An Entirely New Category
of Therapeutic Exercises

First off, people commonly confuse strength with control. Generally, if people have poor control of a muscle or movement, they describe themselves (and others describe them) as "weak".

While a person may have a deficiency of strength, the idea that a muscle is weak and needs strengthening misses the point: Usually, the problem lies not with the muscle, but with the person's ability to control it. That kind of control develops through a process involving movement and the brain's ability to learn to control movement. It's not a muscle problem; it's a brain problem, and not even (except for certain medical conditions), a problem of the muscle, but a problem of the brain -- a developmental (i.e., learning) problem -- learning to control muscles and movement.

Half of strength is muscle bulk, and the other half is control. People get their greatest strength when their muscles work in coordination. Witness the wind-up of the baseball pitcher; he doesn't throw "with his arm"; he throws with his whole body.

Secondly, weakness is rarely the issue. Usually, the muscles involved are not weak; they are fatigued from being tight all the time -- or they are being inhibited by the brain as their opposing muscles contract. The fatigue and/or inhibition feel like weakness. In other words, to describe such muscles as weak doesn't illuminate the cause of the situation. What's needed is for the muscle(s) to relax so they can be refreshed by rest, or their opponents/antagonists brought to rest so the brain-inhibition (reciprocal inhibition) ends; strengthening efforts are unnecessary; muscles regain their strength immediately.

Basic control of muscles is a developmental issue. Sometimes (often), people are awkward or they're truly weak because they never developed the ability to move well in certain ways. Look at handwriting as an obvious example; handwriting is a product of movement ("fine motor control"); people acquire good handwriting through learning and practice. That example applies to many kinds of movements: people may develop "gross motor control" but not "fine motor control", or they may not have any decent degree of control of certain kinds of movement because they never learned it; or they may have lost control from injury, not from damage, but from disruption of control caused only by the shock of injury or pain and its memory imprint on movement, which shows up as protective guarding reflexes outside ordinary control. The term, "workaround", applies here: When a muscle is inhibited or in contracture, the brain does a "workaround," recruiting other muscles (less suited) to do the movement of the inhibited or contracted muscle. As we know, workarounds are inefficient.

A gross motor control (gross movement) problem is quickly and easily remedied by such methods as weight training -- but weight training goes only so far because only gross motor control results from weight training, not finely graded coordination. The side-effect of weight training may be muscles that are too tight (musclebound) because what strength training teaches is contraction, not relaxation, missing half the control-pattern.

Finally, the pain. When muscles are too tight for too long, they inflict compression stresses on neighboring joints (including intervertebral/spinal joints). Muscles in that state have a chronic "burn", another contributor to chronic pain. It's not weakness that causes the pain, but overactivity of muscles.

Recognizing that fact, therapists may prescribe the alternative to strengthening: stretching.

Stretching

So, stretching involves either actions of the therapist upon the patient or actions of the patient that involve muscles other than the ones needing to lengthen to force those muscles to lengthen. The control problem remains and does not change until the patient learns to control the tension and movement of the shortened muscles, themselves.

Because the brain controls muscle length and tone, efforts to stretch muscles forcibly by whatever method -- active isolated stretching, yoga, traction -- miss the mark: the brain's habitual patterns of control develop through movement conditioning, which involves the full range from full strength through to complete relaxation, not through stretching actions.

The proof is in the results people experience.

Somatic Education Exercises

Somatic exercises recognize that muscular conditioning results from three things:

1. awareness of movement
2. basic control of muscle tension
3. coordination

To have that control, we need two things: (1) basic sensory awareness of movement, and (2) the ability to activate and to relax muscles at will.

Coordination

Coordination incorporates many muscles and movements into a single integrated action with such good regulation of strength and timing that we get the intended movement. It's strength (well regulated) and timing.

Awareness, Control, Coordination

Somatic exercises use movements to create sensations that the brain can learn and recognize as familiar and associated with a particular muscle and movement. That's the "awareness" part.

With repetition of somatic education exercises, one develops the ability to regulate the gradual build-up and decrease of muscle-power in a movement. That's the "control" part.

With incorporation of smaller movement elements into larger movement elements, done at first slowly and then more quickly, first of individual muscles (and movement elements) and then of multiple muscles (and movement elements), somatic education exercises develop coordination. That, of course, is the coordination part.

Strength and length -- plus coordination.

Because somatic education exercises train the brain (the master-control center of the muscular system), they are sufficient to free a person from reflexive, protective muscular guarding tensions that have outlived their usefulness and cause pain so that (s)he returns to a free, strong and supple state.