Feldenkrais Exercises: Arms / Shoulders

This category contains Feldenkrais Exercises that are designed to free up your shoulders and help integrate your arms into movement and function. Almost everything we do involves the shoulders and arms to a degree and many Awareness Through Movement lessons work directly with them.

One of the most striking differences between someone who is well coordinated and someone who isn't is the degree to which the arms / shoulders and torso are integrated. With high quality movement, such as we are after here, you see a type of spiralling and flowing effect through the body. Usually the best of the best athletes illustrate this.

For someone who isn't of that standard you tend to see the opposite which is highly differentiated movement. That is the arms move in isolation to the shoulders and torso. Invariably this leads to stiffness, pain, inaccuracies in performance and balance of a lower order.

You particularly see this higher level of quality to a striking degree in those who are well skilled in the softer internal martial arts.

I regard this component to be essential for anyone who wants to develop any level of skill with their function. The lessons currently in this category are Rubber Arms and Super Rubber Arms.

These Feldenkrais exercises are quite complimentary to each other. It is quite a common practice to design lessons to be used in conjunction with each other.

Exceptional movement seems to have a slow motion fluidity about it.

Even at rapid speed.

The reason for this is 'graduated movement'.

This means that the whole body is participating, even at micro movement levels.

To do this we need to be able to mobilize every vertebrae and rib into the action of movement.

All this is useless, however, if it doesn't gracefully flow out through the arms and shoulders.

These exercises are designed to cause just that.

Return to Feldenkrais Exercises main page.

Move on to Rubber Arms