Body-oriented methods may also help to introduce sustainable changes, but only if these are put in correlation to the aforementioned psychological processes, so that the problem can be healed emotionally as well.
With football players, I particularly work with the following methods:
- Pandiculations according to Professor Thomas Hanna
By using the sensomotoric feedback loop between the brain and the body, it is possible to learn with the help of a therapist, how to tense muscles more in a first step that are unconsciously permanently tensed (muscles that cannot be felt consciously and thus not relaxed, either, cf. “sensomotoric amnesia“) in order to gradually relax these muscles again more consciously and in a controlled manner. In such a manner, the patient learns to control superfluous muscle tension, so that the muscle tone is reduced throughout the therapy in individual muscles, body parts and overall.
If the pandiculations according to Professor Hanna due not suffice to loosen the muscle stiffness and the awareness limitation (“sensomotoric amnesia“), it is possible to work with kinetic mirrors:
- Kinetic mirroring according to Feldenkrais
Some muscles are so strongly tensed that the loosening of tensions is not even possible by way of methods such as trigger point treatment or pandiculation. In such an even, the central nervous system (brain) developing the tension in the musculature can be supported by working with kinetic mirroring. Once the brain understood that there is “help from the outside” in order to maintain the protection pattern, it slightly eases the muscle tension. Subsequently, other methods can be applied in the therapy.
With these two methods an improvement can normally be achieved very quickly point by point (when working directly with the tensed body parts), so that the pain is quickly eased or even disappears. However, in order to avoid the recurring of pain in phases of stress and pressure, in most cases an additional improvement of the body awareness and a change of the movement organisation are necessary:
- Artificial floor according to Feldenkrais and body awareness training
An ingenious method is the artificial floor according to Feldenkrais. With this instrument, the football player is able to access unprocessed feelings that are often the cause for his pain by almost completely deactivating all retaining and positional reflexes (inner tension). For him it is then necessary to develop a feeling for how his posture and movement patterns correlate with these emotions.
In a next step, the aforementioned hypnoanalysis can be used to dissolve these emotions, and at the same time the approach of differential learning may be applied (Thomas Tuchel works with this approach when studying new moves on the playing field, whereas I use this approach for the improvement of movement patterns) in order to program “more relaxed” movement patterns in the subconscious.
