Stand up straight

[As some of you know, I had a blog on LiveJournal before I moved here to Blogger. Some of the essays from those days might be worth reprinting, as I mostly have a different group of readers nowadays. Thus, here is one from 2008:]



“Stand up straight.”

Great advice, but how do you do it? Consistently, and not just when someone reminds you to? How do you do it when our culture and educational system conspire to take the excellent posture that most young children have, and turn it into round-shouldered, stooped-over adulthood?

I blame my bad posture on several factors.

-- I am nearsighted, and spent my early years reading intensively with my “nose in the book,” almost literally – without glasses, I have to hold the page about four inches in front of my face to read it. One can either hold the book up, or slump over it on the desk or table. I did the latter, until getting eyeglasses around age ten.

-- I am tall; that means that fixtures such as kitchen counters and work tables are almost always a little too low for comfort. It is easier to slump a little bit and get down to the level of the counter rather than reach a little further; the un-slumped distance to the counter is a bit further than comfortable visual focus, as well. It also means that when one talks with Short People, one feels uncomfortably tall and tends to slump a little closer to their level. I suspect the opposite is equally true, for one more often sees Short People with excellent posture than Tall People.

-- I am lazy and un-physical by nature: a bookworm and music geek, most certainly not an athlete.

-- Finally, I am an Organist. “Organists' Posture” is notorious. At first, it comes partly from slumping back to see if your feet are in the right place. If one plays a three-manual instrument, as I did for many years, the reach up to the top keyboard tends to make one slump into it. Finally, one's feet are not firmly planted; generally, they aren't planted at all. This leads to a variety of compensatory adjustments of the torso, most of them bad.



Some years ago, Mrs. C. got tired of nagging me to Stand Up Straight. She learned that there was a teacher of the Alexander Technique in town, and told me “It's either him or the chiropractor in a few years.”

The teacher was based in Richmond, and travelled around the Commonwealth of Virginia and East Tennessee, teaching lessons in various small towns once a month. That is not an ideal way to learn the Technique, but it was all that was available. I worked with him for several years, and it changed my life. I am sure that long before now, probably before I was fifty, I would have been in chronic back pain, like a great many people of my age.

The Alexander Technique boils down to three things:

Neck free
Head forward and up
Back lengthen and widen

By mentally encouraging your body in these ways, the spinal alignment improves over time in a natural and balanced way. Similar work can (and should) be done with other bodily parts, such as arms and hands, jaw and facial muscles (especially for singers and actors). But “Neck free, Head forward and up, Back lengthen and widen” are the keys.

During an Alexander lesson, the practitioner puts you on a table and does some gentle adjusting, to help the body get the feel of proper alignment. I had the good fortune to have one lesson at my church, where we spent the whole hour with me on the organ bench and he helped me find better ways of approaching the instrument physically. One learns the Alexander lay-down exercise, which is a way of helping the body remember good alignment. While laying on the floor, one goes through the mental process: Neck free, Head forward and up, Back lengthen and widen. It is invaluable.

All in all, my Alexander training was a Good Thing, and I recommend it to others, and not just musicians. I think it can help just about anyone, unless their posture is already so perfect that they don't need it.

But for me, Alexander was insufficient. I had heard mention of Pilates, and took notice when the current RSCM curriculum, “Voice for Life,” recommended it for singers in their teacher's manual. About a year and a half ago [that is, sometime in 2005], I happened on a Pilates book on a clearance table at a bookstore, and bought a copy. Since then, I have attempted to teach myself Pilates from the book, I think with success. Around here, Pilates training is too pricey for me to afford. Also, Pilates has the image of being a “girl” thing, or for men who are “sissy.” Real Men don't do Pilates, or yoga, or Tai Chi, or any such thing. They lift weights, or do martial arts, or compete in triathalons.

I could add that many of the Real Men that I have known are more likely to be sprawled on the couch, swilling Budweiser by the sixpack and playing online computer games. They are likely to be overweight, hypertensive, diabetic, and afflicted with back and joint problems by their mid-fifties. Pilates would do them a world of good.

The ingredient that was missing for me from Alexander, as I learned once I started Pilates, was sufficient strength in the core muscles of the torso to maintain good posture, and to maintain stability in the abdomen and shoulder girdle while doing things like playing the organ. Pilates is a way of developing that, as well as working on flexibility in the lower back and hips, which I badly needed.

On the other hand, Pilates, in my opinion, lacks sufficient awareness of the alignment of the neck and head. “Neck free, Head forward and up” help make it possible to do the Pilates exercises in a healthier way than I think would happen without that awareness. It does for me, at least.

Practitioners of both Pilates and the Alexander Technique sometimes tend to imply that their respective disciplines are complete cure-alls. They are not. But they are, I think, important parts of an all-around regimen of physical fitness, one that includes aerobic work, strength exercises, and stretching, along with good diet and getting enough sleep.

I am a better organist, thanks to Mr. Pilates and Mr. Alexander. I am more aware of my physical alignment as I play, and more in control of how I am playing. I am healthier, too.

Indeed, a word of thanksgiving is in order. At age fifty-something, I am the healthiest and strongest that I have been in my life. This is mostly because the first half of my life was completely wasted in these matters and I was thus starting at a very low level. Nonetheless, my basic fitness and health are good. None of this is my own doing; it is a gift from the One who made us. The time will come when these things are gone; they could disappear in a moment. But so long as we can, we ought to keep the body he has given us in proper order as best we can, and use it to be about our Father's business.

That relates to an aspect of exercise that sometimes troubles me: it seems terribly self-indulgent to spend hours out of the week doing Pilates, or bicycling, or lifting weights (yes, I do a bit of that), or otherwise pampering myself, while there is work to be done. Exercise can, I think, become self-indulgence. It then becomes part of the broad way that leads to death. If you wind too much of yourself up into your body's health and fitness, you will despair when it decays with age or sickness or accident.

Nonetheless, exercise is part of what we ought to do as stewards of what God has provided. In moderation, it is a worthwhile use of our time.

[Thus ended the essay. At the distance of five years, I would add these points:
- Both Pilates and the Alexander Technique remain important to me. Their benefits have continued to grow. They have made me a better singer and (hopefully) choral conductor as well as organist
- Now that my age is more like "almost sixty," I am neither as healthy nor as strong as I was in 2008. But I remain in basically good health, for which I am grateful. And, as I said before, it could all disappear in a moment. "Memento mori," one of our young choristers (age eleven, or thereabouts) wrote on the whiteboard last Wednesday. "I'm learning Latin," she said.]