Somatic Exercises

Somatic exercises arrived in most people’s feeds through short videos promising that a few gentle movements will release trauma, reset your nervous system or shift stored tension. Some of that is useful. A fair amount of it is oversold, and almost none of it comes with the cautions it should.

Richard and Helena Boyd at the Energetics Institute have practised as somatic psychotherapists in Perth since 2005. This is the version we would give a client. What somatic exercises are, five you can try, what the research genuinely supports, and the part nobody publishes, which is who should not be doing this alone.

What Are Somatic Exercises?

Somatic exercises are slow, deliberate physical movements done with attention on how the movement feels from the inside rather than on how it looks or how hard it is.

That internal focus is the whole distinction. In strength training or most intense workouts, the attention goes to the external goal, the weight, the rep, the distance. In somatic movement, the physical movements are almost incidental. What you are practising is noticing physical sensations while you move, which is a skill in itself and one most of us have very little of. That is the mind body connection in its least mystical form, and building internal awareness of it is the point of the whole exercise.

The label covers a broad set of somatic practices. Feldenkrais and the Alexander Technique come from a movement education lineage. Somatic experiencing and sensorimotor psychotherapy come from a trauma treatment lineage and are clinical therapies rather than exercises. Somatic yoga and somatic workouts sit somewhere in the middle. These get lumped together online, and they are genuinely different things with genuinely different evidence behind them.

Somatic Yoga, Somatic Massage And Somatic Tracking

Four related terms get searched constantly and mean quite different things, so it is worth separating them.

Somatic yoga is the biggest of them by search volume and the loosest by definition. In practice it means a yoga class run slowly, with small ranges, no alignment corrections and attention on sensation rather than shape. There is no governing body and no standard training, so what you get depends entirely on the teacher. It is a reasonable entry point if you want somatic movement in a class setting, and it is not a distinct evidence base.

Somatic massage generally means bodywork delivered with attention to the client’s felt experience, rather than a therapist working on a passive body. It sits outside our scope as psychotherapists, and it is worth checking a practitioner’s actual qualifications, since the term is unregulated.

Somatic tracking is the outlier, because it has the best trial evidence of anything on this page. It is the central technique in pain reprocessing therapy, and it means attending to a pain sensation with curiosity and from a felt sense of safety, rather than bracing against it. In a 2022 trial published in JAMA Psychiatry, 151 people with chronic back pain were randomised to pain reprocessing therapy, an open label placebo injection, or usual care. Two thirds of the therapy group were pain free or nearly pain free afterwards, against 20 per cent and 10 per cent. That is a large result, in a specific population, for a full therapy programme rather than the technique alone.

Where The Idea Came From

You will read that somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning the body as experienced from within. That is half right and worth correcting.

Soma in Greek simply means body. The richer definition, the body as perceived from within by first person perception, is Thomas Hanna’s, who founded the field of somatics in the 1970s. It is a good definition and a modern one, not an ancient etymology.

The underlying idea is that a great deal of muscle tension is habitual rather than structural. Your body learns a posture in response to stress, injury or long hours at a desk, and then keeps holding it because holding it has become the default. Somatic movement therapy works on increasing awareness of that holding, on the theory that you can only release what you can feel. It is used well beyond therapy, including in dance practices with professional and student dancers, though that literature is about training rather than treatment.

Before You Start

This section matters more than the exercises, and no competing page we could find includes it.

We are somatic psychotherapists, not physiotherapists, exercise physiologists or doctors. Nothing here is exercise prescription, rehabilitation or medical treatment. If you have an injury, a spinal condition, are pregnant, or have a heart, respiratory or seizure condition, check with your GP or physiotherapist before trying the movements. Work slowly, stay well inside comfortable range, and never move into pain.

There is a second caution that is less obvious and more important. Turning attention inward is not neutral. In one controlled trial of mindfulness based programmes, 58 per cent of participants reported at least one unpleasant effect, including anxiety, re-experiencing of traumatic memories and feeling detached or unreal. Sustained body awareness is precisely the thing that goes wrong for some people with a trauma history.

So if you live with post traumatic stress disorder, dissociation, psychosis or bipolar disorder, or an eating disorder, please do this work with a practitioner rather than from a page. If a practice increases distress, stop. That is information, not failure.

Five Somatic Exercises To Try

These five somatic exercises are the ones we most often give people to practise between sessions. Give each a few minutes rather than a set number of repetitions, and stop well before anything feels like effort.

Body Scanning

Lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor, or sit if lying down is uncomfortable.

Move your attention slowly from your feet upward, pausing at your calves, thighs, pelvis, belly, chest, shoulders, arms, neck and face. You are not trying to relax anything. You are only noticing what is there, including temperature, pressure, contact with the floor, and the places where you find nothing at all. Blank patches are information too.

Body scanning is the foundation for everything else here, because you cannot release tension you have not noticed. Daily practice of even a few minutes builds the sensory awareness the other exercises rely on, and it is the quickest route to genuine self awareness about how your body feels before you are in trouble.

Arch And Flatten

This is the classic movement from the Hanna somatics tradition and the one people feel most quickly.

Lying with knees bent and feet flat, inhale and let your lower back arch gently away from the floor, tilting your pelvis. Exhale and slowly flatten your lower back down towards the floor. Go slowly enough that the movement takes the whole breath. Six to eight rounds is plenty.

The point is not the stretch. It is noticing the difference between the two states, because that contrast is what teaches your system where its resting default currently sits.

Grounding Through The Feet

Simple, portable, and the one we use most with anxiety.

Sit with your feet flat on the floor. Press both feet down firmly for about five seconds, then release completely and notice what changes. Repeat a few times, then simply feel the contact between your feet and the floor, your legs and the chair, your back and the backrest.

Honesty about this one. Grounding exercises are a widely used clinical tool drawn from practice experience rather than from trial evidence. A 2025 review found that no study has yet established their efficacy. We use them constantly because they help people in the room, and that is a different kind of claim.

Slow Paced Breathing

Breathing is the fastest route to a change in physical responses, and the most misrepresented.

Sit comfortably. Breathe in through your nose for a count of four and out for a count of six, keeping the whole thing gentle. Five minutes is enough. Stop if you feel lightheaded. Most people under stress default to shallow breathing without noticing, so simply lengthening the breath is often enough to promote relaxation and reduce stress.

Two clarifications. This is slow, low intensity deep breathing only, not rapid or connected breathwork, which has its own contraindications and should not be done unsupervised. And while extended exhales are widely recommended, the evidence for that specific ratio is mixed, so use whatever pace feels unforced.

Gentle Shaking And Stretching

Stand with your knees soft and let your body bounce lightly, allowing your arms, shoulders and upper body to loosen. Thirty seconds to a minute. Then stop, stand still, and notice what is happening before you do anything else.

Follow it with some gentle stretching, particularly anything that addresses neck tension, which is where most desk workers hold the day. These are simple movements and they belong in a daily routine rather than a special session. Let your head slowly slide from side to side rather than rolling it.

The pause afterwards is the exercise. Shaking is the setup, and the noticing is the practice.

What The Research Actually Shows

Here is the honest picture, which is more mixed than the wellness content suggests and more encouraging than a sceptic would expect.

The strongest finding is about balance. A 2022 meta analysis of 16 randomised trials found the Feldenkrais method produced a large improvement in mobility in older adults, with unusually consistent results across studies. Improved balance is the best supported benefit of somatic approaches, full stop, and for older adults that single change does more for physical well being than most interventions.

Slow breathing has decent support. A meta analysis of randomised trials found small to moderate reductions in stress, anxiety and depression. Movement generally helps chronic pain and physical function, though a Cochrane overview of 21 reviews covering more than 37,000 people rated the overall evidence quality as low and the effects small to moderate. And mindfulness based training modestly improves how people report experiencing their bodies, pooled across 29 trials. Research suggests mindful movement and mind body techniques help most with stress relief and how people relate to bodily sensations, rather than curing anything.

What is weaker than advertised. Somatic experiencing has two randomised trials, one positive against a waiting list and one that found no significant benefit when added to physiotherapy. Hanna somatics has one uncontrolled retrospective study whose own authors say placebo effects cannot be excluded. And there is no good evidence that slow movement lowers cortisol specifically. The best meta analysis found the mind body subgroup was not statistically significant.

One more. Polyvagal theory is invoked constantly in somatic content. In 2026 a group of thirty nine physiologists and evolutionary biologists published a consensus assessment concluding the theory is not supported by current evidence. The underlying observation, that slow breathing and gentle movement shift autonomic arousal, holds up fine without it.

The Eighty Six Per Cent Claim, Corrected

You will see it repeated everywhere that somatic movement reduces chronic pain by 86 per cent. It is worth knowing what that number actually is.

It comes from a 2008 randomised trial published in the BMJ involving 579 people with chronic back pain across 64 UK general practices. The group that received 24 one to one Alexander Technique lessons reported 18 fewer days in pain per four weeks than the control group, down from 21 days. That is where the 86 per cent comes from.

Three corrections follow. It measures days in pain, not pain intensity. It required 24 individual lessons with a registered teacher, not a self guided routine. And the Alexander Technique is a specific discipline, not somatic exercises in general. The trial is genuinely impressive. It is just not evidence for what it is being used to sell.

When Somatic Exercises Are Not Enough

Self practice and clinical work are different things, and conflating them is the most common mistake we see.

What you can do alone is build body awareness, settle ordinary stress, ease muscle tension, improve movement quality, and get better at noticing your own state early. Body movement of this kind is legitimate self care, it supports emotional health and emotional well being, and for many people it is all they need. It can also help relieve chronic pain, though pain relief from movement is usually gradual rather than dramatic.

What a session provides that a page cannot is another regulated nervous system in the room. A somatic therapist tracks what is happening in your body while you talk, adjusts the pace when you go too fast, and helps you come back when something opens up. That titration is the safety mechanism, and it does not exist when you are alone on a mat following a video.

There is also a counterintuitive signal worth knowing. Shutdown can feel like calm. If you consistently finish a practice numb, blank or far away rather than settled and present, that is not the practice working. Traditional talk therapy alone often misses this too, which is part of why body based work exists.

What This Looks Like In Practice

These are composite examples drawn from our clinical work, with identifying details changed.

A man in his forties with persistent neck and joint pain had been given stretches by three practitioners and did them diligently without change. He was performing the stretches at the same intensity he did everything else. Slowing the movements down by half, and adding the noticing, did more in six weeks than two years of effort had.

A woman in her thirties had been doing somatic exercises from social media daily for months and reported feeling calmer and increasingly flat. What she was describing was not relaxation. Once we slowed the work down and added contact, the flatness lifted and the emotional awareness underneath it became available.

A woman in her sixties came for anxiety and left with something she had not asked for. Balance work improved her confidence on stairs, which changed how much she left the house, which did more for her mood than the anxiety work did.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions we are asked most often about somatic exercises.

Do Somatic Exercises Really Release Trauma?

Not in the way the phrase suggests. There is no good evidence that a movement discharges a stored traumatic memory. What body based work can do is help people notice and settle physical responses linked to past experience, which supports trauma recovery over time. Australian guidelines recommend trauma focused psychological therapies as first line treatment for post traumatic stress disorder, and we would not suggest somatic exercises instead of those.

Can You Do Somatic Therapy On Yourself?

You can do somatic exercises on yourself. Somatic therapy is a clinical process involving a trained practitioner, and it is not the same thing. Self practice is a good complement and a poor substitute where there is significant trauma history, dissociation or a mental health condition. Start with the gentlest options and pay attention to how you feel afterwards, not just during.

How Long Before Somatic Exercises Work?

Most people notice something in the first session, usually a small change in muscle tension or breathing. Lasting change in habitual holding patterns takes a daily practice over weeks. A few minutes daily beats an hour on Sundays, because you are retraining a default rather than treating an event.

Are Somatic Exercises Good For Weight Loss?

No, and the claim is worth naming because it is common. Somatic exercises are low intensity and not designed for energy expenditure. They may improve posture, body awareness and how sustainable other movement feels, which can help indirectly. They are not a substitute for regular exercise, and anyone selling somatic workouts primarily for weight loss is misrepresenting them.

What Is The Difference Between Somatic Exercises And Stretching?

Stretching aims at a physical outcome, usually length or range. Somatic exercises aim at changing the instruction your brain is sending to the muscle, which is why they are slower and smaller. This is also why forcing a somatic movement defeats it. If you are straining, you have left the exercise.

Getting Support In Perth

Somatic exercises are worth doing. They are also more modest than the internet claims and less trivial than a sceptic assumes. Improved balance, easier movement, less muscle tension, better posture and a better sense of one’s body are real benefits, available from a daily practice of a few minutes, and they do not require you to believe anything about stored trauma or the transformative power of a stretch. Taken together they add up to a modest but genuine gain in overall well being.

The honest framing is this. Somatic exercises are a good way to build the skill of noticing what your body is doing. That skill is genuinely useful in daily life, it keeps you in the present moment more often, and it is the same skill clinical work is built on. Getting all the benefits on offer means practising when nothing is wrong, which is the part people find they feel challenging, because mind and body both prefer to wait for a crisis. Where there is trauma, chronic pain that is not shifting, or a pattern that returns no matter what you do, the noticing is the beginning rather than the treatment.

If that is where you are, we work with exactly this at our Inglewood rooms and online across Western Australia, with no referral needed. Call us on 1300 956 227, book a session, or read more about our somatic psychotherapy and sensorimotor psychotherapy.