From the Spring 2005 Schedule

Prevention of Injury

One of my students came up to me after class the other evening and asked, “Is Feldenkrais good for the prevention of injuries?”

“Sure,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”

“Well, my daughter is 15 and she plays soccer competitively. They have fun, but they also take it seriously. She is starting to get some recurrent pains and a couple of her friends are really hurting. I was just wondering if it would do them good to take Feldenkrais.”

In responding to my student, and also thinking about it afterward, two things became clearer to me. The first is that in sports, the focus is nearly all outward. You are supposed to score-the-goal, or complete-the-pass, or run-the-fastest. Everybody cheers when you achieve one of these good things, but rarely does any one ask you to notice how you feel while doing any of the above. This inattention to your inner state is a set-up for, at some point, doing more than you can safely do.

A second aspect of sports is that whatever attention is paid to inner experience has mostly to do with LARGE magnitude of sensation. I SLAMMED that ball. It was FANTASTIC to win. It was AGONY to lose. Subtler sensations are usually not recognized.

But, usually, injury begins with subtle sensations. Every now and then an injury occurs because of something completely unexpected. Once when I was working as a Feldenkrais Practitioner in a Physical Therapy clinic, a man came in because he had intense neck pain and headaches. The reason for this was that a flower pot had fallen on his head. This was not an injury with a prolonged history! But most injuries are not of this kind. Most injuries are problems that start small, like the acorn, and gradually grow into knotty, multi-branched problems.

How is it that Feldenkrais helps to prevent injuries? We help by training you to 1) focus on your inner experience while moving and 2) to discern differences in sensation at low levels of stimulus. In this way, athletic achievement becomes an integrated action of a whole person: you look good on the outside, and you feel good on the inside.