Primary Control - Part II

Did you ever play with a wooden toy train when you were little?

The kind that kids like to pull along the floor – not on tracks, just free to go anywhere. You pull from the front, don’t you? Because if you pushed it from behind, it would scrunch up and become hard to move.

The front car leads, and the rest follows – that’s Alexander’s Primary Control. An easy concept to grasp. Expressing it more rigorously:

Head movements govern vertebral co-ordination.

This means that your head/spinal orientation influences how everything is able to move below it: spine, arms and legs. That’s not such a commonly expressed idea is it? How often do you think about your head location when you are doing Pilates? Or Yoga? Or any exercise at all?

This head/spinal supremacy not exclusive to humans either: this slow-motion video of a cheetah shows how the fastest animal on earth chases its prey. You can see how its head organises: the eyes stay on the prey, while the body as a whole acts to propel it along. The head is your control centre: not just your brain, but your eyes, ears, taste, smell – they are all operating from your head.

Taking the example of the cheetah, here’s a fun little activity you can do at home with a friend or a child that illustrates this primacy of head movements…

Get into a crawling position on all fours, then have someone put their hands around your head – the part where your brain is, not the face. As you start crawling, let the other person turn your head to the left, then the right, and experience how – every time – you have absolutely no choice but to follow in the direction they lead your head. The only way you can move in another direction is by moving your head first.

Try it – it’s fun.

Margot Fonteyn, who partnered with the famous ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, once commented in an interview:

“When I dance, I imagine my legs hanging from the back of my neck.” *

When you do Pilates, are you imagining your legs hanging from your neck?

“The primary control is there for anyone who cares to come along and use it.” — F.M. Alexander, Bedford Physical Training College Lecture (1934)

In PILANDES this concept evolves into “posturally cueing” the head before doing many of the Pilates exercises. At my one-day workshop in London and New York, I will be methodically going through some of the primary exercises of Pilates – Head Float & Head Nods, Roll Down & Mini Swan – to demonstrate the dramatic effect that first posturally cueing your head can make to the exercise. Come along…

NEXT: Primary Control Part III

Stay Tuned.

* Even AI couldn’t find my source: it was a quote told to me in London during my Alexander training in Highgate, back in the late 1970s. I remembered it vividly and have been using it ever since. I could not find the interview from which the quote was taken.

2026 Workshops

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

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

Information and Bookings