Postural Cueing II - Why Postural?

“Trying is only emphasising the thing we know already.” – FMA Aphorism #118

When you command yourself to “try harder” by blindly increasing effort – you’re on the wrong path. Postural cueing introduces trusting your PMS to support that effort.

There are two distinct spinal pathways that signal your muscles:

VOLUNTARY PATHWAYS (VMS)

Your Voluntary Movement System (VMS) uses the corticospinal tract as its primary pathway for cueing voluntary movements – when you learn a new Pilates exercise, you are using this pathway to activate muscle groups in various sequences.

Voluntary movements arise from your conscious intentions – you decide to move this way or that. This is how you cue Pilates. Or you might even cue your illusory self-image into muscular activity. A bit like a false smile. You can cue whatever you want.

POSTURAL PATHWAYS (PMS)

The Postural Movement System (PMS) supports your underlying structure through brainstem pathways, arising from subcortical locations in your brain: reticulospinal, vestibulospinal, and tectospinal tracts. These pathways automatically direct muscles to maintain your underlying, ever-present postural tone.

Postural movements arise automatically in response to changing conditions. You want to get out of the way of this system so it can support what 500 million years of evolution designed it to support. It really doesn’t need your help, except to get out of its way. The right thing does itself.

However, postural movements do require you to cooperate, and too often we don’t.

THE WAY CUEING WORKS

Say you are trying to do Leg Pull Back.

When you place your arms behind you to support the full weight of your body, you may feel like you don’t have the strength to do this. You feel a little anxious, so you increase your cueing to the voluntary system:

“Work harder, do more.”

This conscious cueing travels down the corticospinal tract to recruit muscles that aren’t designed to assist your arms to support your full body weight. This work is best left to the PMS, but you fail to realise that and instead try harder by cueing more through VMS. Then you feel more effort, so you think: “Now I am using more power to help me stay here” even though most of the contractions aren’t actually the actions that will support you best!

Or it could be that you have been forcing this for so long now, your arms are already in an overworked condition, so before you even start Leg Pull Back you have conditioned your system to be disadvantaged. Either way – you are doing too much with VMS.

THE CUEING PROBLEM

Today, we confuse the way we use each of our two movement systems – this is what Alexander discovered and what PILANDES brings back into clarity. FM lost his voice because of his miscues. While restoring his voice, FM uncovered a unique area of knowledge about how we move.

WHAT HAPPENS WITH PILANDES?

First, you study how the Postural Movement System (PMS) is designed to give you support by directing movements initially around 5 key Postural Joints. PMS support happens because different areas (head, chest, pelvis, arms & legs) pivot around these 5 Postural Joints in specific unidirectional ways. A fascinating feature of postural movements is their unidirectionality. Alexander named these unidirectional movements “your directions” and framed them this way:

“There is no such thing as a right position, but there is such a thing as a right direction.” – FMA Aphorism #16

It’s simple enough to apply as you become familiar with the “right direction” of your 5 Postural Joints.

Second, you apply this understanding of the 5 Postural Joints to identify whether your “extra effort” is allowing or suppressing your PMS’s ability to effect these unidirectional movements.

Of course, this takes time, and in my PILANDES Mat Course in Japan, this is what we explore.

WHAT HAPPENS WITHOUT PILANDES?

Without knowing about the 5 Postural Joints, your decision to put more effort into Leg Pull Back might cause you, for example, to retract and depress at the Wing Joints (sternoclavicular). The result is that you have cued your arm into a less mechanically advantageous position in relation to the torso. Unless you study PILANDES, you don’t recognise this…

But you feel it!

Leg Pull Back feels extra hard and is very uncomfortable to do. This is usually a sign that you are not letting PMS support you as it is automatically designed to do.

Almost universally, students report that after a PILANDES 5 Postural Joints redirect, their exercise feels much lighter and easier to do. This is because you have ceased to cue voluntary movements that suppress the PMS’s ability to support you.

Alexander discovered these PMS movements – he often referred to a “primary control” being in existence – and empirically showed that these underlying “directions” calibrate other systems – respiration, circulation and digestion, to name just three – and therefore sustain health and well-being in all areas of your life.

The proof of the pudding comes from the experience of posturally cueing your Pilates exercise in a PILANDES way, using knowledge of the 5 Postural Joints. Come along to my one-day workshop in London or New York to learn how posturally cueing your 5 Postural Joints makes moving become so much easier.

It’s in the cueing, not the doing.

NEXT: What is Alexander’s Primary Control?

Stay tuned.

2026 Workshops

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

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

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