You should be able to recover your equilibrium, your balance faster than the opponent and find any fault in his balance and take advantage of that. – Moshe Feldenkrais
Today, I’m going to introduce you to this new skills called Feldenkrais. It may not be new to you, in that case, just practice it along with us, you may find something new from your body that you’d otherwise not.
What is Feldenkrais?
Based on an article by Ed Brucia, Feldenkrais lessons use carefully constructed sequences of unusual movements to focus your awareness on how you organize movement. The lessons are better viewed as mental exercises for the body rather than physical exercises in the usual sense. Improving the quality of your movements is the paramount goal. Pain, effort, and hurrying are all counter-productive, and will reduce or even reverse the benefits of doing the lessons.
So how does this exercise help you at all?
First of all I would like to quote Melinda Glenister, known as a movement specialist, she said that Feldenkrais “is a way to improve the intelligence of the body, increasing flexibility, improving strength, balance, coordination, power, improving the breathing, reducing risk of injury, improving recovery. It also helps the players to monitor and regulate themselves better, their emotional states and the effects of stress.”
Wow! Those are many things and it sounds like Feldenkrais can make you very powerful if you can master it right.
The Right Conditioning
I guess as athletes, many if not all of us will always suffer some form of injury that stems from overtraining or any accident that’s part of our game. Even without overtraining, any form of training that requires any part of our muscles will cause our muscles to tear and form back.
This means that if we are not going to reduce any wear and tear of our physical body, we will have to condition ourselves by being more mindful of our senses and movement in order to speed up recovery and healing. This also means using our mind to control our body is just the thing we need to still give ourselves the added advantage without having to stop training just to avoid further attacks and blows to our mind and body.
Mind-Body Discipline
I’m actually introducing something physiological here as part of the so-called mental movement, because being able to be still or to move just half an inch rather than instinctive strong actions you always do in your games depends on your mind. It’s considered a form of mind-body discipline that benefits you physiologically. You will understand how it works as you follow what I will be saying to you in a minute.
Listen to the episode, try it out yourself and share your comments with us
Show Links:
- A Ten-Minute Introduction to the Magic of Feldenkrais by Ed Brucia
- Feldenkrais for Sport by Melinda Glenister
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