Today, Norm Goldman, Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com is pleased to have as our guest, Roy Palmer, author of Zone Mind, Zone Body: How to break through to new levels of fitness and performance-by doing less!

Norm:
Good day Roy and thanks for participating in our interview.

Roy, please tell our readers something about yourself and how you became interested in The Alexander Technique and perhaps give us a brief explanation of what is this technique?

Roy:
Since a very early age I played sport and as I grew older I came to love the competitive side as well as the challenges sport offers. However, in my early twenties I began to experience back pain and when conventional treatment only achieved limited results I came across The Alexander Technique. I soon became fascinated with this subtle technique that brought almost instant relief to a problem I had had for years. Not only did it help my back but it also led to huge improvements in my sports of karate, running and cricket.

Briefly, The Alexander Technique is a re-education system that makes you recognise where you are making life harder than it needs to be. For me it was mainly due to how badly I moved, although until my teacher brought it to my attention I was completely oblivious of my movement. She got me to repeat some very simple movements and then made a few slight adjustments to my neck, shoulders and back and then asked me to perform them again. To say it was a life-changing moment is not to overstate the experience. I was amazed at how much easier it was. Of course it takes time to learn how to do this for yourself but it is possible with practice.

Needless to say I was hooked and decided to quit my job and enroll on a training course and three years later I qualified as a teacher. That was ten years ago and since then I have taught people from all backgrounds to help with a wide range of problems. My own special area of interest is sport and it’s my ambition to make this remarkable technique as widely known in the sports world as it is in the performing arts.

Norm:
What motivated you to write Zone Mind, Zone Body: How to break through to new levels of fitness and performance-by doing less?

Roy:
I had written a book five years earlier called. ‘The Performance Paradox: Challenging the conventional methods to sports training and exercise’ but I was not really happy with the end result – and it took over two years to write! It was as the title suggests a bit of a rant against what I saw (and still do) as poorly thought out exercise methods that cause more harm than good. It was quite difficult to read so I never felt I had put my point across.

I had continued to write for my website and started to find the process got easier with practice and so began to contemplate writing another book. In 2004 I received a telephone call out of the blue from Greg Chappell (ex-Australian cricket captain and current coach of India). He had read some of my articles on the Internet and was in London for a few days and wanted to meet up. As a child I had sat and watched Greg play for Australia against England and here he was on the phone wanting to meet up! I gave him a practical demonstration of The Alexander Technique and we spent a few hours discussing our theories on training and fitness. His enthusiasm was enough for me to get back in front of the keyboard and start on the project.

I specifically choose to write about ‘The Zone’ – the almost mystical state sports people experience when performing at their peak – as it had always fascinated me why some days I felt in The Zone whilst the next I could be absolutely useless. One other motivating factor was the continuous stream of new fitness books that offer nothing new but keep repeating the same old advice that I believe has no scientific basis behind it.

Norm:
What does the Alexander method refer to when it states, "Let the neck be free?"

Roy:
This is a vital part of The Alexander Technique. F.M. Alexander, its founder, discovered that most adults prepare for movement by first stiffening their necks. Try it for yourself. Try to get out of a chair without pulling back your head, lifting your shoulders or pushing with the lower back. I must have taught over one thousand adults and have yet to find one that doesn’t do this.

So why should it matter? Well the most sensitive muscles we have in our body are at the base of the skull and attach to the top of the spine. These muscles feed information about our position to the nervous system that along with signals from our inner ear, eyes, joints and other muscles help us to balance and coordinate movement. If we tighten our necks we can feed ‘false’ information into the system. It’s a sort of brake for the body. If you can release the neck muscles you take the brake off – this explains the sensations I experienced in my early lessons.

Alexander uses the word ‘let’ because he found that you cannot ‘make’ your neck free because any attempt to ‘do’ something results in your muscles responding to that thought with the end result that your neck gets tighter. So the only way we can prevent putting the brake on is to ‘let’ it be free and stop the thoughts that will lead to the signals telling your neck muscles to tighten.

Alexander had a wonderful saying that goes ‘your muscles will do exactly what you are telling them to do – but do you know what you are telling them to do’. I know I certainly didn’t and I have found the majority of people I have taught don’t. This even applies to athletes who compete as quite a high level. This is a very subtle technique but it can have a huge impact on performance – and that’s not just in sport.