I did not know I was locking my knees.
I would have told you — if you had asked me, during any performance in my first two years of standing in front of audiences — that I was standing normally. Comfortably, even. The way I always stand. Nothing unusual.
Then someone filmed me from the side during a corporate keynote in Vienna, and I watched the footage back, and I saw it immediately. The legs, straight. The knees, locked. The hips, slightly pushed forward to compensate. And you could see the effect moving upward through the body like a current: the torso slightly rigid, the shoulders slightly raised, the chest slightly elevated and tight.
Patsy Rodenburg has a framework for this. She describes the body as a chain — a linked system where tension in one area does not stay there. It travels. And the knees, she argues, are one of the most common points where the chain gets locked up, especially for people who are nervous or trying to project confidence through stillness.
The Chain and How It Works
Here is the cascade as Rodenburg describes it, and as I have since felt it and watched for it in myself and others:
Locked knees. The quadriceps engage to hold the joint rigid. The leg becomes a column rather than a spring.
Rigid hips follow. When the knees are locked, the pelvis has nowhere to move. The natural, slight swaying quality of a body in balance disappears. The hip joints freeze.
The lower back tightens in response. The lumbar spine loses its natural curve. The belly pulls in subtly, holding against the locked pelvis below.
The chest lifts. When the belly is engaged holding tension, the breath rises. The diaphragm cannot drop fully. The ribcage elevates.
The shoulders follow the chest. They rise, tighten, come slightly forward. The neck shortens. The throat, which needs space and ease to produce resonant sound, gets caught in the squeeze.
The voice changes. It becomes thinner, higher, more effortful. The natural resonance — the chest resonance that makes a voice feel present and authoritative — is gone because the chest is too tight to vibrate freely.
And the whole thing reads, from the outside, as a person who is slightly not here. Controlled. Contained. Not available.
This is the physical domino effect. It begins at the floor and ends in the mouth. And most performers have no idea it is happening, because each individual domino feels like nothing in isolation. The knees feel like nothing. The hips feel like nothing. The chest feels like a normal, comfortable chest.
Why Nervous People Lock Their Knees
There is a logic to it, once you understand what the nervous system is doing.
When you face a stressful situation — a speech, a performance, a presentation — your body prepares. One of the preparations is a bracing response. The muscles engage to hold you stable against the threat. This is ancient, pre-rational biology. The body is getting ready to be impacted.
Locking the knees is part of that bracing. It is the body trying to create a stable, immovable base. The problem is that stability through rigidity is false stability. A locked joint cannot absorb impact. A rigid structure cannot adapt. And on stage, the performance equivalent of this is a person who cannot respond — who is so busy holding themselves together that they cannot actually be present with the audience.
The irony is that soft knees — slightly bent, released, springy — feel less stable but are more stable. The body is in balance rather than rigidity. And from this more genuinely stable place, everything above it releases: the hips, the lower back, the belly, the chest, the shoulders, the throat.
I remember the first time I deliberately practiced soft knees during a performance. It felt precarious. It felt like I might sway or shift. I felt slightly exposed, as if I had removed some armor.
What I saw in the footage afterward was a different person. Easier. More available. More like someone who was simply standing in a room talking to people rather than someone who was performing in front of people.
The Warmth in the Knees
Rodenburg has an exercise she describes as the “warmth in the knees” — a way of releasing the joint without overthinking it. Rather than telling yourself to bend your knees (which produces a slightly awkward, consciously bent look), you imagine a gentle warmth behind the kneecaps. A softening. The joint releasing just slightly.
I use a version of this now as part of my pre-performance physical check. I run through the body from the floor up: feet flat, weight balanced. A warmth in the knees — release, not bend. The hips dropping naturally. The belly softening. The chest wide rather than elevated. The shoulders dropping — not pulled back militarily, just released downward, where they belong. The neck long.
This takes about forty-five seconds once you know what you are looking for. And it changes the quality of everything that follows, because you are starting from an open physical structure rather than a closed one.
The Consultant’s Particular Problem
I should say that this was a specific problem for me in a way that it might not be for everyone, and the reason is professional.
Consultants learn to project confidence through stillness and uprightness. There is a physical grammar in corporate settings — the way you hold yourself in a client presentation, the way you stand at a whiteboard, the way you occupy the head of a conference table. This grammar rewards a certain kind of controlled, poised stillness. The body does not move much. The voice is measured. The affect is professional.
This is appropriate for a lot of professional contexts. And I had spent many years developing it.
But it does not work on stage. Or more precisely: it works for about ninety seconds before the audience starts to feel that something is slightly off. That they are watching someone perform composure rather than simply being present. The professional stillness that reads as confident authority in a board meeting reads as guarded or stiff in a performance context.
The physical language of genuine stage presence is different. It involves more ease, more release, more visible breath. The body is slightly more alive — not theatrical, not exaggerated, just less held.
I had to unlearn some things I had spent years carefully learning. The locked knees were not bad professional habits. They were exactly the right professional habits, in the wrong context.
What the Chain Teaches About Integration
What I find most useful about this framework is the idea of integration — the body as a single system rather than a collection of independent parts.
Most performance coaching addresses specific symptoms. Your voice is too thin: here are vocal exercises. Your shoulders are tight: relax your shoulders. Your presence feels weak: try to be more charismatic.
Rodenburg’s approach starts further back: where is the physical source? Because there is almost always a physical source. The thin voice has a structural cause — probably chest tension, probably from the locked joint structure below it. Working on the voice directly, without addressing the structure, is working downstream.
I think about this a lot now when I watch other performers. You can see the domino chain. You can often trace the voice quality all the way back to what is happening in the feet and knees. The people whose voices you want to listen to are almost always the people whose bodies have a quality of ease and groundedness. And the people whose voices make you feel slightly tired or slightly tense are often — not always, but often — locked somewhere below.
None of this is about looking a particular way. It is not about performing relaxation or performing ease. It is about actually being in an integrated, open physical structure, because from that structure, everything else becomes possible.
The voice that makes people lean in. The pause that can actually breathe. The presence that says: I am here, and there is nowhere I would rather be.
It starts at the knees. Check your knees.