Theme descriptions for all weekly classes

“NECK, SHOULDERS - AND EYES!”
- Mondays 7.30-8. 30pm (UK)
ONLINE
- Tuesdays 7.45 - 8.45pm at The Haelan Centre, London, N8

"WHAT IS POSTURE?"
Wednesdays 10-11am (UK)
ONLINE

"A SUPPLE CHEST"
Fridays: 1.30-2.30pm
The Crouch End Fitness Centre, London N8

SPRING 2026

These on-going weekly classes are stand-alone so that you can drop-in as you wish and start in any week. If you are able to come regularly you will get a more complete picture. All the themes overlap and interweave, so coming on different days works too.

In each series of lessons we will address how we put our movement together, exploring and improving the fundamental habitual ways we tend to use ourselves, or get in our own way!

We will discover more approaches to reduce unneccessary difficulty and strain and find clearer movement pathways that use our whole selves to move with less effort and more clarity of intent.

The relationship of the neck and shoulders is often challenged by our habitual ways of sitting, standing, lifting, carrying, looking around ourselves, using our mobile phones, computers - just to name a few.
But if we can think of the neck as part of the whole spine, and notice how the shoulder girdle relates to both the neck and the chest, we can start to explore how we support and enable movement of the head and shoulders with our whole selves .
And how the eyes (and jaw and tongue even!) are part of that story too!

There is no one universally 'correct' posture; once we start to move, all the relationships between parts of ourselves have to change to maintain our uprightness, like an ever-shifting constellation.
But if we think of a simple standing posture as just a middle place between many different movements and directions, maybe that allows us to explore any improve all those different directions and movements and see how a new middle place emerges?

The rib cage or chest, being so challenged by its jobs of protecting lungs and heart, supporting the shoulder girdle and being situated between the flexible arches of the neck and lower back (and having names that make it sound solid and inflexible) is often quietly overlooked and starts to become fixed.
And yet its suppleness and mobility is crucial to help support the weight of the head, to enable breathing and to allow movement to flow through the whole structure from feet and hip to shoulders, arms and head.
A rigid chest is one of the biggest factors in so many of the mobility, balance and injury issues people face, but so many of us have little sense of its central role.