Turning on Muscle Tone - Part I

Nature loves binary systems.

Sensory and Motor. Arteries and Veins. Left arm and right arm. Two sets of reciprocal chambers in the heart. Even your brain has a Left Hemisphere and a Right Hemisphere. This organisation continues into the way we manage movement:

Voluntary and Postural movements. (VMS & PMS)

Voluntary movement is just that – you do it. It’s voluntary.

Postural movement is the opposite – you don’t do it. It does itself.

Every time you lift an arm, for example, hundreds of muscles in other places are automatically instructed to fire in order to support the movement happening in your arm. That is how it is designed to work. One is voluntary, the other is an automatic postural response.

Whereas Pilates appeals to voluntary movement, PILANDES is dealing with postural movement. Why do we need to approach both? Isn’t postural movement automatic?

The problem is that voluntary movement can easily override your postural movement.

In fact, you are taught to do this all the time. In Japan, from your earliest years, you were encouraged to pull back your shoulders by the instruction “Kiyotsuke!” This is effected by intentional voluntary movement, which devastates the delicate postural balancing act of your arm. Large gross muscles – latissimus dorsi, trapezius – propel the smaller postural muscles – such as the rotator cuffs – into an organisation which was never part of your postural design. It is foolish to instruct children to behave in this way, because eventually many of them end up with the condition labelled today as “katakori”.

PILANDES can easily show you how to evaporate the movements that create this condition.

Each of our movement systems generally accesses different types of muscles. This is true both at a cellular level – non-fatiguable (PMS) versus fatiguable (VMS) muscle fibres – and at a larger organisational level – smaller postural muscles (PMS) versus larger, powerful muscles (VMS).

It’s a beautiful system which is elegant, energy-efficient and effective.

Until it isn’t.

And when it isn’t – when discomfort, fatigue and excessive effort start to become the norm – you need PILANDES – based upon Alexander’s discoveries – to reset your system into balance.

You do want tone – that part is right. Pilates will give you this tone. This is evident by the robust, upright stature of Pilates educators generally. However, there are unintended costs in taking a direct voluntary approach to produce the tone you need.

It is worth reconsidering how you produce that tone. The postural muscle tone you want is not brought about very efficiently by voluntary movements. Nature designed an elegant binary system to produce the postural tone you need to support the movements you do.

Alexander discovered that the Postural Movement System has a brilliant design that produces exactly the kind of postural tone you need for any movement at all.

What is this brilliant design?

Stay tuned.

NEXT: Turning on Muscle Tone - Part II

P.S. If you want to experience the way I have “re-invented” Alexander’s discoveries – come along to either of my workshops in London or New York. Both feature the 5 postural joints, and both explore how the voluntary and involuntary Selves relate to each other consciously.

2026

LONDON
August 8 – PILANDES
August 23 – Trauma-Informed AT
Near Regent’s Park

NEW YORK
October 24 – PILANDES
October 25 – Trauma-Informed AT (also with Fabio Tavares)
Balance Arts Centre, 151 W. 30th St. NYC

Information and Bookings