One of the most useful things Moshe Feldenkrais ever said, and he said a lot of useful things, was something along the lines of: “If you know what you’re doing, you can do what you want.” The idea being that most human dysfunction comes not from incapacity but from unconscious, inefficient habit. We’re working too hard. We’re using muscles we don’t need. We’re bracing against movement instead of allowing it. The path to better function is to strip away the unnecessary effort and let the body do what it already knows how to do.
It’s elegant. It’s often exactly right.
And it’s not the whole picture.
Because alongside all those people who are working too hard, there’s another population. People who aren’t working hard enough. Not because they’re lazy or unmotivated, but because parts of their body have essentially gone offline. Muscles that should be participating in movement have checked out. Fascial connections that should be transmitting force have gone slack or adhered. The body has learned to accomplish tasks using a reduced set of resources, and the result is not effort but fragility.
These two problems, too much effort and too little participation, look very different from the inside. They feel different. They need different solutions. But they’re both responses to dysfunction, arriving from opposite directions. And one of the things I find most fascinating about my work is figuring out which direction a particular body needs to go.
The Feldenkrais Direction: Less Is More
Feldenkrais’s genius was in recognizing how much unnecessary muscular effort most people carry. Watch someone reach for a glass of water. If they’re like most adults, they’ll recruit their shoulder, their neck, possibly their jaw, and maybe even their hip on the reaching side. All to pick up a glass that weighs a few ounces.
This is what Feldenkrais called parasitic effort. Muscular work that doesn’t serve the task. It’s everywhere. People clench their jaws while typing. They brace their legs while sitting. They hold their breath while thinking. The body is running background processes that consume energy, create tension, and interfere with the movement that actually matters.
The Feldenkrais method addresses this by creating conditions where you can notice the unnecessary effort and, through slow exploration, learn to let it go. An Awareness Through Movement lesson might have you performing a simple movement, like turning your head, while systematically noticing what else activates. Do your eyes tighten? Does your chest hold? Does your pelvis lock? As you notice each layer of unnecessary involvement, you can choose to release it. What remains is the movement itself, clean and efficient.
This is profoundly useful work. I’ve seen clients shed years of accumulated tension through this kind of exploration. People who’d been bracing so long they’d forgotten what relaxation felt like, suddenly discovering that turning their head doesn’t require their entire body to participate.
For the bracer, the gripper, the person whose default mode is maximum effort for minimum task, Feldenkrais is often transformative. The body learns that less is enough. And “less” doesn’t mean weak. It means appropriate. Only the muscles that need to work are working. Everything else gets to rest.
The Other Direction: More Is More
But here’s the thing. Not everyone’s primary problem is excessive effort.
I see a lot of people whose problem is the opposite. Not too much recruitment, but too little. Bodies where significant portions of the musculature have effectively stopped participating in movement.
Let me describe what this looks like.
The pattern I see constantly looks like this. Someone comes in with chronic lower back pain. They have tried a lot of things. Physical therapy, yoga, Pilates, massage. They are not sedentary. They walk daily, do some exercise, generally take care of themselves. But their back hurts, and nothing is making it consistently better.
When I assess them, I find something that shows up again and again in my Santa Cruz practice. The glutes are barely participating in movement. The person can walk, squat, climb stairs. But the force generation that should be coming from the gluteal complex is instead being handled almost entirely by the lower back extensors and hamstrings. The glutes are not weak in the sense that they can not fire. If I ask the person to squeeze them, they can. But in functional movement, in the actual tasks of daily life, the glutes are not showing up.
This is not a problem of excessive effort. The glutes are not bracing or gripping. They are just absent. Disconnected from the movement patterns they should be integral to. And the lower back is paying the price, because it is doing its own job plus the job the glutes should be doing.
For this person, the Feldenkrais approach of “use less” would be misguided. They do not need to strip away effort. They need to build connection. They need more muscle participating in movement, not less.
Why Bodies Check Out
This phenomenon of muscular disengagement is epidemic. And I think it’s worth understanding why, because the reasons inform the solution.
Modern life is the primary culprit. We sit for extraordinary amounts of time. Hours and hours every day in positions that keep certain muscles shortened, certain muscles lengthened, and certain muscles completely uninvolved. Over months and years, the nervous system adapts. It stops sending activation signals to muscles it doesn’t need for sitting. It builds motor programs around the muscles it does use. The body optimizes for the demands placed on it, and if those demands are primarily “sit in a chair,” the optimization is going to look like atrophy and disconnection in everything that isn’t needed for sitting.
But it’s not just sitting. Injury plays a role. When you hurt something, your body develops compensatory patterns to protect the injured area. These patterns redirect force away from the injury and toward other structures. Even after the injury heals, the compensatory pattern often persists. The muscles that got bypassed during recovery never get reintegrated. They stay offline.
Fascial adhesion also contributes. When fascial layers adhere to each other, they impair the gliding that allows muscles to slide past their neighbors and contract efficiently. A muscle encased in adhered fascia might be neurologically capable of firing but mechanically unable to produce useful force. The nervous system, ever pragmatic, routes around the problem. It uses what works and abandons what doesn’t.
I discussed fascial adhesion in detail in my previous post on what fascia knows. The connection here is direct. Fascial restriction creates muscular disconnection, which creates compensatory patterns, which create the kind of dysfunction that brings people to my practice.
Two Epidemics
So we have two problems running simultaneously in the modern population.
Epidemic one: excessive bracing. People who carry enormous amounts of unnecessary tension. Jaws clenched, shoulders elevated, cores gripped, breathing restricted. Their nervous systems are running in a state of chronic hyperactivation. They’re working too hard at everything, and their bodies are exhausted and painful as a result.
Epidemic two: insufficient recruitment. People whose bodies have lost connection to significant portions of their musculature. Glutes that don’t fire. Deep stabilizers that don’t engage. Intrinsic foot muscles that have atrophied from years in rigid shoes. Their bodies are accomplishing movement with a fraction of the available resources, and the structures that are overworking to compensate are breaking down.
These epidemics overlap more than you might think. Many people have both problems simultaneously. They’re bracing in some areas and disconnected in others. They’re gripping their neck and jaw while their glutes and deep core are completely offline. The body is simultaneously doing too much and too little, just in different regions.
This is one of the things that makes human bodies so endlessly interesting to work with. The solution is never one-dimensional.
The Client Who Needs to Stop Bracing
Let me describe what it looks like when someone primarily needs the Feldenkrais direction.
Imagine someone with severe tension headaches and TMJ pain. Jaw clenched almost constantly. Upper traps like concrete. Neck with maybe thirty degrees of rotation in each direction. Breathing shallow and primarily thoracic.
This is the classic bracer. The nervous system has dialed up the tension on everything from the collarbones up. Every muscle in the upper quarter is working overtime, all the time, regardless of whether the task demands it. Think of it like a computer running every background process at full power. The fans are screaming, the CPU is maxed out, and the actual task on screen is just reading email.
For this person, structural integration work focuses significantly on creating the conditions for release. Working with the cervical fascia, the suboccipital muscles, the thoracic inlet. Creating space and mobility in tissue that has been compressed for years. But the structural work is only part of the equation. The person needs to learn a different relationship with effort. They need to discover that they can hold their head up without gripping. That they can talk without clenching their jaw. That they can work at a computer without armoring their shoulders.
This is where the Feldenkrais principle of eliminating unnecessary effort is invaluable. The bracer needs permission, neurological permission at the deepest level, to let go. They need the experience of less effort producing better results. And that experience is exactly what awareness-based movement education provides.
Working structurally while incorporating movement education that draws on Feldenkrais principles, slow explorations of jaw release, gentle rotational movements for the cervical spine, breathing practices that invite the nervous system to downshift, can reduce headaches dramatically and nearly double neck mobility.
The body was doing too much. The solution was subtraction.
The Client Who Needs to Start Engaging
Now let me describe the opposite scenario.
Now consider the opposite scenario, the person with non-participating glutes. Their problem is not tension. It is absence. The body is not doing too much in the gluteal region. It is doing too little.
The approach is fundamentally different. Structural integration to address the fascial restrictions impeding gluteal function. Gluteal fascia adhered to underlying tissue. A dense, immobile IT band. A restricted sacrotuberous ligament limiting pelvic motion.
Once the structural barriers are addressed, the work shifts to building connection. Not just telling the person to “engage their glutes,” which they have heard from every trainer and physical therapist they have ever seen. That instruction is like telling someone who does not speak French to “speak French.” The problem is not motivation. It is neurological connection.
Instead, we work on creating contexts where the glutes naturally activate. Standing on one leg. Walking uphill. Specific movement sequences that demand gluteal participation by the nature of the task rather than by conscious instruction. Building the neurological pathways through repetitive, guided, progressively demanding movement. Not reducing effort. Increasing participation.
This is what I mean when I say my work sometimes involves recruiting more muscle rather than using less. The body needs more players on the field. More muscles participating in the tasks of life. And that requires both structural preparation, clearing the fascial restrictions that are keeping those muscles sidelined, and movement education that rebuilds the neurological connections.
Back pain resolves over the course of a 12-session series. Not because the person learned to relax, but because they learned to distribute load. When more muscle participates, no single structure has to overwork. The force is shared. The demand is spread. And the body becomes resilient rather than fragile.
The Integration
I hope it’s clear by now that I don’t see these two approaches as contradictory. They’re complementary responses to different presentations of the same underlying problem: disorganized movement.
Feldenkrais looks at disorganized movement and asks, “What can we take away?” What effort is unnecessary? What tension is parasitic? What would happen if we just did less?
I look at disorganized movement and often ask, “What can we add?” What muscles are missing from this pattern? What fascial connections need to be restored? What would happen if more of the body showed up?
Both questions are valid. Both lead to better movement. The skill is in knowing which question to ask for which body at which moment.
In practice, most of my sessions involve both directions. There is almost always something to release and something to recruit. The chronic bracer also has disconnected deep neck flexors that need to be reintegrated. The person with absent glutes also has excessive gripping in the hip flexors that needs to soften. The body does not present its problems in neat categories.
Why Both Problems Are Epidemic
I mentioned that both excessive bracing and insufficient recruitment are epidemic in modern populations. I want to spend a moment on why.
We live in bodies that evolved for a very different world than the one we inhabit. Our nervous systems were designed for environments that required constant physical engagement. Walking, running, climbing, carrying, squatting, reaching. In that context, the body’s full musculature was routinely called upon. Movement was diverse, demanding, and constant.
Modern life has removed most of that demand and replaced it with sitting, stress, and repetitive task performance. The physical demand has collapsed. The psychological demand has increased. The result is bodies that are simultaneously underengaged and overaroused.
The muscles that would have been active all day, glutes, deep spinal stabilizers, intrinsic foot muscles, respiratory diaphragm, have atrophied and disconnected. The muscles associated with stress response, upper traps, jaw, pelvic floor, hip flexors, have become chronically activated. It’s as if the body has reallocated its resources, abandoning the movement muscles and doubling down on the tension muscles.
This is not a design flaw. It’s an adaptation. The body is doing what it always does. Optimizing for the demands placed upon it. The problem is that the demands of modern life produce a dysfunctional optimization. We end up with bodies that are excellent at sitting tensely and terrible at moving freely.
Addressing this requires both directions of intervention. We need to release the chronic tension, the excessive effort, the habitual bracing. And we need to rebuild the connections, the recruitment patterns, the structural capacity that modern life has allowed to atrophy.
Feldenkrais addresses the first beautifully. Structural integration, paired with movement re-education, addresses the second. Together, they begin to reverse the optimization problem. They move the body from its adapted-to-modern-life dysfunction toward something closer to the full, capable, resilient function it was designed for.
Where to Start
If you’re reading this and trying to figure out which direction you need, here are some questions worth considering.
When you move, do you feel like you’re working too hard? Does simple movement feel effortful? Does your body feel tight, clenched, held? Do people tell you to relax, and you’re not sure what they mean? You might be primarily a bracer who would benefit from the Feldenkrais direction of reducing unnecessary effort.
When you move, do you feel disconnected? Do certain parts of your body feel absent or unavailable? Does movement feel fragile rather than tense? Do you lack confidence in your body’s ability to handle physical demand? You might be someone who needs more recruitment, more connection, more structural integration to build the pathways that have gone dormant.
Most likely, you’re some combination of both. That’s normal. That’s human. And it’s why I’m a believer in approaches that address both the neurological and the structural, that can both subtract and add, that understand the body as a system that needs not just one kind of intervention but a conversation between different kinds.
I discussed the structural preparation for neurological learning in my post on fascial barriers. And I talked about how different bodies need different timelines for change in my post on the speed of change. This post is, in some ways, the synthesis of those ideas. Two directions of change. Two responses to dysfunction. Both necessary. The question is always proportion.
In my next post, I’ll continue this exploration with a look at how movement patterns establish themselves and why some are so stubbornly resistant to change. Because whether you need to do more or do less, the question of how patterns persist is central to everything we’ve been discussing.