Level Up
One workshop with audio recording and one clinic per week
Tuesdays, 8:00 – 9:00 am | Fridays, 11:30 am – 12:00 pm, PST
Your coach has taught you technique. Your trainer has built your strength. Maybe you have plateaued or maybe you are feeling too much wear and tear. These Feldenkrais lessons can help you use what you have developed in a more integrated way.
Reclaim the joy of your favorite sport. Through movement explorations in these Body Wisdom classes, you’ll discover how changes in organization can create significant improvements in pleasure and performance.
When your paddle stroke gets more efficient, or you generate more power in your tennis serve, it can be a manifestation of the more elegant organization working alongside your existing skills. The improvements come from your own discoveries about how you want to move.
Note: these classes are not about teaching you the right way to angle your stick or paddle or blade. They are about using movement as a way to become more aware of what you do. And from that awareness, the ‘right’ move, for you, emerges. Thus what you learn in these classes serves you in all your life: not just specific awareness of how one move could be done more efficiently, but the approach to listening to your body and finding not just ease and power and agility, but also intrinsic pleasure.
What to expect
These are examples of topics we might address within this series, but the series is not limited to these topics.
1. When Effort Gets in the Way: Balanced Power
Most athletes know how to work harder, but few understand how their own systems can work against themselves. Sometimes efficient movement is as much about what you let go as it is about the heroic star-of-show working muscles. Sometimes it is as much about sequencing as it is about exertion. And often, the secret sauce hides in the parts of you that stabilize rather than the ones that ‘do.’
Become aware of how your flexors and extensors harmonize. Shed unnecessary effort. Ask yourself whether you always have to make things happen or whether you sometimes could just let them happen. (Gravity isn’t always your enemy.)
You'll discover, for yourself, how your whole body functions as an integrated system, not isolated "core muscles" to strengthen, but a dynamic relationship where every part affects every other part. Through very precise exploration, you'll learn to let go of the ways you're fighting yourself and find the pleasure of coordinated power - movement that feels both effortless and strong because all your parts are working together instead of at cross-purposes. This is not so much a class about how you move as it is a class about how you know how you move--and once you know that, you can do anything you want.
2. Getting Past Movement that Fights Itself: The Secret of Strategic Anchoring
Most people focus on what's moving, but the real secret might lie in what stays still. When you lift your foot, how does it shift your weight elsewhere? When you reach overhead, what supports you? This series reveals how your body's opposition patterns - the automatic way one part stabilizes while another moves - determine whether movement feels elegant or effortful. You'll *feel* for yourself that every action has a counter-action. When you are aware of these forces and in choice about how you want to use them, movement becomes almost magical, weightless.