DW Dance

THE EXERCISES
Exercise 1:
Begin by sitting on an office chair or dining chair (not your favourite armchair). Imagine a string attached to the crown of your head and going up to the ceiling. (The crown is not the top of your head – it is farther back.)

A friendly puppeteer is about to pull on the string, to draw you gently upwards, crown first. As the puppeteer pulls, your neck begins to lengthen.
This will make you aware of the muscles at the back of your neck. Think of these muscles relaxing. As the neck muscles release and lengthen, the back of your neck can’t help but move towards the back of your collar. As your crown is drawn upwards, your chin drops and your forehead rolls slightly forward and up.

By imagining a puppeteer doing the work, you are not stiffening or forcing your neck into a new position but allowing it to happen naturally. The less you tighten the back of your neck, the longer it becomes; muscles contract as you tighten them and lengthen when they relax.

As your neck muscles relax and lengthen, your head, neck and back realign
themselves and you regain your natural poise.

Taken from : The Busy Body - Stress Free Posture

REORGANISE YOUR LIFE
Begin by organising the filing cabinet inside your head. Dispose of outdated notions of posture. Posture which requires strenuous effort (chin out, chest up) can go straight in the bin. Instead, start working with the idea that to achieve poise, balance and elegance of movement, you can do less work by thinking in a new way about your body. The exercises, thoughtfully performed, will help you recognise when you are making too much effort.

Thinking organises your body to do less, not more.

IS WORK A PAIN IN THE NECK?
THE PROBLEM
Do you suffer from a stiff neck or tension headaches – for example, when sitting at a desk or keyboard?

You’re probably tensing your neck and pulling your head back, without realising it. If your neck is tight, your chin juts forward and you’re compressing your spine. You’re probably so used to this posture that it feels completely normal. Sitting up straight is the usual reaction but this is not    a good way to go about it and is more effort; you need to attend to the way you balance your head on your neck.

Taken from : The Busy Body - Stress Free Posture

THE PRINCIPLE
Stopping and thinking are twin activities which should be complementary.

Stopping – putting a pause in between resolving to make an action and then performing it – allows for thinking time. You can then act in the newly organised, unfamiliar way. You will be giving yourself more options and be more in control. This means that you are potentially more in control of your tension and the internal factors contributing to it.

As you work your way through this book, you will find that you are being encouraged to pause (inhibit your reflexes), think about what you are about to do and direct your body to go about the action in the new way (sometimes using images as a tool to help you).

In this way, you will find that you do not have to be a slave to damaging postural habits. You can learn to observe, think about what you are doing and reorganise the way you are about to do it.

By making your mind work harder, your body will have an easier time.

Taken from : The Busy Body - Stress Free Posture

Make a point of trying a few actions with your non-dominant side, for example: which arm goes into the jacket first? Same hand on the computer mouse? Telephone always on the same side? Trousers on with the same leg first? You have to think it through to reorganise these activities to favour your non-dominant side. This will make you more sensitive to body balance.

Exercise 2:
For this you need a small, unbreakable object such as a ball of paper or a plastic cup. Standing or sitting, prepare to throw the object from one hand to
the other. Extend the catching hand out in front of you. Usually you would move this hand to catch the object but in this exercise you choose not to – you let it remain still.

With your throwing hand, throw the object into your catching hand without moving the latter. The object may fall but never mind. If it lands in your hand, clasp it, but if it misses, let it go. Under no circumstances are you to move your catching hand to intercept the object. The purpose of this exercise is to test your ability to resist the impulse to move.

Try this a few times with both your dominant and non-dominant hand doing the throwing. As with the previous exercise you will find you have to engage your brain to actively inhibit the catching reflex.

Taken from : The Busy Body - Stress Free Posture

REORGANISE YOUR LIFE
Give yourself time to observe these energywasting habits. Do a personal tension audit: when you make a move, perform an action or respond to a request, stop, relax, observe what you’re about to do and break the habit of tension.

When you’re busy at work, it is easy to forget about your body unless it becomes stiff or painful. But you don’t have to ignore your body awareness
in order to concentrate on something else. To begin with, you may need to take time out to observe what you are doing. As you become more practised, you will be more aware of how you are moving, sitting or standing whilst engaged in everyday activities. It is a skill which can be learned – a slightly different mode of thinking with continuing benefits.

CHAPTER 2
FIRST STOP AND THINK THE PROBLEM
You want to stop being tense but you don’t know how. People tell you to relax but no matter how you try, somehow it eludes you. So how do you do it?

THE EXERCISES                                                                                        Exercise 1:You can do this sitting or standing. Cross your arms. Now cross them the other way. Not so easy is it? Notice how much you had to reorganise your approach and think through the movement before crossing your arms in the unaccustomed way.

Taken from : The Busy Body - Stress Free Postture

PRINCIPLE
Tension – what is it and why do our muscles grow tense?

We become tense at work for a whole variety of reasons which can be categorised into two groups – psychological and physical (mechanical).

Some psychological factors would include: not enough personal space on the tube, not enough office space, the urge to leave the meeting NOW and not being able to, the primitive urge to have a punch-up with someone at the meeting when politeness and promotion prospects prohibit us.

Physical factors would include: chairs sloping the wrong way (see Chapter 5), unsatisfactory work stations, cramped working conditions and so on.

When tense, the posture we adopt is the startle response. That is, whatever the stimulus, we respond in the same way: we tighten our necks, pull our heads back and shorten the whole length of our spines. We have entered ‘flight or fight’ mode. We make these unnecessary and damaging movements whenever we make an action – however minor. We’ve learnt the habit – through repetition in formative years – of gearing ourselves up, ready for action, instead of going smoothly into that action.

When we’re psychologically  tense, our muscles are tense. One way to help cope with the psychological pressure is to begin to deal with the muscular tension. For example, unclench that jaw. If your jaw is tight, the rest of your body cannotbe relaxed – other  muscles will tighten as well; it is a cumulative effect.

Taken from : The Busy Body - Stress Free Postture

THE EXERCISES
Exercise 1:
To begin with, here’s a really easy demonstration of muscle tension and how to release it. (This is also a good exercise in observation.)

Hold your hand (either one will do) in front of you at face level, palm side-on, forearm vertical. Your wrist needs to be visible for this exercise.

Keeping your hand open, tighten your wrist muscles. You will feel a pull towards your elbow. Notice that this measurably shortens the distance between the tips of your fingers and your elbow, and arches your hand.

Now release the muscle tension. Your hand is still supported in an upright position, but you are doing much less work and the distance between your fingertips and elbow is much longer. You’ve released tension to allow your hand and forearm to lengthen upwards.

This is a precise analogy of everything postural we will learn during the course of this book.

Exercise 2:
Sitting at a table with a cup in front of you, place one hand on your bicep and with your other hand, pick up the cup. How much effort do you need?

If you feel muscles pulling from the elbow to the shoulder, you are doing too much. You have a nice little muscle in your forearm which is more than adequate for the task. Try it again, minimising the effort all the time. Hinge, don’t heave.

Taken from : The Busy Body - Stress Free Postture

REORGANISE YOUR LIFE
Practical tips and hints on how to modify your lifestyle and environment to help maintain the new you. Be a rugged individualist; look after yourself in a practical, organised way and get back in control of your body.

… AND FINALLY
The Busy Body is aimed at working on yourself in the workplace but not exclusively so. If it is really not feasible to do a particular exercise in your everyday environment, try it as soon as you get I home. (You will, in any case, want to continue the process at home and out of normal work hours.) Although you can treat the exercises individually, the effect of the book is cumulative. Any of the exercises will be a useful re-education of your body, performed wherever, whenever you can. The more you do, the more you get
out of it. It’s not just about work, it’s not just about home – it’s about life.

CHAPTER 1                                                                                              ANYONE FOR TENSION? THE PROBLEM
Are you doing too much? Most of us are tense to a degree – you might be
breathless, have a bad back, headache, digestion problems or just feel more tired than you think you should be. You’re doing too much.

It’s nothing to do with a heartless boss or unsympathetic co-workers, it’s you! You can be lying on the beach and still be doing too much. It’s all down to the habits you’ve learned since you were a child.

Taken from : The Busy Body - Stress Free Postture

THE PRINCIPLE
In this section we explain more about why and how you might have acquired a particular problem and the relevance of the exercises. It puts the work you are doing into a useful context. You will find it helpful to read these sections along with a glance at the Body Map.

THE POSTURE POST-IT
The chapter in a nutshell – thoughts you repeat to yourself to direct your body into its easier, natural posture. They act as antidotes to bad postural habits and reinforce the new you.

They work in a similar way to affirmations. They help to change the unhelpful script most of us have running around our heads most of the time (for example substituting the positive ‘I can do this’ for the negative ‘I can’t do that’). Repetition is the key factor to affirmations; the positive thought consciously replaces the negative until a new way of thinking is formed.

Thoughts work on our body in a similar, very potent way. The Post-its help remind you of useful thoughts on posture. We offer some suggestions 13 for these but feel free to add your own – making up your own will help you think about the work you are doing on yourself. But keep them positive – ‘do’ is more useful than ‘don’t’ and is less likely to introduce the wrong idea. For instance, if we say: ‘Don’t think of an elephant!’, what is the first thing you think of? Exactly.

Once you have your thoughts, distribute them about your desk, computer screen, anywhere you will see and be reminded of them.

Taken from : The Busy Body - Stress Free Postture

These are quite unlike conventional keep-fit exercises. They are habit-breakers. They require mental rather than physical effort. They are designed to examine and remedy the tense and over-effortful way in which you have been making everyday actions, and to encourage your body to revert to its natural, tension-free way of doing things. Take your time over each exercise – if you do it too quickly, your muscles will take over and repeat the old, habitual way of doing things.

We use words and images which help you make less effort. For example we say let your elbows drop to your sides, allow your shoulders to widen, think of a string taking the crown of your head upwards. All these phrases help you to naturally adopt these ideas, which is the very opposite of forcing the body into a good posture.

When you attempt the exercises, do so with a friendly and interested attitude. The quality of your attention is a key factor in the effectiveness of each exercise. If you perform them quickly in a let’sget- this-done sort of way, your body will miss the point. Staying with the process can be difficult at first. If you find that your mind is elsewhere, find another time when you are in a more receptive mood. Work on these exercises when you feel you can give them your full attention and then you will be making real changes.

Remember that just as you acquired damaging postural habits by repeating the same thing over and over again, so you need to unlearn the habits by repeating the exercises. Like skilled craftsmen or musicians you never stop practising. Continue to work on yourself.

Taken From : The Busy Body