As a reader of your book Anatomy of the Moving Body, I am curious to know what role the hamstrings play in standing, walking, etc. In your book and other anatomy books, it is stated that the hamstrings are used to bend the knee, but they seem to have larger role in uprightness. When I lean forward from the ankles, it seems that my hamstrings tighten to keep me from falling. Might these muscles have a dual function?

As an Alexander Technique instructor, I find that often the muscles in the front of the leg are relied on excessively, and that lengthening through the back of the leg seems very helpful. However, when I look at anatomy books it appears that there are few muscles in the back of the leg that help with standing. Any thoughts?

Susan

Dear Susan,

Yes, I think the hamstrings do have a dual function. Acting on the knee joint, they flex the leg at the knee. But they appear to have at least two other functions. First, they help to extend and support the trunk at the hip, which means that in this sense they act as extensors of the trunk at the hip. Second, when the leg is extended at the knee, the hamstrings (which cross the back of the knee joint) seem to act synergistically with the gastrocnemius (which also crosses the back of the knee) to extend the leg at the knee. This action is needed at times, as when we are climbing a steep path and need to forcefully extend the leg at the knee, in which case the hamstrings and gastrocnemius aid the quadriceps in extending the leg. As you point out, however, these muscles are usually shortened and overactive, which causes us to brace, stiffen, and hyperextend the legs. So the hamstrings act as flexors of the leg at the knee but also act as extensors of the hip and knee. This is why, in The Body in Motion, I show the muscles on the back of the leg, and not just the quadriceps, as extensors of the leg. And yes,  the hamstrings and the other muscles on the back of the leg are usually overactive and need to release and maintain length in standing and walking.

Hello Dr. Dimon,

I was at the talk in London at the Friends Meeting House, 17th May, you were raising things that have interested me ever since I became aware of the technique. Thanks for coming over A further question that interests me is, what about the study of linguistics in all this? A cat’s paw is completely of the whole cat, because of language, it’s a challenge for us to say that about our human arm. For me the awareness gained by practicing the Alexander Technique seems to counter and resolve some of the problems we have with language and consciousness, which so easily separates things up into compartments or disparate threads, taking us away from the whole of ourselves Also, in our approach to life, again it’s language that, amongst other things, gives us the difficulty of orientating us to ‘ends’ and fixed points, rather than to the ‘means whereby’ we can develop and progress. Alexander saw this ‘end gaining’ habitual thinking as a universal fault in modern humans which could be worked on by his suggested conscious awareness and control Alexandrian ‘Direction’,'inhibition’ and ‘mind wandering’ are all language aspects of our consciousness What are your views in this area? Is there anything I can read about this?

Dear Mark,

Thanks for your interesting questions. You’re quite right that in our use of language, we tend to separate the organism into parts, and as you know, Alexander tried very hard to get away from dualistic language–in fact, he begins three of his books with a discussion of the inseparability of mind and body, so important did he think these issues were.

You asked about where you might be able to read more about this issue. In philosophy, Spinoza addressed this problem, as do some of the pragmatists, who tried to use new language to describe the body/mind in unitary terms. Dewey, of course, rejected mind/body dualism and was a big supporter of Alexander’s concept of mind/body unity and tried to develop new language for describing problems of behavior and awareness–for instance, in his concept of habit in Human Nature and Conduct. Perhaps the most famous work on linguistics and philosophy on this subject is Gilbert Ryle’s book, The Concept of Mind, in which he debunks the notion of mind as a separate entity, and shows how the separation of mind and body occurs as a kind of error in thinking. Recent work in neuroscience tackles the mind/body problem in really interesting ways–in particular, Damasio and Oliver Sacks make fascinating reading on the subject.

Having read a good deal about the mind/body problem, however, I have not found very much that is helpful on this score because this sort of writing is, after all, just theory, and theoretical discussions of mind/body unity do not tend to reflect a very real understanding of mind/body unity. The real problem is that, when it comes to knowledge of ourselves, we are still quite ignorant about what unity really means. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to say a few things about this issue.

Let me say, first of all, that not every problem is psychophysical in nature. I have heard people say that, because mind and body are unified, mental illness can be solved by addressing our use, which is nonsense. Mental illness is really not a psychophysical problem in the sense that we mean. It may be organically based and is in this sense psychophysical–that is, psychochemical; but it isn’t psychophysical in the sense that back tension is psychophysical. So it is rather dogmatic to assert that, if a problem is psychophysical, our work can solve it.

Secondly, it is also useless to say, on philosophical grounds, that everything is psychophysical. Some problems really are physical–like a broken arm; some really are emotional (like mourning the loss of someone you love), and some really are mental–like worrying about paying your mortgage. Not everything is psychophysical, and it is perfectly fine to refer to some problems as physical or mental and serves no good purpose to call everything psychophysical.

But what do we mean when we say something is “psychophysical”? This refers to the fact that when one performs an action or engages in an activity, the process that takes place in the organism is not purely physical or purely mental but involves both elements. If, for instance, I type some words on my computer keyboard, this activity involves both a mental element (seeing the keys, thinking of words, having an idea of what I want to communicate) and a physical component (contracting muscles in my arms and fingers).

Now at a theoretical level, this idea is rather obvious. Most scientists would agree with this statement as a matter of course, since the mind is not some “thing” that operates the body, and the “body” some thing that gets operated by the mind; there is simply a nervous/muscular system that works as a total system, whether we are speaking of physical or mental acts. But understanding what “psychophysical” means in practice–that is another issue entirely. When, for instance, someone’s back hurts and they say that they deal with it by practicing yoga or getting a massage, that person is betraying a lack of understanding of psychophysical unity, since the back problem is related to activity and cannot be adequately addressed by simply treating the muscles or performing exercises. And just about everyone–scientists included–has this attitude. So the first thing that psychophysical unity means is that certain problems that appear to be physical are in fact caused by our own activity, and if we really want to solve the problem, we must learn to stop doing the harmful things we’re doing.

The problem is that, when we suffer from a use-related problem such as tension in the legs or back, we don’t really believe we are causing the problem in our own activities. This is the real meaning of psychophysical unity–that you can’t separate what is apparently a physical problem from what we are doing in activity. This is why Alexander insisted on the need to stop consenting to performing actions the way we have always done them, as perhaps the central and most difficult problem of his work. It isn’t enough to “direct” the leg muscles, to be aware, or to have lots of lessons, if when you return to activity you do the activity as you have always done in. We have to learn to stop what we are doing in the most fundamental sense, which means that we must learn to stop in the most fundamental way, and then learn to bring this into our daily activities.

Alexander’s work, then, is not simply a method for using the body better, and this is the real meaning of the mind/body problem. Because Alexander’s work is so universally seen as a method of body awareness and posture training, we have not really conveyed the real meaning of his discoveries. Underneath the apparent problem of misuse of the body is the more fundamental problem of habitual behavior and how to make it more conscious.

To articulate this problem, I borrowed the term “ideomotor action” from psychology when writing my first book, The Undivided Self. Because of the difficulty of communicating what mind/body unity really means, I made this the central concept of the book because it conveys very clearly the idea that, when we perform an action, the action is part of a total pathway of activity that involves an idea as well as a motor act, and that this total pathway is habitual and unconscious and must be made more conscious. It is not enough to practice a method or to think of our work as a method, since no method can mean anything as long as we fail to recognize the underlying problem that it is intended to address. Understood properly, the study of use constitutes nothing less than a new field of study–the study of the awareness and control of action. And the concept of mind/body unity is at the core of this field and of understanding its significance in education and development.

I hope this helps to answers some of your questions, and I look forward to speaking further with you about this,

Best wishes,

Ted Dimon

Dear Dr. Dimon,

Based on FM Alexander’s discovery that use affects functioning, I would be interested to receive your comments about whether the onset of scoliosis (lateral curvature of the spine), either from birth or at least from early childhood, would cause someone to be more prone to developing an unbalanced ideo-motor action, or whether the scoliosis itself, which is a shortening of the spine, is a result of the imbalance?”

Best wishes.

Stella Weigel

Hi Stella,

Thanks very much for your very interesting question–it is not an easy one to answer, so let me begin by sorting out a couple of very basic issues, and then I will get to your question.

To begin with, for readers who may not be familiar with the term “ideomotor action,” it refers to the pathway of neuromuscular activity in which an idea triggers a motor act. When, for instance, I am sitting at my desk and I hear the doorbell ring, I may think about whether I want to answer the door, but chances are I will react rather unthinkingly because the ring, which associates with the knowledge that someone is at the door, triggers a motor act or series of act, and I find that I am answering the door before I have even deliberated about it. That’s ideomotor action, which is the basic way that we perform actions during the course of our normal everyday lives.

When ideomotor is unbalanced, this means two things: first, that the action is performed with a harmful degree of tension–what Alexander identified as the harmful pattern of misuse that we are so familiar with (pulling the head back, shortening in stature, and so on); second, that the action is triggered too easily because we are too reactive or hyperactive, which we see if, for instance, someone has decided not to answer the door and is so jumpy that he answers the door anyway. Obviously, if ideomotor action is imbalanced in this way, as it is in virtually all adults, then over time our actions are going to adversely affect our health–use affects functioning.

But what causes ideomotor action to become unbalanced to begin with? Unlike animals, we humans perform many complex actions that we are not instinctively equipped for–sitting for long hours in school, typing at a keyboard, writing with a pen. As a result, the system does not work in a reliable way; we engage muscles that are not meant to be engaged, and often exhibit an outright lack of control. I am convinced, from working with and observing children, that this misdirected or unreliable use of the system, or unbalanced ideomotor action, begins very early and precedes malcoordination of the primary control. What I mean by this is that, even in a child who sits beautifully and seems to be quite well-coordinated, the system will be misdirected so that, when the child stands up, he will pull his head back and arch his back, as if his nervous system is simply not organized properly and is sending the wrong signals to the muscles. This seems to suggest that, if there is any tendency toward twisting or scoliosis, the performance of everyday actions will tend to exacerbate the existing condition.

On the other hand, if the muscular system has become imbalanced from other, more physical causes–say, a period of bed rest, an illness–or from emotional factors–then this will create interference with the ideomotor response, which will tend to become more imbalanced. This is also true if, in learning to stand and walk and to perform other actions, the child’s basic coordination is interfered with: in this case, the pattern of ideomotor action will be disturbed by the existing imbalanced in the working of the postural system.

In answer to your question, then, postural imbalances can cause imbalance in the pattern of ideomotor action, and ideomotor action will also certainly tend to exaggerate and interfere with postural function–it can go both ways.

There is more to say on this issue, but I’ll leave it at that for now and hope this has been helpful!

Best wishes,

Ted