LOGICAL ANALYSIS OF POSTURE: ELONGATION OF MUSCLES – SOME SIMPLE EXPERIMENTS

From some simple experiments it becomes obvious that one type of muscle moves, lifts and carries weight by tightening up or shrinking (all shrinking muscle fibres flex or draw up into each other to form a hard mass of flesh). There seems to be another group of muscles that do the opposite, i.e. elongate and thin out. This latter group of muscles is the one that most definitely supports the posture. That is why such muscles do not tighten up into a hard mass. The process of elongation 'thins the bulk of the muscles' and this results in relative softening up of muscles. F. M. Alexander (who invented the Alexander Technique for posture control and incidentally was an actor, not a doctor) may have been the first to point out this elongation and the curious fact that a muscle is more powerful when it is lengthening than when it is shortening. Indeed, Professor F. P. Jones researching the Alexander Technique at Tufts University in Boston was able to show by X-ray that Alexander movements brought about lengthening of the sternocliedomastoid muscles in the neck, with a related increase in width of the discs between the neck vertebrae (Stevens 1987). Other research into the Alexander Technique established that muscles are more powerful when they expand than when they contract.

In the first experiment I described on page 38, as soon as the body attains the vertical position and stops, the posture-maintaining/supporting muscles switch into action instantaneously and the tight muscles of the abdomen or spine become soft or flaccid. There is a quick transfer of power, so quick that it is almost a smooth transition.

In the second experiment, as soon as the vertical position is achieved the quadriceps stop acting as muscles that help to move the body from a sitting position to an erect position and become muscles that maintain posture (vertical). Therefore, the quadriceps too have two distinct groups of muscles, one participating in walking, kicking, jumping etc while the other group elongates and supports the torso's weight. The first group causes tightening of quadriceps while the other doesn't.

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Pain Relief-Muscle Relaxers