What’s Hanna Somatics?

I first heard of the work 2 months ago when listening to a series of podcasts hosted by

Frank Forencich of www.exuberantanimal.com, if you haven’t heard of him I suggest you check out his site, that’s him in the picture, its a bit fuzzy but you get the idea that he likes movement.

Martha Peterson presented one of the podcasts and what she said peaked my interest.

How do we relax a muscle by manually treating it if is the neural input that is keeping it ‘tight’ and painful.
I’ve always been intrigued by this. My limited understanding is that we an have motor reflex feed back loops at three levels, the spinal cord, the brain stem and the cortex.  Movement expert, Professor Lederman from the UK, argues that in order to change all three levels of the motor nervous system any corrective exercise must involve:

1. Cognition – we have to think about the rehab, it can’t take place without thought.
2. Being active – we have to actively do the movement we aim to recover.
3. Feedback – In order to correct faulty movement the body needs feedback, (either internal or from a therapist).
4. Repetition – We have to practice the task again and again.
5. Similarity  – The rehabilitation should closely resemble the movement that is lost.

It seemed to me that the somatic exercises that Thomas Hanna has created hit on all those aspects of neural
re-setting and I was keen to learn more about how to change the brain rather than wasting valuable time and
energy banging away on muscles that may or may not change their aberrant high tone.

So I signed up for a 3 day workshop.

For years I had heard about the movement disciplines Alexander Technique and
Feldenkrias but didn’t know them in detail. In an over view Martha explained how the Alexander Technique aims to change posture through inner awareness and focuses on bringing the head back into alignment with the rest of the body. Feldenkrais looks at the centre of the body as the centre of gravity and building on that work Thomas Hanna, who was a student of Moshe Feldenkrais, developed Somatics with the aim of correcting reflexes that have become subconscious in the body. This subconscious adaptation can lead to a proprioceptive deficit around certain joints or muscles, a condition Hanna referred to as Sensory Motor Amnesia.

What these reflexes?
Hanna identified 3.Firstly, he looked at the landau reflex. This emerges in the toddler but usually is inhibited by 24 months.

Hanna argued that this reflex was still present in adults and useful in situations where we need to ‘move our butt’. Our lower back muscles contract, and our extensor chain is activated to help us move forward. As with all reflexes, once its usefulness is over our muscles should return back to a normal resting tone. However Hanna noticed that in some individuals this did not happen, and the reflex became habituated and people who we commonly refer to as sway back are ‘stuck’ for want of a better term, in this posture. He termed this posture, a green light response.

Secondly, he looked at the startle response. This posture has some usefulness in the short term for adults.

If there is a loud bag or some perceived threat the spine rounds, the shoulders and knees move medially protecting the vital organs and the eyes and mouthopen allowing in more light and air. This is good if the stress is short term. However, like the green light response he noticed that if the stimulus was constant enough that it too could become habituated. He termed this posture a red light response.

Thirdly, he noticed that when a person has suffered some sort of physical trauma, i.e. car crash, fall, etc they would go into a slight antalgic posture or functional scoliosis. This posture would remain even though the acute pain had long since passed. This he termed a ‘trauma reflex’.

What do you do during Somatic work?
The power of somatic exercises or education is in the use of pandiculations. These are movements which take the muscles to a full lengthening followed by a full contraction in a similar way to how a dog would get up from a sleep and do a slow arch followed by a ‘down dog’ then a slight shake before it starts to walk.

Hanna’s theory was that this slow mindful activation helps reset the alpha/gamma co-activation to reset the resting tone of the muscles. Interestingly researchers have noticed that most large mammals will pandiculate at least 40 times a day. Most of us only stretch like this once in the morning and occasionally our jaws will self pandiculate when we yawn but that’s about it. Imagine if we did it 40 times a day…pretty sure that would solve about 90% of work related muscular tightness!

What does it look like?
With my background in osteopathy and functional exercise I feel as though I have a good knowledge of exercises. I even use full-length contraction exercises to help flexibility in my clients. However, the somatic exercises are different to what I have previously been doing in two ways. Firstly, they are usually done on a mat lying either prone, supine or on the side. This loads the joints differently to standing and takes out the ‘righting reflex’ that exists when we are upright. Secondly, the speed is slow, very slow. The reason they are slow is because the aim is to take a muscle group that has become subconsciously tight through

a habituated reflex, consciously pandiculate it so that the conscious brain (cortex) becomes aware of it undoing the altered proprioception or sensory motor amnesia.

Does it work?
On the last day of the course we were asked to put our new skills to the test on a real client. Martha had arranged this for us and to my surprize my client was actually someone who I had seen and treated before with osteopathy.

To my shame when I was treating her osteopathically we didn’t have the results we would have liked I had referred her on to another discipline. When she walked in I was looking forward to putting somatics to the test. I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. After assessing her posture with a new appreciation of retained reflexes I put her through some simple exercises to correct what I saw and can say that in this one 45min session there was more change in her posture than in 4 osteopathic sessions. What’s more the exercises we worked on in the session was the ones I gave her for homework…so she can continue to help herself indefinitely.

I’m going to continue to work with somatics and see what it can do, I’m excited and if you are interested in finding out new way of helping those ‘hard to treat’ patients I recommend looking into somatic education by starting with Martha’s website: http://essentialsomatics.com/

 

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