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The Strengths and Weaknesses of Pilates’ and Alexander’s Approach to Self-Improvement

© Robert Rickover

When I started taking Pilates instruction, I had been teaching the Alexander Technique for over twenty years. Within a few weeks - and a lot of very strenuous classes and very sore muscles - I could detect a noticeable strengthening of my abdominal muscles and an increase in core strength. A change in my appearance was noticed by friends and family. Over time, however, I found additional benefits very slow in coming and eventually, after almost two years, I stopped taking classes.

Later, I resumed Pilates instruction, this time with an Alexander Technique teacher who was also a certified Pilates instructor. This time, the Pilates exercises were still quite demanding, but were typically repeated only a few times each day. A lot more attention was devoted to my use as I performed the exercises. And my training was always accompanied with gentle reminders to use my Alexander knowledge as I did the exercises. Improvements in my functioning quickly followed.

From my own and others' experience with the Pilates Method and the Alexander Technique, I have come to the conclusion that both processes have great potential for improving our physical and mental well-being. And both, in my view, have limitations that are rarely addressed by their practitioners.

I'll start with the method I know best - the Alexander Technique. It is my belief that the Technique is by far the most powerful method currently available to improve our conscious direction of ourselves. If you want to learn how to use your mental abilities to make immediate and useful changes in how your body functions, the Alexander Technique is the way to go. The Technique has been around for over a century and has a long history of helping people learn how to stand, sit and move with greater ease and efficiency. Countless performers have used it to improve the quality of their performance, and it has a well-deserved reputation for teaching people strategies for alleviating stress-related conditions such as back pain, stiff necks, tight shoulders and the like.

But the Technique does have limitations. First, it quite limited in its ability to alter the exceedingly complex and subtle physical restrictions that lie below the level of consciousness. In my experience, methods like cranio-sacral therapy are an ideal way to get at those kinds of restrictions. Second, and of relevance here, it can also be limited in changing deep-rooted structural imbalances. Because the Technique relies on mental direction rather than exercises, the pace of change tends to be gradual. On the one hand, this is a great strength of the Technique - it never pushes change too fast for the body to handle. But it also means that, in effect, it might take many lifetimes to eliminate large physical distortions.