Elite athletes have been using Alexander Technique and acupuncture for years to maximize their on-field performance.

Professional basketball, football, hockey, and baseball players, and olympic athletes are all on record as benefiting from acupuncture and associated modalities (Olympic swimmers famously demonstrated their use of cupping with purple circular marks on their backs). For elite athletes, the relief from muscle tension, pain and inflammation that acupuncture provides is crucial to their performance. Read a more detailed article here.

The Alexander Technique is best known by performers (actors, dancers, musicians) to help them operate at their highest level so they can perform their art. What many people don’t know is that it can help athletes achieve their personal best, too. Alexander Technique improves coordination, balance, and overall efficiency, all of which lead to fewer injuries and less recovery time. There are several Alexander teachers around the world who specialize in specific sports (running, swimming, skiing), but any AT teacher will be able to help you improve your general coordination, which will benefit every activity you engage in.

Bob Quinn, an Alexander Technique client of mine writes about his experience here. He says, “I have been a runner since 1973 when I first joined the track team at my high school. I am now 62. For most of those intervening years I have been out on the roads and trails logging mile after mile. That is a lot of wear and tear. I have injured hips, ankles, and my back many times. Since I started to take AT lessons though I have not injured myself running. That is quite an improvement!”

If you’re an athlete and want to know more about how I can help you maximize your performance, contact me!

 Hypermobility syndromes (including Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) affect an estimated 1 in 10 people. Symptoms include chronic, generalized pain as well as digestive upset, bladder issues, skin changes, cardiovascular issues. Many hypermobility groups recommend Alexander Technique as a preventive measure to help with posture, movement, and coordination (e.g., see here and here).

With the Alexander Technique, people living with hypermobility syndromes can build coordination skills so they are less likely to injure themselves and less likely to make injuries worse.

Acupuncture is a wonderful complementary tool for all the symptoms mentioned above. Where Alexander Technique is preventative, acupuncture can help repair and re-balance systems that aren’t working as well as they used to.

Other traditional east asian modalities can be very helpful for chronic pain from hypermobility/EDS, for example, moxibustion has been shown to be helpful for chronic low back pain. Cupping and bodywork can also help with the generalized pain often experienced in hypermobility syndromes.

Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels.

Studies have shown that acupuncture is effective for fibromyalgia (Cochrane Review). When compared to standard care alone (exercise and medication), patients who received standard care plus acupuncture rated their pain 30 points lower on a scale of 0-100. Research shows improvement in many areas after receiving acupuncture: pain, sleep, fatigue, stiffness, global wellbeing, and physical functioning.

When I work with people living with fibromyalgia, I treat the whole person, not just symptoms. I use a variety of modalities and tools to help people feel better. I am skilled in cupping, gua sha, moxibustion, polarity tools, and bodywork. These combined with acupuncture can be very beneficial for people living with fibromyalgia.

One fibromyalgia patient said, “I felt so much better after my first treatment with Lauri. I felt very relaxed and had much less pain.”  

.A long time ago, my Alexander Technique teacher told me a story of a particularly lovely AT lesson she received in London. After this lesson, she walked to the local cafe, sat down, and ordered a cappuccino. She was in such a balanced state that she took one sip of her cappuccino, sat in the pleasant afternoon sun, paid, and left. She felt no need to finish drinking the cappuccino. She was content with things exactly as they were.

In the Alexander Technique, we cultivate skills in inhibition and direction. (If you're unfamiliar with the work, I could describe these phenomena, but any description I provide would be completely inadequate. If you've had Alexander Technique lessons, you know what I'm talking about.) By practicing these skills in an ongoing manner, we are able to bring about the conditions necessary for a balanced, content state. Sometimes this state is fleeting, sometimes it lasts longer. The important point is to practice the skills so you can bring about this state on your own (more on this in a blog post on “working on yourself,” coming soon).

I have had a few similar experiences of contentment. One was during a lesson with the teacher mentioned above, at her farm house. She worked with me for a while and at the end of the lesson I was standing in the middle of the room, and I had the sense that I could go on standing like that for a very long time. Now, I'm usually a person who is ready to move on to the next thing pretty quickly, so for me to be content to be where I am for a long time is memorable.

There are probably many names for states like this from many other bodies of work. I encourage you not to try to compare this experience to other kinds of work. It may be similar, or it may not. Let it stand on its own, in a room, for a very long time.

The Alexander Technique (AT) is the work of opening doors and windows and tiny cracks in people's habit patterns so they can experience something new. When you experience something outside of your automatic, stereotyped behavior, you can start the work of change - of figuring out what you want and moving toward it. Until you can step outside your habitual pattern for a moment, there's very little real ability to change.

AT is about bringing to light our habit patterns so we can avoid activating them. Only then can we start to have access to something new and different. One of the wonderful things about this work is that you can't quite imagine what the new thing you'll have access to is. It's at the far side of a leap of faith. Alexander referred to this as “going from the known to the unknown.” You can't know ahead of time what it will be like to have a new experience.

I think of acupuncture as the same work in a different form. I use needles, non-insertive tools, cups, gua sha tools, and moxa to make small changes that add up to a new experience of one's self. Once you have a new experience, you can begin the work of nurturing the conditions which allow this new sense of self to flourish.