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Book Review ....
The instruction to put less effort into your training is not what you usually hear from coaches or exercise teachers. But that is the basis of The Performance Paradox, a book which should be of interest to anyone involved in sport, from amateurs to professionals, for anyone interested in exercise or fitness, or anyone who works with people who are in training or suffering from sports injuries. This is a serious book which brings a radically different approach to training. The author is an athlete and an Alexander teacher, and he explains the Technique and how it can be applied to sport. When an athlete has performance problems the usual remedy is to train more, practice harder. Palmer advocates a different solution. If what you are doing is not bringing success, why do more of it? We all have an individual way of moving and using ourselves which is usually less than perfect. We take this personal movement style into our sport where the intensity of training makes these traits even stronger. It is easy to develop habits in our training pattern that are not helpful, and more training only ingrains these more deeply. If our most basic movement patterns are not as good as they should be this will make us less skilful and more vulnerable to injuries, and it is these underlying coordination patterns that must be examined and changed, Exercise goes through fashions and the present favourite is the gym with its multitude of machines, each of which works one particular body area. Going to the gym has replaced aerobics, which also focuses on individual parts of the body, and running. Recently I was advised by a trained exercise teacher not to run except on a treadmill in a gym because running on the ground is dangerous and invariably causes injury. This nicely illustrates the ideas in The Performance Paradox. Running is the most natural exercise imaginable; people have been running throughout human history. The problem is not running, but the unfortunate way many people run. The numerous injuries sustained by runners are the result of poor running technique which, in turn, is the product of their general poor co-ordination. Palmer is against doing exercises that develop particular muscles in isolation. Sports people have always done exercises but these were always integrated back into a sport. A sport requires whole body coordination, balance and skill. An exercise machine requires strength but nothing else. A rowing machine is not the same thing as rowing on a river, nor is running on a treadmill anything like running on the ground. Training in such a manner may even decrease coordination. I have been going to aerobics classes for years and notice that the teachers are often ungraceful and clumsy looking although they are certainly fit and supple. Palmer slightly overstates his case in the effort to make his point; and the prose could be more user-friendly, but, to be fair, the subject matter is technical. However, his ideas 'how to do less in order to achieve more', and 'it is not so much what you do as how you do it', are important ones and the book makes an invaluable contribution to the exercise debate.
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