AFGWA online ATM master classes offers a rare opportunity to learn directly with the world's leading Feldenkrais educators. Designed to deepen your understanding of ATM lessons and elevate your practice these sessions provide fresh insights, practical tools and a welcome space to connect with other practitioners.

Muscles learn, too... with Andrew Gibbons

As a Feldenkrais teacher, you are trained in the value of skeletal support. But your understanding of muscularity and how muscles contribute to lessons may be less coherent. Clarifying your understanding of muscular synergies deepens your study of Awareness Through Movement lessons. Muscles are the primary means through which we generate movement as well as restore balance, and they’re the main tissues through which sensory information arrives and is governed. Integrating a muscular understanding into your teaching neither kills the mystery, nor complicates the model of movement and awareness that we teach. It adds to and deepens our explanations and interpretations of the method and can engage your audiences with ideas and images that have greater specificity, reliability and functional value.

…and your obliques should be famous.

When Dr. Feldenkrais spoke about “coordinating flexors and extensors”, he meant your obliques—or at least how to resolve some of the conundrums buried in the abdominal layers. In this masterclass, Andrew Gibbons will lead you through the popular “coordinating flexors and extensors” ATM lesson and explain why an understanding of your obliques lies the heart of the lesson’s design, constraints and success. By clarifying the shape, direction, and contribution of these muscles to the patterns of true rotation, you will strengthen your appreciation and understanding of this lesson and the many other rotationally driven ATMs: e.g. “dead bird”, “carriage of the head’”, and “sidelying, lifting the arm in an arc”.

Included :

The functional reasons behind specific constraints in the lesson design.

How to cue certain steps in the lesson for more reliable results.

Applications in sitting and standing, racket sports (like golf and tennis), and the continuous dynamic miracle of walking.

Time for Q&A

Anatomy App demonstrations.

About Andrew...

A practitioner for over two decades, and an assistant trainer since 2017, Andrew has taught Feldenkrais for the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, the Doctoral PT program of SUNY Stoneybrook Medical School, for musicians in the Manhattan School of Music's wellness program and in other public programs sponsored by the NY Department for the Aging, and has worked as an ergonomic consultant for The New York Times. He delivered a Tech Talk at Google’s New York headquarters on Avoiding the Black Hole of Computer Posture, and contributed a chapter about working with musicians for the recent book, The Feldenkrais Method: Learning Through Movement (Handspring Publishing, 2021). Since 2008 he has worked as a practitioner in residence teaching Feldenkrais for elite classical musicians every summer at the prestigious Marlboro Music Festival.

He is a graduate of Columbia University, and the Manhattan School of Music.

LINKS:

Private practice in New York (Manhattan & Long Island): www.bodyofknowledge.me

Online learning community platform: www.feldenkraisfirst.com