Efficient Use of Arms and Hands

MP3

Working with your arms and applying force is very challenging. Being able to effectively manipulate the outside world with your hands is deeply human, it’s what distinguishes us from most of the other mammals.

But we often don’t organize movements of our arms and hands very well. We apply unnecessary force when all it takes is a soft movement and when a powerful interaction with the environment is needed, for example when we are lifting an object or pushing things around, we don’t always have a clear image where to generate this power from.

So the modern human tends to overwork the arms and hands and neck in two seemingly contradictory ways: By using too much force when little is needed and by concentrating on using the muscles of our arms and hands when we should actually use our whole body.

Paul Newton, Feldenkrais trainer and educational director of the Instituto Feldenkrais, shows us how we can make better use of ourselves and how we can use our arms and hands more effectively and even more elegantly by binding them into movements that we do with our whole self.

Contents:

  1. Talk (Introduction to the course) 2 min.
  2. Talk (About hands and arms functions) 14 min.
  3. ATM (Work with the active (dominant) hand) 66 min.
  4. Talk (Questions and answers about previous lesson) 28 min.
  5. Demo (A very useful and necessary explanation for the next lesson) 2 min.
  6. ATM (Lengthen right side, look inside) 46 min.
  7. Talk (Why do lessons like the previous one work?) 5 min.
  8. LAB (Short experience to feel how flexibility in the ribs helps your arms) 8 min.
  9. Talk (Open questions from yesterday) & LAB (Hand like medusa) 18 min.
  10. ATM (Bell hand in hair) 47 min.
  11. Talk (About nausea, dizziness and proportionally distributed movement) 13 min.
  12. ATM (Bell swim, ending with crawling) 47 min.
  13. Talk (About our Feldenkrais professional training programs and the medusa movement) 7 min.
  14. ATM (Fingers backward (flying)) 36 min.

Recordings from an online-seminar in November 2021.