You don’t have to be an elite athlete to enjoy sport and the feeling of improving and becoming more skilful. Sport often involves repetitious movement at higher speeds, with greater loading, stress and impact than in everyday movement. No matter the application, the Feldenkrais method can help improve our skills and performance and reduce risk of injury.
Many athletes use the Feldenkrais Method to refine coordination, improve efficiency and develop greater awareness of how they move. By learning to organise the body more effectively, sportspeople can often increase power, precision and endurance while reducing unnecessary effort.
During Feldenkrais lessons you will start to feel how you use your left foot or hip joint differently to your right, the ways in which you use your pelvis, what exactly you are doing with the ribs, how you breathe when you find something tricky. We don’t just use our legs to run, but our back, our arms, even our head and eyes. In martial arts or football, kicking involves not just the hip joints but our ribs, shoulder blades, the other foot. We start to discover the ways in which we can use our whole selves in movement.
This increased awareness can translate directly into sport. Runners may discover more efficient stride patterns, golfers may refine their swing, and martial artists may improve timing and balance. When the whole body participates in movement, performance becomes smoother, more coordinated and less prone to strain.
Feldenkrais is not about pushing harder. Instead, it helps athletes learn how to move with greater efficiency and adaptability — qualities that support both performance and injury prevention.
Feldenkrais goes beyond the ideas of strength and flexibility and focuses us on the quality of movement. Rather than relying on sheer effort, force and will power, which is hard to sustain, we begin to look for easier, more integrated and fluid movements.
[Taking ownership of our movement, it’s…] about getting to know your body better. About getting more in touch with what makes you human so you can do what humans are designed to do in the way we are designed to do it. This is about rediscovering the techniques that we, as a species, are physically built and mentally wired to undertake. It’s about freeing you to do what you love so that you can feel an even deeper connection with yourself and the world. So that you can do it more often. Be injured less. Go further. Go faster. Feel that flow.
Shane Benzie in The Lost Art of Running