I was doing some caulking work on a seven-foot-tall egg this morning, and I thought about a study I read about regarding a back-pain relief regimen called the Alexander technique:

The study...tested different back pain treatments using patients from 64 general practices in England. A total of 579 patients with chronic pain or recurrent low back pain participated; 144 were given "normal care," 147 had massages, 144 took six Alexander technique lessons, and 144 took 24 Alexander technique lessons. Half of each group was also prescribed an aerobic exercise plan, primarily walking...

The patients who saw the biggest improvement were the ones who took the Alexander lessons and also were prescribed an exercise plan. The improvements still held after one year, while massage's benefits waned after three months.

I did some very cursory work in the Alexander technique in grad school as part of a movement class for actors (F.M. Alexander, after whom the system is named, was an actor).  At the time I found it rather frustrating, as it requires you to develop and maintain a fairly constant awareness of what your spine, head and neck are doing.  You can't just take a class, get the knowledge, and forget it; you've got to apply it 24-7, and at the time I guess I thought I had better things to do.

Usually, I'm a "get the the knowledge and forget it" type of guy; I like to be able to get my own workouts out of the way and done, for instance, so I can more or less relax for the rest of the day guilt free. 

But for conditions like back pain and poor posture, this "treat it in the gym" system doesn't work very well.  If I work on someone's posture for even 90 minutes a week--a lot of time for me to spend on something primarily therapeutic--then they still have another 166.5 hours a week to reinforce their bad habits.  Those aren't very good odds.

But the Alexander technique works primarily on awareness, and on verbal cues, rather than directly on muscular work.  So instead of thinking "sit up straight," which immediately generates tension, an Alexander practitioner might tell a patient to "Let the torso lengthen and widen,"  which cues the client to find the easiest, most natural way of aligning the spine, top to bottom.  Once you become proficient at it, you can practice Alexander work anywhere.

Certainly, muscular work is involved in correct posture--but so is the relaxation of needless tension.  Alexander's technique is based on the idea that our posture and movement is innately perfect but that years of socialization impose poor body use and alignment upon us (Alexander practitioners often point to the superlative posture of young children to demonstrate this point).

That the Alexander technique--an extraordinarily gentle, non-invasive, largely mental form of "exercise"--is so effective in combating back pain is further evidence that engaging the mind can be fundamental to healing the body. 

I suspect it also points to something Chad Waterbury has been suggesting for quite some time now:  that the nervous system is the great unexplored frontier of strength and performance enhancement.