Are You Feeling Older?

Granted, some days are worse than others.

Feeling older happens to younger ones too. Development is usually complete by your mid-twenties – after that, you have a progressive accumulation of damage and decline to counter over time.

Age is experienced as having less energy and a body that doesn’t respond as quickly, as constantly, or as easily as before. For example: it takes more effort to bend down, cutting your toenails is getting harder. And do you really want to run for the train today?

What can you do?

Well, there’s another option that no one tells you about. Let me explain…

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Muscles make up the largest mass of tissue you have in your body – anywhere from 30–50%. It is also the tissue that gets you around: to cut your toenails, to run for the bus, to bend.

Modern-day methods for countering the effects of age usually focus on diet, exercise, sleep and mental health. But where is Posture in that? Posture lives inside all that muscle tissue. With an understanding of Alexander’s discoveries, you can bring about a physiological transformation in how your muscles are recruited for everyday life, thereby recalibrating many other systems. “Use affects Functioning” is how FM put it.

Therefore, posture has a significant influence on your health. Posture is not exercise. Exercise is more about your cardiovascular and respiratory systems, i.e., getting your heart pumping and getting more precious oxygen into your cells.

Exercise is a healthy thing to do – but it is not addressing Posture.

Posture is the relentless coordination of your muscular system to maintain you in balance as you move. It is dynamic. The idea of Posture as a set of fixed “correct” positions is a Stone Age idea. It’s time for Society to update this archaic idea of Posture…

Posture is run by your Postural Movement System (PMS) – a complex, multi-functional system that is dynamic, responsive, and unconscious.

In PILANDES, you study PMS, but because of its automated unconscious nature, Posture is the one ageing factor other methods do very little about. Why? Because they have no idea how to go about improving Posture. They often just talk about “core” without any real understanding of the complex physiology it involves.

Finding “correct positions” has nothing to do with it. The real problem is this:

How do you influence something that is not consciously open to being influenced?

Alexander found a way to solve this problem. He realised that there are ways to indirectly facilitate this automated postural system, firstly by preventing your many voluntary interferences. However, like any age-countering method, it is a lifelong endeavour.

And there is proof that it works.

Teachers of Alexander’s work are famous for living long and healthy lives.

I looked at the lives of eight renowned teachers who first trained with Alexander. Here are the ages they lived to:

96, 92, 70, 95, 96, 83, 94, 96 * Impressive, isn’t it?

And for people born into their era, life expectancy was broadly around 70 years, not 90. Yet I know personally that all of them were active, with the majority still teaching, right into their last year of life. None of them was infirm or living in a nursing care facility.

There is a lot you can do to prevent ageing, but Posture is not covered anywhere as thoroughly and specifically as you find in PILANDES.

F.M. Alexander was the Master of Posture – although he’d probably turn over in his grave if he read that. However, no one has eclipsed his insights into postural efficiency, nor surpassed the efficacy of his touch communication methodology. As Nikolaas Tinbergen stated in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973:

“This story, of perceptiveness, of intelligence, and of persistence, shown by a man [Alexander] without medical training, is one of the true epics of medical research and practice.” ※

My readers also need to understand that Alexander alone won’t lead you to vibrant older-age health – you need a robust and energetic muscular condition to achieve that, which comes from being active. PILANDES is new-style Alexander: combining sweat and cognition in one dynamic session.

Come along to my workshop in London next month, or New York in October to find out more…

Bring your leggings. In London it’s a smaller space, so book soon to be included.

NEXT: Who Regulates the Breathing Regulator?

Stay tuned.

* These teachers are Marjorie Barstow (1899–1995), Margaret Goldie (1905–1997), Lulie Westfeldt (1895–1965), Walter Carrington (1915–2010), Dilys Carrington (1924–2020), Patrick Macdonald (1908–1991), Peter Scott (1913–2007), and Erika Whittaker (1919–2015).

※ Tinbergen, N. (1973). Ethology and Stress Diseases. Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1973. Nobel Foundation.

2026 Workshops

LONDON:
August 8 – PILANDES
August 23 – Trauma-Informed AT

NEW YORK:
October 24 – PILANDES
October 25 – Trauma-Informed AT

Information and Bookings