Feldenkrais and Strength Training

As I mentioned a few days ago, I'm currently in San Diego on another Feldenkrais-studying adventure, and although we are generally discouraged from exercising when class is in session, I snuck off to the gym (yes, I snuck, not sneaked. If my spellchecker lets "irregardless" go by with impunity, I've lost all respect for it).

So I snuck off to the gym after class. Now, today in class had been particularly potent for me. If you haven't actually experienced Feldenkrais work, it's hard to exactly explain what's going on, but on a good day, and after a good lesson, essentially you leave class moving in a way that feels more organized, more organic, more natural. Everything suddenly works together in a completely new and coordinated way that makes you feel like a cross between a cheetah and Mikhail Baryshnikov. You wonder why you, or indeed anyone, moves any other way. By comparison, your old way of standing, sitting, lying down, driving, being, starts to feel tense and fragmented, like you'd been wearing a suit of armor your whole life. You wonder why everyone doesn't drop what they're doing and run to the nearest Feldenkrais practitioner and beg them for lessons.

That's the kind of day I had.

But I still wanted to go to the gym afterwards. However-- I wanted to hang onto my 'new' body. I didn't want to snap back to my old habits.

So I did things a little differently.

My warmup usually consists of lots of dynamic stretching and foam rolling but--and I don't advise this--I actually chose to skip those things altogether. I wanted to signal to my body that it was going to do something else, something new, and starting off with my normal patterns--even if they are usually beneficial--seemed like starting off on the wrong foot. Besides, in a sense, I'd been warming up all day in class. 

So I jumped right into deadlifts, starting with a very light warmup weight. But rather than breeze through it, I took my time to actually feel the weight, to position myself not just technically accurately, but in a way that felt the best to me. I tried to think of the deadlift as one thing, not as a collection of cues: back straight, weight on heels, look straight ahead. etc. For the most part, I just thought, 'I'm going to lift this thing off the ground,' and then paid attention to how it felt. If it didn't feel comfortable (not easy, but comfortable, biomechanically speaking), I'd reset, start again.

Essentially I was applying a Feldenkrais approach--going for less effort, doing the least work for the most result, respecting the body's boundaries and not overstepping them, paying attention throughout the movement, listening to and always trusting physical cues--to a high-effort situation: lifting weights. That is, of course, anathema to the usual way people exercise, and I felt a little odd, in a roomful of grunters and yellers, to by trying to figure out a way to make lifting a weight easier rather than harder. But that's what the strongest guys do--their form is spot on; and then they pile on the weight.

I went through about 8 sets like that, working up to a decent weight, taking my time between sets, and continued through my entire workout in the same manner.

Although I got an excellent workout, I wasn't exhausted in the same way I usually am. I didn't feel broken into pieces as I often do. The feeling of physical integration remained and stayed with me for several hours afterward (it's still with me as I lie in bed writing this).

It was a revelation: done right, strength training can underscore and complement physical efficiency. You're not just strengthening muscles, you're programming movements. If your form is bad--and you wind up "getting a burn" in one particular area during a lift, rather than distributing the effort more evenly throughout the body--then you're programming bad habits. But if you focus on efficiency and integration, then you can program and reinforce good ones.

Or you can address matters more directly, hit up a Feldenkrais class, and find out what all the fuss is about.