The Alexander Technique and Martial Arts

By Martin Finnegan

How can the Alexander Technique enhance Martial Arts performance?

This was a question that popped into my mind when one of my first Alexander Teachers suggested we work on a Form that I was learning at the time. He admitted right up front that he knew only a little about martial Arts and nothing about the style of Chinese Kung Fu that I studied. But by the end of that lesson I was amazed that although he didn’t know anything about my style or that form, he knew a lot about how to perform it better, more easily and more efficiently. In fact that lesson changed the whole way I approached the form in the first place, making it much more fluid, flexible and expansive. How can the Alexander Technique do this? Because it is based upon conscious movement and provides you with a set of useful tools that are directly applicable to an activity such as Martial Arts.

Practicing Detachment: Alexander Technique and Meditation

By Mike Cross

The fact to be faced is that the human self was robbed of much of its inheritance when the separation implied by the conception of the organism as ‘spirit,’ ‘mind’ and ‘body’ was accepted as a working principle, for it left unbridged the gap between the ‘subconscious’ and the conscious. I venture to assert that if the gap is to be bridged, it will be by means of a knowledge, gained through practical experience, which will enable us to inhibit our instinctive, ‘subconscious’ reaction to a given stimulus, and to hold it inhibited while initiating a conscious direction, guidance, and control of the use of the self that was previously unfamiliar.