4 Tips to Get Started With Alexander Technique

If you’re new to teaching or you’ve wondered about the best method for teaching students to play with healthy technique, try these 4 simple tips from the Alexander Technique.

How often do you ask your students to curve their fingers, keep their wrists above key level or improve their posture? These technical adjustments lead to better tone and facility at the piano, allowing students to progress to more challenging music. So it’s no surprise that technical development plays such a central role in our teaching.

But how often do we find ourselves repeating the same technical reminders with little lasting change? It can be frustrating – for us and for our students. And it often means those concepts aren’t being monitored during practice at home. 

Perhaps there’s room to consider how we go about teaching technique.

Pinpoint the Problem – or Maybe Not

Imagine you’re teaching a student whose low wrist is preventing them from reaching the keys easily. You might have an age-appropriate way of communicating this to them which has worked well in the past. 

Certainly, when it happens again, you can always just remind them about it. Maybe your student will eventually learn to pay attention to their wrist and you won’t have to tell them about it quite as much. 

But even if that’s the case, have you noticed how they’ve managed to play with their wrists at an appropriate level? Have they done it by raising their shoulders? Or by tensing their wrists or forearms? 

Focusing on the “problem” can actually create more tension in that area – or somewhere else entirely.

A Bigger Picture Approach

Let’s look at that same situation from a different perspective. When you notice that your student’s wrists are low, you also see that they’re slouching, or perhaps they’re keeping their arms tucked into their torso, causing their wrists to lower. 

You realise that there may be a solution that will improve the coordination of their body as a whole and indirectly solve the problem of their low wrists – without the need to focus on it.

Look at the Entire Body

This is how an Alexander Technique approach can benefit your students’ piano technique. By considering the whole body, we can make fundamental changes in our students’ coordination.

This can improve their playing, and often remove the need to address (and readdress) specific problems. It also allows us to approach these issues without causing unwanted tension in other areas. 

If your students incorporate Alexander Technique warmups into their practice routine, they may begin to move with more freedom – and that can carry over into their lessons. 

This will give you more opportunity to work with them on musical aspects of their playing instead of spending precious time just trying to get them to stop slouching at the piano! 🙄

4 Tips for Applying Alexander Technique

With the following tips, you can begin to incorporate Alexander Technique into your teaching. These experiences can improve your students’ overall coordination and technique, and foster their independence between lessons. 

Try them out in your own playing first so you can feel the benefits yourself and teach them with confidence! 💪

Tip No. 1: Constructive Rest

In Alexander Technique, we practice something called constructive rest. Begin by asking your student to lie down in a semi-supine position on the floor so that their knees are bent and their feet are flat on the floor. 

If it’s comfortable, their hands can rest on their abdomen. They might be more comfortable if you place a paperback book under their head, just to make sure their head isn’t falling back or being thrust forward. 

As they’re lying down, ask the student to notice where their body makes contact with the floor and to allow their back and shoulders to release into the floor. 

This is a great practice for pianists because it brings our attention to our back, which is something we desperately need in our playing but often ignore. Our back muscles are designed to support our arms, and simply noticing them is the first step toward accessing that support.

After practicing constructive rest and returning to the piano bench, you might notice that your student is already sitting differently at the piano. You can ask them to recall the sensation of their back on the floor, and hopefully you’ll notice less tendency to slouch. 

This gentle, indirect approach addresses sitting at the piano without the need to ask our students to “sit up straight”. Since our spine actually has four curves, we’re not meant to sit up straight anyway! 🤔

Alternative Approaches

If it isn’t feasible for your student to lie down in your studio, they could instead:

• Sit or stand with their back against a wall. 
• Practice constructive rest at home before their lesson and before they practice. 
• Become more aware of the contact of their back to the seat of the car on their way to see you.

This doesn’t have to be a long practice, so if you have younger, fidgety students, even just having their back meet the floor or wall for 30 – 60 seconds can make a difference.

Tip No. 2: Connect the Back to the Arms & Wrists

Once your student becomes more aware of their back, it will be helpful to connect those muscles through their arms to their hands. Practicing an exercise like the one in the video below will help your student learn to think from their back, through their arms and wrists, all the way to their fingers.  

This exercise is also especially helpful for students with wrist tension. Imagining their wrists as open channels that allow for a connection from their back to their fingers can give them access to larger muscle groups in their playing so they can stop overusing their wrists.

Tip No. 3: Take a Standing Break

We tend to have better use of our torso when we stand than when we sit, so if a student is starting to slouch at the piano, standing up for a moment can really help. How our students use their body when they sit back down is also important, of course.

When your student sits back down, ask them to notice their sit bones against the bench. If they don’t know where their sit bones are, you can ask them to place their hands between the bench and the seat of their pants while they’re sitting down. The sit bones are the two bony protrusions there, and we’re meant to balance on them when we sit at the piano. 

Ask your student to allow the torso to remain standing on the sit bones. In other words, there needn’t be any change in the way we’re using our torso whether we’re standing or sitting.

One important thing to remember about the sit bones is that they’re round! They’re designed to help us move at the hips while we’re sitting. You might show your student this picture to remind them that they can use the sit bones to move at the piano. 

During the lesson, you can also have your student check in with their sit bones, allow their weight to pass through them into the bench, and then draw an imaginary line from the sit bones up to their head. You might also have your student watch this video, which expands on that idea.

Tip No. 4: Soft Eyes

This is a concept that Alexander Technique borrows from aikido, and it can be used in several ways when we teach. 

“Soft eyes” is a widening of our gaze so that we include our peripheral vision. Musicians tend to hyper focus on the task at hand, which causes us to contract our bodies. Not only does that produce unnecessary tension, but it can also make us miss important information in our score and in our playing.

You can try this idea right now. While you’re reading this article, see what you can notice in the space where you’re sitting. Without moving your head or eyes, can you see other objects in the room?

You might turn this into a game for younger students. While they’re looking at their music, you can ask them:

• what else they see in the room
• how many fingers you’re holding up 
• if they can see their hands

If we encourage our students to develop this skill, they can learn to expand their view while they read music so they can take in more information at once. This will improve their reading since it will help them see notes in relation to each other, rather than one at a time. And, of course, it’s also practical to be able to view the hands and music simultaneously.

We can also use soft eyes in a different way when we’re teaching. Remember your student with the low wrists? If you use soft eyes as you’re viewing them, you’ll probably be able to spot the reason for that issue. You’ll see the whole body instead of being focused on one part of it. This allows you to see the whole picture so you can make good decisions about what to discuss with your students. 

Alexander Technique Outcomes

Studying Alexander Technique has changed my playing and teaching in so many ways. It has improved my students’ technique and given them a toolkit of skills that they can use independently. They feel more ease and freedom when they play, and that keeps them interested and engaged. 

If these basic ideas piqued your interest and you’d like to learn more about Alexander Technique lessons, visit https://alexandertechnique.com/ to find a teacher in your area. 

Which of these practices will you try with yourself and your students? 

Comment below and tell us what you noticed.