How to Lengthen and Widen the Back - Part 2

Yet MORE drawings of anatomy + lines to help you uncrush the Coke can of your torso!

Happy Tuesday! This week I’ll be attending my first ever Alexander Technique conference. It’s happening right here in New York City. It’ll be great to see a few old familiar faces and meet some new people. If you happen to be in the city and want to meet up, feel free to reach out!

Where’s your salsa made?

To the Blogssss!!!

Allow the neck to be free

So that the head may balance forward and up

So that the spine may lengthen and the back widen

So that the knees are forward and away from the hips.

—

Allow the neck to be free

So that the head may balance forward and up

So that the spine may lengthen and the back widen

So that the shoulders go apart from one another with a “pull” at the elbow.

A few weeks ago, I left you with a bit of a cliffhanger in the post, How to Lengthen and Widen the Back. In that post, I gave you some drawings for the directions of the torso and everything was drawn from the front view. Take a minute to go back and check it out as I’ll expand a bit more on that concept today!

In the photo above, the right side of the torso shows the outermost layer of musculature. On the left side, I’ve removed the two largest muscles (the trapezius covering the neck and the latissimus dorsi covering the middle and lower back). I’m doing this so that you can see how interwoven our musculature is.

In a sense, we can view the organization of these muscles like the lattice network used to make a Chinese Finger Trap! If we start pulling on our backs or heads or necks to make things free up, the lattice network of muscles will very likely stiffen up like crazy. When we STOP and allow every fiber of our being to simply NOT LOCK, we will slowly feel this network release.

There’s a school of thought that so fears this temptation to push and pull that some people will just encourage you to contemplate stillness and expansion via poetic imagery. Personally, I have no objection to such imagery, but if you find yourself STUCK these directions may add some much needed clarity to why the Coke can is crushed.

Anatomical Imagery

I think the image of the whole head, neck, and torso organizing like a Chinese finger trap is pretty apt. The more time you spend looking at our interwoven structure, the more it just makes sense at a high level. And just like releasing a finger trap, we want to think about releasing a little bit everywhere, all at once and altogether.

But in order to help you refine such a high level image, I’m going to give you a few more localized examples of expansion. These examples tend to work best when you quietly think about them one at a time in an additive way. That is, you think about the neck softening and as you feel the neck soften you ADD a thought of the jaw softening; you don’t want to stiffen your neck the instant you think about softening your jaw!

An Expansive Trapezius

The full length and breadth of the trapezius stretches from your head down to you mid back and from shoulder to shoulder. I see a lot of people complaining that their trapezius is tight or that one part of their trapezius is more developed than another. If you allow your head to balance forward and up, that will give you a slight sense that the top of the trapezius is going up. That’s a terrific start to alleviating neck and back tension, but adding in a gentle thought of the widening across the upper back (marked with the two big black arrows) can help build the feeling that the whole trapezius is beginning to expand like a kite catching wind along your back.

Looking at the layers beneath the trapezius, you’ll see some muscles expanding in length and some expanding into width. I’m not sure it’s necessary to feel these muscles at an individual level. Your best bang-for-your-buck is to simply allow yourself to experience the whole lot of the upper back thick, soft, and expansive.

Don’t let these images create neck tension!

A Softening and Expanding Ribcage

In between each rib, you have muscles. Without them, we couldn’t have a summer BBQ featuring PORK or COW ribs! As you have a sense of the upper back expanding, you can include a sensation of the inner lining of the entire rib cage. Part of allowing the back to widen is the sensation that the ribs can expand away from the spine.

It is particularly nice to sense the upper ribs expanding away from the spine so that you can sense the full rings of the ribs through to the breast bone.

A Widening Chest

See those big purply chest muscles? Just as your upper back has an expanding kite, your chest can follow suit and expand wide through to the upper arms. You can see this expansion on the left side of the image above. Along the outside of the front of the ribs (seen above along the right side of the image), the pectoralis minor expands from the base of the breast bone (ish) to the upper arm (ish) in a diagonal line.

Incorporating the 3 images above can help you get a sense of the whole finger trap releasing. You’ll want to include a sense of the lower back expanding and the stomach coming into its full volume, but I think that’s enough imagery to serve for one blog!

Does This Resonate With You?

These blogs are hopefully a way of helping you better understand yourself, how you function, and why things sometimes feel off in a general way. If these posts are helpful, I encourage you to subscribe, leave a comment, ask a question, or check out the archives for my previous articles. I like hearing from everyone and I’ll do my best to respond as I can.

Get In Touch

If you’re in NYC, you may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com.

If you’d like to book any lesson time with me, you can find my booking link here.