Postural tonic attitude is our corporeal attention state that prepares us for action through harmonious muscular exertion. Its fundamental mission is posture adjustment and global body activity. It collaborates in reaching our body consciousness applying a suitable tension degree for every motor action. This activity is under control of our central nervous system, facilitating sensations that allow forming individual corporeal consciousness, which we should aspire: getting to our own essence, creatively liberating harmful habits through detecting muscle and mental tension.
In addition, this attitude allows an appropriate posture, which is the basis of all movements and actions. As it varies in relation to different actions or postures, we assume our own tonic condition that characterizes us and that will determine our motor evolution rhythm. Besides our muscle activity (controlling tension), we should take into account our mental attitude (controlling attention) that relates to the mental representation of action and perception, both indispensable in learning.
Tonic attitude and emotion
Our tonic-postural attitude is related not only to our muscle tone but also to our emotions, as these influence our postural reactions. Muscle tone has a direct relationship with emotion because of attitudes’ regulation. In the tonic attitude, it can be observed our different emotional states like anxiety, motivation, desire, fear, joy, etc. For example, reducing our anxiety collaborates in reducing our muscle tension. At the same time, emotion establishes a postural attitude, which can be limited to an appropriate attitude or lead to excessive levels of contractions, immobility, agitation or tremor.
Our muscle tension could be the physical expression of an unresolved emotional conflict. This conflict has not only respiratory tension but also a perceptive blockage: in this state we do not appropriately perceive our body so we cannot control it. In some situations, when exigency is significant and the fear of not being able to appears, it is not easy to control our muscle tension.
Optimal muscle tension
Optimal muscle tension, or functional tension, is the muscle tension level maintaining us moving without excessive efforts of a particular group of muscles. To achieve this, it is necessary that we assume a prior posture toward actions regulating body segments deviation from their initial position. Through muscle tone regulation, on the one hand, we may compromise our balance in terrain and snow changing conditions because of excessive relaxation, and on the other, we may restrict our movements by limiting the degrees of joints’ freedom because of excessive tension.
The consciousness of muscular effort allows us finding a more suitable tone at all times when skiing. The benefits of optimal muscle tension may be to assist the maintenance of a better balance, to provide a lesser effort on movements and actions, to achieve better coordination, and to influence movement amplitude and quickness.
Some strategies to achieve optimal muscle tension are:
- To determine how much tension we are applying.
- To change tension for voluntary relaxation.
- To detect and alternate relaxation-tension periods.
- To find out in which part of the turn we feel more or less tension.
Muscle tension and relaxation
Skiing is a permanent exchange between muscle tension and relaxation, between holding on (retaining) and letting go (releasing). Certain actions involve muscle contracting and others implicate de-contracting or, in the same action, some muscles tighten while others relax. Not only movements’ coordination and their temporal and spatial precision are important, but also the appropriate control of muscle tension and relaxation. If our muscles relax too much, our actions become slow and weak; if they are exaggeratedly tight, our executions will be rough. It is not just mechanically performing learned movements, but allowing each one flowing towards the next because at resisting is when our tension emerges.
Ideally, only active muscles should be properly tensed while the others are kept in a state of controlled relaxation. This is usually achieved by the expert, not so by the beginner skier who has limitations at releasing a specific corporeal part without getting the rest tensed. Effortless skiing is allowing flow connections between executions; on the contrary, contracting a body segment is an obstacle to energy flow.
Muscle tension
Skiing actions should give pleasure of moving without creating muscle tension. If we are efficient skiers, we possess good muscle tone function and control, which facilitates our corporeal consciousness but if we feel tense, then we lose our conscious body connection.
We could observe that our muscle tensions may be projections of our mental tensions since both are closely related. This influences our learning directly, undergoing emotional reactions to given situations. Then, for efficient skiing, we need to liberate ourselves from the restrictive habit of excessive muscle tension. As our posture shows the degree of muscle tension or relaxation, before focusing on tension levels, we should adopt a proper skiing posture.
When we were beginners, our muscle tension excess was due to the lack of movement coordination and, at a greater tension, we had less sensitivity development since tension restricts movement expansion. Perceiving muscle tensions is a valuable mechanism for detecting and preventing errors since we evolve when recognizing particular tensions felt in difficult situations. Excessive muscle tension blocks the ability to perceive sensations and due to a persistent habit, we conclude accepting it as natural.
Tension increases because of rigidly controlling our movements, limiting their sequence. We get tired quickly of the excessive level of muscle tension. We tend to keep our jaws tight, block our legs, and continue skiing with considerable will because if not doing so, it would be like accepting our own frustration.
As we ski in a state of permanent tension, we forget how to relax. Of course, releasing muscle tension takes time, especially at paying attention to learning how to achieve it. To determine the degree of the perceived muscle tension, we should recognize the situations where these arise: during snow texture changes, on uneven terrain, while increasing our speed, in congested areas, or in specific turn types.
Muscle relaxation
We call muscle relaxation to the release of excessive muscle tension and muscle fibers stretching, opposite to shortening.
The purposes of relaxation are:
- To arrange our body’s schema composition.
- To induce posture modification.
- To balance emotional tensions.
- To eliminate physical and mental fatigue.
Relaxation is not completely exerted; it implies keeping the necessary minimum muscular tone, which is achieved through relaxation control. Tension is usually sudden while relaxation is gradual. Relaxing allows, through the progressive elimination of excessive muscle tension, improving posture and global skiing. It consists of reeducating our muscle tone, contributing to a better perception of our body schema.
While reskilling, it is useful to become conscious about our individual tension differentiating the “doing” from the “not doing”. On this regard, we must first accept tension and then let it go by reducing muscular effort. Tension arises because we are constantly seeking to ‘do’ rather than to let go, therefore, a useful practice is to give up whenever tension is perceived, allowing the gravity to guide us down the slope.
Something that is repetitively observed in complicated or even in normal situations is tensing our back. Although it is a self-preservation reflex, it also demonstrates a clear resistance to cede, to yield. When tensing our back becomes recurrent, it begins to be a defense technique. Another example that goes habitually unnoticed is the constant tension of our jaw, which directly influences muscle control of the rest of our body. It is necessary to inhibit the impulse of teeth clinching since it retains tension in jaw muscles, promoting tension expansion to the rest of our body.
To relax, we should first become aware of our tension, then exhaling to liberate it towards the ground, experiencing that our muscles give in and our joints are flexing, getting our bones closer together. By tensing our body, our bond with the ground is lost and by relaxing, this relationship is retrieved.
According to Alexander Lowen, since our body parts are interdependent, it is observed that if our arms contract, our neck also contracts and it is enough relaxing it to ease our arms. In a tensed body, if a single part relaxes, it leads to the natural relaxation of other parts. Arm or leg contraction is the result of contracting our foot or hand, according to the elementary law of muscle mechanics.
