Stiffened necks and arms of people of today are outward signs of the imperfect development and lack of coordination of the muscular system of the back and spine.
—FM Alexander

FM’s description of the imperfect development and lack of coordination of the muscular system of the back and spine, a distillation of the ills of modern living, applies to the legs as well as the arms. In my experience of teaching musicians who are new to the Technique, it is far more difficult to get the legs working well because, unlike the arms, they are perceived to be weight-bearing (‘they hold me up’) and therefore accustomed to overdoing. The typical standing posture I encounter is: the pelvis sliding forward and the knees locking, with very little sensory awareness between the pelvic region and the feet.

Let’s look at the use and functioning of the legs. The challenge for teachers of the Alexander Technique is to get the Primary Control working indirectly in movement, their own first and then that of the pupil—to create the conditions whereby the directions are activated so that flow of energy up along the spine is pulsing and renewing itself. This freedom then extends to the limbs—both the arms and legs—which function as levers1, transmitting the power necessary for a given task rather than generating it. Too often the reverse is the case, the limbs overdoing because the back is not active enough, either overly contracted or collapsed. The essential difference between pushing with the legs to get out of a chair versus allowing the back to do its work, lengthening and widening to provide the power to the legs which can then lever our upper body weight advantageously, is at the core of what FM called ‘mechanical advantage’.

Leverage is a useful paradigm to understand the working of the limbs, which are a system of levers in and of themselves (using the arm as an example, in descending order of range of movement capability: the upper arm, forearm, fingers and thumb). As a string player, I studied the principle of leverage in order to understand how larger movements are initiated by the larger levers and smaller ones by the smaller levers, assuring efficiency of movement at the cello. (You sign that expensive cheque using your smallest levers and hail a bus using that large ‘wave’). Playing a four-string chord on the cello requires a larger preparatory gesture than a two-string crossing, but the power for each is always supplied by the back and transmitted by the arm and fingers.

I was fortunate to have been shown one way of identifying this pushing with the legs which is common in beginners and can be present even in long-time students of the Technique, on a subtler level. I use the corner of the door for this purpose.

I ask my pupil to stand against a door corner, with their back lined up along the edge of the corner frame. Then I ask him or her to bend the knees, leaving the back and spine in contact with the door frame. To initiate this bending of the knees, he or she will of course need to direct for the Primary Control, including the knee forward and away from the hip, without tightening the legs. Once lowered, to bring the legs back in space to their original standing position, the pupil requires an exceptional degree of watchfulness and inhibition in order not to push with the legs, but to allow them to be drawn back in space by means of the energy from the back. In new pupils it is almost impossible for them not to overuse the legs. Their habit is too strong; their neck tends to tighten in activity and their back is not yet working properly.

The pushing can be detected in two places: 1) in the kneecap region, and especially behind the knee and 2) in the hip flexors. One can demonstrate that when pushing with the legs, the large muscle in the front top of the leg—the quadriceps—over-contracts, causing the knee to pull inwards and shortening the distance between the hip socket and kneecap. One hand placed gently on the hip flexors and one on the kneecap is often enough to illustrate this contraction and also its opposite—when allowing the back to generate the power to draw the legs backwards in space, the knee is not contracted or pulled in, but remains quiet; the space between the hip socket and the head of the femur remains open. The levers of the leg (femur and shin bones)—with the ankle as fulcrum—behave as they should, transmitting power and not trying to do the work of generating it. Of course, the muscles of the leg are activated but they are not over-active. There should be no pushing with the legs.

The whole approach to the work of the legs can be an exploration of letting, allowing, and gradually observing how the urge to do diminishes with the practice of this quiet work. It’s nothing short of a miracle–a miracle of coordination—as my Taiwanese pupil, 14 years old, put to me one day.

With the experience of the legs in quiet operation comes the state described in the Tao: “Gravity is the root of lightness; stillness the ruler of movement.”

Selma Gokcen c. March 2018

1. In Mechanics: a rigid bar that pivots about one point and that is used to move an object at a second point by a force applied at a third.

In Physics: a lever (from French lever, “to raise”, cf. a levant) is a rigid object that is used with an appropriate fulcrum or pivot point to multiply the mechanical force that can be applied to another object. This is also termed mechanical advantage. Using a screwdriver to open a tin of paint is an example of a force amplifying effectiveness of a simple tool. The theoretical mechanical advantage of a system is the ratio of force that performs the useful work to the force applied, assuming there is no friction in the system.