Your posture matters. Posture is, unfortunately, one of the most misunderstood things in the world, which partially explains why nearly everyone living in modern civilization has bad posture. This channel is dedicated to providing you with reasoned, practical, and effective means by which to stop habitually making movements that strain your body and stifle your own intentions. Though the end goal is a body free from irrational restrictions and harmful habits, the means to that end is a change in how you use your mind.
Drawing from the luminous work in the field of gesture by François Delsarte, and from F.M. Alexander's important advancements with concepts like conscious guidance and the means whereby principle, as well as Jeando Masoero's clear and practical explication of a rational way to self-regulate one's postural system, I intend to place you in a unique position to benefit from the greatest thinkers in how to move.
The problem of imbalance in the body is solved through yoga. By guiding your body through different natural poses while using the breath to fully expand and relax in these poses, you are returning the body to a natural state of mobility and strength that aligns every aspect of your musculoskeletal system. Through my own experimentation of traditional physical therapy style exercises of "strengthening and loosening" certain muscles to fix imbalances I found that a "conscious" effort to return to a natural state of balance in the body is incredibly hard because most people have lost the mind-body connection to properly due the exercises. Alexander technique gives good cues to initiate the proper positioning of the body, but it lacks in its ability to fully address the bodies range of positioning which gives way to proper FULL mobility of the body like yoga does. To me it looks like you've tried addressing your perceived aspects of bad posture only to have put yourself in another imbalanced, albeit less stress/pain inducing state. In short, yoga will address every aspect of your body's imbalances by going through the full range of motion your body is capable of, while also allowing a proper mind-body connection to return through the use of breath work. I would suggest doing Yoga With Adriene's 30 day challenge and follow along to her body cues and breathing cues and your body will feel naturally return to it's balanced state. This is the whole practice of yoga.
Wow, great video! I just subscribed and I intend to watch all your videos to learn about IAT. Perhaps I will get a teacher online during or after it. Thank you very much.
If you follow every direction you will find out mewing does absolutely nothing other than raise the hyoid. I had trouble that every time I dropped my tongue when talking or eating I would look recessed again, I found out it was because I wasn't moving my mandibular angle in the forward direction, now when I eat or talk my jaw still looks defined and no longer recessed and I no longer need to mew, I only need to remember the directions of pulling my upper sternum and mandibular forward (of course with the other multiple directions).
If you know about the martial art, what you are trying to say, is just the same with the Tai Chi principles, i think the ancient martial artist know about the important of posture, the important of relax but not release, good video man
The stand tall upright stance is a propaganda from the past century about posture, me myself following a bunch of mewing rule, chin tuck, stand upright, shoulder down and back .etc, bad result, unecessary stiffness, lower back pain and bring unconcious stress to the whole body and mind, whoever understands understands, until i dicide to drop off everything i know about posture, just release, relax, even when standing, never feel so comfortable like that
What similarly valuable channels do you follow guys? I look for more pearls like this. I know one top notch about nutrition. Already feeling like winning a lottery haha I have a hunger for more epic sources of knowledge!
But should you have it fully open. If you breathe a lot of air you are hyperventilating. You will also struggle to breathe slow filling diaphragm and getting lots of NO gas accumulating in nose. Buteyko method improves breathing exactly by training getting less air and improving efficiency of using air. Too much air isn't balancing C02 use and oxygenation. Just my simple logic about it. Still im really greaful for finding this channel. Keep up the awesome work!
The openness of the airway does not necessarily mean you are breathing more or less air. What happens when you partially close the airway, typically, is that you will then suck air in and blow air out muscularly with the muscles of the face, or making heaving and dropping movements with your ribcage as you inhale and exhale. These are ways of getting the air through the kink in the airway (without actually undoing the kink), but they cause all sorts of problems. F.M. Alexander argued that breathing should be a natural process that results from having an expanded thorax. Air will, on its own, flow into the partial vacuum of your lungs after you've exhaled. He saw in the breathing exercises of his time that frequently when people tried to take specific control over their breathing without regard to their posture, it resulted in poor postural habits like hollowing the back and retracting the head. Often habits of audibly sucking air in and blowing it out are cultivated in breathing exercises, and in conjunction with the postural issues that can also be cultivated, you can end incapable of breathing naturally and dependent on these habitual reactions to feel like you’re getting air. I appreciate your input, and I’m not saying there’s anything necessarily wrong with Buteyko method breathing, but I think we should be careful with which habits we cultivate around breathing.
Just found your channel and I’ve been chronologically going thru all ur videos since the first upload. The information has been so enlightening and I can already feel the difference implementing it into my life. Thank you
Hi man! Really a fan of your channel, i have seen the 4 principal playlists (torso, legs, arms, neck and head) I was mewing until i found your channel, it was really helpful for me. I have a question, how much time did it take to you to improve your face appearance? I think that it's a question that you dont like to respond because its more about quality and consciusness rather than time. But i ask this because i am 23 years old, i have been 1 year and a half mewing and i realised that it was a waste of time and while i have in mind keep studying your videos i would like to have a time expectation (approximately)
It depends on how consistent you are with using the directions in your day to day life, and also on what you’re starting point is. I had braces for around 5 years as an adolescent and was in a rather sorry state when I found this stuff. It took me about around 1-2 years to see major improvement, and I would still say there is improvement to be gained. That’s another thing to consider. Most people’s posture will get worse every year as they age and their face will significantly droop. If you have a system for combating that, then you can continue to improve your posture and face continuously for the rest of your life and not have the associated problems as you age. You’re still relatively quite young, so you can possibly make improvement faster. But I also took a lesson every week as part of my training process. If you’re not taking lessons, you will need to be very diligent on your end and need to be using visual feedback. When I teach through these videos, I can’t see what you or anyone is doing or how you're interpreting what I say. I don’t know if you’re correctly orchestrating the movements or not. So you have to be the one verifying that. If not, you might feel like you’ve made a lot of progress, but find that you really haven’t been doing what you thought you were doing.
Sorry I watched this series but I am still confused. I’ve tried to change my posture but my left shoulder still hangs down lower than the right. Not sure what to do
INCREDIBLE. BRAVO. Correcting my posture according to this IMMEDIATELY feels right, my whole body confirms it. The S curve in my spine straightens out and there's a healthy consistent pressure on my maxilla and face in general, proving how truly recessed my maxilla is. The pictures of generic "good posture" all look completely unnatural and wrong and standing like this feels ridiculous and wrong, too. Really awesome stuff, thank you
@@goggle921 Don't you think you should sleep on your right side though? Since the heart is on the left side of you body, I think it's better if you leep on the right side to equalize everything. Also it feels more Natural sleeping on your sides as I can't imagine our ancestors sleeping on their back
Dear creator, thank you for your video I would like to ask you, what are your thoughts about lack of breastfeeding as an infant effect on underdeveloped maxilla? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050168420911027 writingbros.com/essay-examples/the-effects-of-breastfeeding-and-bottle-feeding-on-the-process-of-jaws-development/ www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9443554/
Hello again I feel like I'm bugging you with all my questions but I'm curious to know if lengthening the legs as you advise + proper walking as you demonstrate will straighten my curved legs that I have will stay or improve over time. are curved legs reversible?
Yes, curved legs are essentially bent legs. The legs are bent by the habitual movements that are applied to them. If you change your movements, the legs will extend and will no longer be bent. It will take time; the stronger and older the habit, the more difficult it is to overcome, but it can certainly done.
This video is the one that goes the most into the anatomical specifics, a few of which are probably unneeded. However, part of the point of the video is to show that you can make sense of the point of this dense scientific language. Did you watch the follow up video (the next one in this series) that goes over the same topic in a bit more straightforward manner? You can also try asking questions if something is unclear.
Essentially every image is portraying poor posture. I reorient the images based around either the skull, ribcage, or pelvis. This makes that one part of the body correctly oriented, which makes it easier to see how the other parts are misoriented.
Hey man, you've popped up in my recommended and I've watched a few of your videos and they're awesome. I just wanted to ask if you cover the topic of scoliosis and if not do you by chance know any resources on that topic that are on par with yours. Thanks
If you’re talking about just run of the mill scoliosis as in a twist in the spine, then everything I talk about is relevant to correcting the issue. When the torso is shortened, the ribcage and pelvis both become twisted. This of course twists the spine as well. The way to untwist the spine is to lengthen and widen the torso appropriately. And once the fascia is functioning, it will help prevent you from falling back into a habitual twist.
i didint understand the corrective exercise .. in your vidoes you talking about the problems more than taking about the solution . with respect to your effort .. ifound them useless
Pls continue this series this topic is so interesting and difficult I must admit. Also, I have been doing your exercises for over a month and I'm seeing great results, Thank you! I have a question to clarify: Do we need to raise the front leg on the phalange simultaneously as we move our back leg forward while walking?
I will certainly continue the series eventually. You don’t want to go on the phalanges, you want to go up on the forefoot (around the heads of the metatarsals). And yes, going up on the front foot provides the clearance you need for the back foot to swing forward without needing to lift it.
Alexander's feet positioning is functional to teaching, it is the most effective for lowering into a monkey to put the hands on a pupil. As he would himself state, there's no thing such a 'correct position' nor 'posture'. We are designed to move, and Alexander work is allowing us to seek for freedom in movement. Instruction for teaching or for sitting and standing should not be interpreted as ''the way' to do everything. Knees forward and away is functional for sitting. Try to sit with narrow knees. You will have tons of tension in the hips. Alexander is not providing a fixed idea to move around and about, nor should we look for it.
I understand your perspective, but I think you might want to examine some of the fixed ideas you appear to have on the subject. You say sitting with narrow knees will produce tension in the hips. I assume that when you say narrow knees, you would include knees that point straight ahead, and that you subscribe to the common AT practice nowadays of widening the knees to sit. However, why is “tension” bad in your view? Isn’t due tension absolutely necessary? If your feeling sense was used to not feeling such tension, wouldn’t due tension feel “tense”? Should the feeling even be guiding us? Shouldn't we be reasoning and not feeling our way through the matter? If we seek freedom in movement, then shouldn’t we be able to sit with the outsides of the feet pointing straight head and the knees pointing straight ahead? Might the tense feeling one experiences when they try this be an indication of a lack of freedom? Because I do sit with my knees pointing straight ahead, and I can also widen them if the situation demands that I do so. I would argue that feeling as if you must point the feet out to go into monkey is an indication of a habitual narrowing at the backs of the legs and a lack of abduction in the legs. I also must say I’m not particularly impressed with how most AT teachers go into monkey nowadays, as you will often see them retracting their upper torso and head rather significantly. If you compare how most teacher today go into monkey with how Alexander and his early students went into monkey, the difference is quite glaring.
I mean exactly what you say when you state that you can widen the knees when required. That is what Alexander is pointing out. Most of the bad monkeys you see around are due to people opening the feet, but not letting the knees go away from each other while lowering in space. They put themselves in a position, but they do not let go of the tension in the hips and knees. The legs move according to a double spiral arrangement of the muscles, when going down one spiral works by opening out, widening the knees happens momentarily (think of going in a squat) while coming back up the opposite spiral works (inner thighs, etc)and you get the legs to straighten and the knees going back in (hence the feet). All joints should stay movable all the time, transitioning to one movement to the next. My “preconceived ideas” come from 4 years of training as AT teacher + 15 years of practice, teaching about 300 hrs p/y.
@@kathleendelaney5846 I still don’t understand why you’re asserting that tension in the hips or knees is inherently an issue. Fascia and connective tissue needs to be taut to function. Even muscles function better when they have an underlying tension from being lengthened as opposed to shortened. I would say most people are greatly lacking in due tension, even though they may have a few muscles that are overworking and tense. If you lack that tension, you will not be capable of lowering your torso without retracting your head and, in most cases, bending the lower back. Those are, to me, indications that the monkey gesture is failing, as you are essentially shortening and narrowing the back when you do that. I almost always go into monkey with my feet pointed straight ahead at the outsides and with my ankles, knees, and hips all in line with each other. This allows me to have the freedom in the joints that you mention, to stop the monkey at any point while lowering, and even to lift off the chair immediately without needing to heave myself forward. Whereas, if you closely observe how many AT teachers sit, they are either falling down to the chair, or they are dramatically lowering their ribcage (leaning sometimes 60+ degrees) in order to sit softly. Most cannot stand up without using momentum to hurl themselves forward (which results in the lower ribs and abdomen going forward and the head retracting). I don’t really understand what your conception of the double spiral of the legs means. Why would you want part of your leg to be inactive as you go down and the opposite spiral of muscles to be inactive as you stand up? How do you even know that that’s what’s happening with the muscles? Is it based on the feeling? I’ve studied in the current version of the Alexander Technique as well, and as I said, I find the way that monkey is typically performed and taught frequently results in the very faults that Alexander detailed in his books over and over: retraction of the head, hollowing of the back, protrusion of the abdomen. Jeando Masero (who trained in AT and was a training program teacher) has catalogued numerous images taken from AT teachers themselves and compared them with images of Alexander and his early students. The differences specifically in the retraction of the head, the hollowing of the lower back, and the protrusion of the abdomen while in monkey and also in standing are glaring. So while I respect that you are well-versed in the Alexander Technique, I’m quite skeptical of how AT is being taught nowadays. An idea like tension being bad is, in my opinion, quite contrary to what Alexander believed, and yet that idea is very popular in the AT world. So while I’m unclear on why you’ve placed “preconceived ideas” in quotes in your comment (I never said that), I do think that many of the ideas that are popular in the AT world today are completely backwards, and unfortunately there’s been a huge shift towards a focus on the feeling sense, even though Alexander warned that we must use our reasoning capabilities and not rely on our faulty sensory perception.
@@delsartealexandermasoeroyo9147 I understand your point and I’m sorry if I cannot explain properly. I agree about the fact that people are most of the time not making use of their leg muscles. But we always need to work out of primary control, taking care of the head, neck and back. Thinking about placing the legs somewhere means end-gaining. This way we go into feelings: what feels “right”. The trap is there waiting for us. We find something and we feel good about it. We think we found truth. We don’t unfortunately. With the word tension we refer to fixation, rigidity and lack of elasticity. We do tense muscles for example to lift weights, using flexors and substantially bending one isolated joint. When we move our own body, it’s a whole different story. Postural Reflexes take over and we actually need very little tension. The double spiral arrangement of the muscles in the legs (and in the whole body) is activated as general pattern. We move as a coordinated whole, and by following this principle than muscles and joints fall in place. We really need not to interfere with the reflexes, that’s all. And it’s a process, it takes time, it’s not about following the instructions. Concerning the double spiral arrangement, you can look into Dart’s procedures.
When lifting the head forward and up does this tought the fascia because I can feel almost all the way down to my lower traps that its sore or working. Also does lifting the head forward and up does it automatically cause the shoulders to unround? Thanks.
You don’t want to just lift your head forward and up. You want to lift the whole ribcage, and nearly everyone will need to lift the back of the ribcage more than the front. If you also prevent the back of the pelvis from tilting forward, you will stretch the thoracolumbar fascia. I don’t agree with the concept of rounded shoulders, the real issue to prevent the shoulders from coming back, up, and in. I would not say that correcting the torso and head will automatically fix the shoulders. This is because you have muscles that attach from the upper arm into the upper back and neck. Many people will find that when they try to lift their ribcage, they lift their shoulders as well. And if they try to move their shoulders down, it pulls their ribcage down. This is because those muscles are not used to being lengthened, so when you pull in one direction, everything goes in that direction. The goal is coordinate the multiple movements together. That is what will stretch the muscles and fascia in this area. That’s why you need visual feedback to make sure you’re not just lifting your shoulders every time you lift your ribcage. You need to learns to control your shoulders and torso separately and move them in opposite directions. That is what will create lengthening.
In this video, we examine two major stumbling blocks in correcting your posture. Firstly, how do you get around your habitual response and reason out your gestures rather than reacting by shortening and narrowing. And secondly, how do you actually verify that you're not just falling back into your habit? Some of the images used in the video were made by Jeando Masoero. I offer lessons in the Initial Alexander Technique, which are conducted one-on-one with a teacher over Zoom. They are designed to help you gain conscious control over how you move your body. Most people have no idea what they’re doing with their body, and as they misuse their body, they end up with discomfort, pain, and other issues that they may not even realize are caused by what they’re doing to themselves. But how do you figure out what you’re doing wrong? And how do you change what you're doing and overcome lifelong habits? In an Initial Alexander Technique lesson, you will record yourself through Zoom, so you will be able to see and understand what you are doing when you stand, sit, walk, and perform other simple gestures. With the assistance of your teacher, you will come to understand how you are misusing the mechanisms of your body, and you will gain the ability to choose to use yourself in a more sensible way. You can learn how to use your body without pain. You can break free from long held habits. All you need is a system that works. For more information or to book a lesson, please visit my website: mechanicsofpoise.com/ You can contact me at: DelsarteAlexanderMasoeroYou@protonmail.com "The phrase ‘means-whereby’ will be used throughout this book to indicate the reasoned means to the gaining of an end. These means included the inhibition of the habitual use of the mechanisms of the organism, and the conscious projection of new directions necessary to the performance of the different acts involved in a new and more satisfactory use of these mechanisms." F.M. Alexander
Wholebodybreathing says back of the tongue and soft palate should be vacuumed but they should go slightly down when inhaling and still be vacuumed to each other
In my view that's a bad idea. The tongue goes to the palate when you swallow. When you swallow, you close your airway and open your esophagus. So you don't want to be in a swallowing mode with your tongue and larynx lifted while breathing.
