Adam Cole
(Originally published in Natural Awakenings Magazine, January 2002)
As a FeldenkraisÒ Teacher, I am often in a position to help athletes improve their performance in their particular sport. I myself am neither particularly athletic, nor an expert on sports. Yet I am able to help athletes improve their performance in ways that they never thought were possible. How can I do this?
The world is full of people who can tell you how to do what they do. If you play golf, you can learn how to swing your club like almost anyone you admire, through videos, books, and professional instruction. The same is true for tennis, baseball, bowling, and so forth. Experts in every field have made a wealth of material available for us to peruse, each claiming that they have the true way to become a master at the sport.
This wealth of resources is a boon. But it has an unexpected cost. With so many different approaches to something as specific as a golf-swing, we are losing sight of the common features of all these approaches, and even more fundamentally, the reason why playing a sport is worthwhile.
If
we look at all sports, we find they share common elements. The most common element is so obvious
that it seems pointless to remark upon it.
But I will, just because sometimes stating the obvious can lead to great
insights. All sports involve human
movement.
Obvious, right? Ho-hum. Next, please. Where’s the sports section in this magazine?
But if we begin with this obvious statement, and we take it a step deeper, we start to touch on something far more important: The movements we make in every sport can be related to movements that we use in our daily lives. That’s more interesting, because it means that when we improve our ability to play sports, we may be improving our ability to function well in the world. Conversely, when we improve the way we move in our ordinary lives, we may be able to improve our performance in sports.
Whoa! What did he say? What I said was, movement is movement, no matter what the use of the movement may be. When we turn in our car to look behind us, we are doing something very similar to beginning the swing of our golf-club. In this case, the common movement is twisting, and how well we can turn in our car and how well we can swing our golf-club has to do with the same ability to twist the spine evenly along its length without hampering it in our ribs, shoulders and pelvis.
When I look at athletes, I don’t look at them as people who have come to me to improve their golf-swing. I look at them as people who want to twist better. This makes it possible for me to show them something about the way they move when they twist. By moving them slowly through several twisting motions, with greater or lesser constraints on their hips and head, I can bring their awareness to the places in their bodies where they are hampering the twist, or cheating it. Once they become aware of their own pattern of twisting, they are often able to let go of these parasitic movements and make a much nicer and more useful twist in their bodies. Their range of vision behind them is improved, they are able to stand up straighter because they are no longer shortening their spine with unnecessary muscular activity, and they are able to make a smooth, elegant movement that takes full advantage of the human body’s design.
When the golf player steps up to the tee, he makes his backswing and feels a much better twisting movement is possible than before. He swings his club, and the swing is smooth, unhampered by any unnecessary movements. The arc of the club is perfect, and as such, the speed of the head of the club is greater than it was before. The club hits the ball at a greater speed, and guess what? The ball goes farther. The golf player has improved his swing by thinking only about twisting, and not about golf!
This approach works equally well in all sports, because twisting, and for that matter, folding, rolling, and extending, are present in all sports. By taking a look at an athlete as a whole person and seeing how that athlete functions in a general way, apart from their sport, we are able to discover ways in which that movement may be improved upon. The potential for improvement is endless, and the process of learning to pay attention to oneself instead of the golf-pro on the television screen has benefits that will continue to pay off for as long as you use your body!
Adam Cole publishes a free monthly newsletter about Feldenkrais on www.feldenkraisinfo.com. During his training, Adam wrote a novel entitled The Myth of Magic, about a school of magicians who are fighting for their survival in a world that does not understand them. Visit www.xlibris.com/AdamCole.htm to read an excerpt from this Feldenkrais-influenced book. To learn more about Adam, hear his CD, read his poetry, and much more, visit www.acole.net.
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