so just just becoming aware of that and also when when you have
Alexander listen your your whole body is just much freer anyway so when you go
and play tennis you're not so or football or horse riding you're not so
likely to be injuring yourself this also applies this principle applies to
playing musical instrument so I didn't realize that many musicians
give up their careers because of aches and pains and injuries generated by the
way they stand sit while playing yeah people like Madonna people like Paul
McCartney quite a few famous musicians but just regularly I live in Galway and
there's a whole musical community so again a lot of people coming to me just
holding the guitar with a look with too much tension for too long can produce a
pain in the shoulder or pain in the neck so again just teach them how to sit
stand or whatever and hold their instrument in a easiest of the way the
pain the pain just go away the painter's going pain is always a sign that
something's going wrong and if I can find out what is going wrong and change
it then I can eradicate the pain there's an interesting story actually of George
and ashore the right zone so at the age of 80 he was riddled with paint he has
pain in his neck he has a major back problems his hip didn't work properly he
had knee problems and ankle problems so he books a lesson with Alexander not for
anybody's reason but because he had a heart problem and the dog has given them
a few weeks to live so he goes along to Alexander when he get to the front door
he can't even get up the three steps to ring the doorbell he's still frail and
they probably everyone think George burnisher is just about to die and he's
on his last legs anyway he eventually gets into the
Alexander's teaching room Alexander takes one look at him and said look I
can't do anything for you unless you promise to come every day for three
weeks after the three weeks George burnisher writes a letter says
dear mr. Alexander I just want you thank you because all my aches and pains have
gone and the doctors can't find the angina anymore I'm walking five miles a
day and swimming every morning which I haven't been out to do since I was 14
incredible where yeah however you have left me with one problem I didn't have
in the first place now that I'm three inches taller and none of my clothes fit
me anymore and then and then he went on and lived for another 14 years and the
only reason he died he fell out of a tree while he was pruning him so he's up
apple trees at the age of 94 yeah I know I know I
know well this is gonna appeal appeal to some some people I'm sure pregnancy and
childbirth now there's some great images in the book of this a woman with a great
bump it in front of her and of course this this puts a great strain on the
physic on the human body doesn't it it does it does yeah and again you know
when Tom and in childbirth or in pregnancy the more tension that they
have in their body the harder the prenta gonna be the harder the the birth is
going to be so someone who has a more relaxed body it's just going to have an
easier time they're also back problem is a really big problem with people who are
pregnant a lot of pregnant mums get back problems and the yellow content you can
actually definitely help with that so you just give people an easier time
doesn't matter whether you're pregnant or whatever you do it just helps you to
move through life with greater ease so it's a beautiful book Richard who's it
really aim does it aimed at anyone pretty much anyone who want to be more
conscious of what they actually do anyone who wants to improve something
you might be a musician want to prove your your playing you might be a runner
you want to have better at performance or you just might want to improve the
way you sit at a computer so if they anyone want to improve something or if
they have any eggs or paint and they don't know why they're getting up this
might throw some light on them and the Richard thank you so much now if anybody
is interested in Richards work do check his website
aleksander dot IE and yeah richard thank you so much for your work I'm sure you
know it's touching many people brilliantly
okay thanks Steve
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