Why Movement at the Core Matters

The centre of your body is where moving your body begins. Most people have heard of core strength, but overly contracted, tight muscles at the core are the main cause of many postural and movement problems. Every step, reach, or breath depends on the coordinated action of your spine, diaphragm, abdominals, and hips, and the muscles that support the skeletal system need to have the ability to contract and relax. Postural muscles form your internal support system, the bridge between the upper and lower body.

Tightness in the muscles of the torso prevents the natural contralateral flow of movement, which is the human motion or coordinating opposite arm to leg during walking. When this suffers, everything else, arms, legs, neck, and shoulders, has to work harder.

Most people hold tension here without realising it. Stress, prolonged sitting, or constant forward drive teach your nervous system to keep these muscles switched on. Tight backs, tight chests, shallow breathing, restricted shoulder blades are common place. Over time, you stop feeling how you’re holding yourself.

That’s why Somatic Movement emphasises reducing tension in muscles at the core of the body as a first step and reconnecting to the sensation of all these muscles.

The Brain–Body Communication Loop

Your brain and muscles are in constant conversation through the sensory–motor system:

• Sensory nerves send signals upward, such as what you feel, position, pressure, and stretch.

• Motor nerves send signals downward informing what you do, how much to contract or release.

This loop governs all voluntary movement. But when stress or habit repeatedly triggers the same muscles, this feedback becomes distorted. The brain stops registering clear sensory information from those areas.

The result is what the creator of Somatic Movement, Thomas Hanna, called Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA), the loss of both neurological and conscious awareness of specific muscles or movement patterns. They keep contracting automatically, outside your volitional control.

In practical terms:

• You can’t feel the tension, so you can’t change it.

• Stretching or strengthening doesn’t reach the root, because the brain isn’t fully involved.

• You live inside the pattern without knowing it.

Self-Sensing: Reclaiming Conscious Oversight

Hanna Somatics is sometimes called sensory-motor education because it doesn’t just train the body, it trains your ability to feel and direct your own movement.

Through slow, mindful practice, you learn to notice subtle contractions, holding patterns, and asymmetries. This process of building awareness of habitual movement patterns, reawakens the possibility of learning new and more functional ones.

You’re essentially reuniting two levels of control:

1. The neurological (automatic regulation through the brain and spinal cord).

2. The conscious (your felt, voluntary awareness of how you move and hold yourself).

As these reconnect, your brain regains both oversight and choice. You no longer move reactively or habitually, you move consciously, and with choice.

The Contralateral Pattern: The Signature of Human Movement

Humans movement is notable in its use of the contralateral pattern , right arm with left leg, left arm with right leg. This pattern gives us our graceful walking gait, rotational power, and the ability to move efficiently in upright posture.

Every contralateral action, from walking to swimming to throwing, is initiated in the core. The muscles of the trunk create the gentle twist through the spine that drives the opposite-side coordination of arms and legs.

But when the core is tight or asymmetrical, this pattern becomes innefficient. Somatic Movement restores this cross-body rhythm. By releasing core contraction and retraining awareness through slow, sensory motion, the brain re-establishes coordination between left and right sides, reawakening the effortless rhythm of easy human movement.

How Somatic Movement Restores Control

The primary tool in Somatic Movement is pandiculation a conscious contraction, followed by slow release and rest.

This simple sequence does three things:

1. Reawakens sensation — you feel what’s happening again.

2. Restores motor control — you regain voluntary command over those muscles.

3. Recalibrates muscle tone — the brain resets the resting tension to neutral.

Each pandiculation is like a dialogue between brain and body. Instead of forcing a stretch, you re-teach the nervous system how to let go. The release isn’t imposed from the outside,  it emerges naturally from awareness.

You can read more about Pandiculation in the article: Pandiculation: The Secret to Releasing Muscle Tension

Moving from the Centre to the Periphery

Once tension has been release from the centre of the body it is also necessary to release tension in the arms, leg and extremities.

These outer areas often carry secondary tension patterns created in response to what’s happening centrally. When your trunk is tight, your limbs compensate to stabilise or counterbalance. Over time, this creates a chain of tension that travels outward such as a stiff shoulder mirroring a tight spine, or clenched jaw reflecting  tight abdominals.

From Disconnection to Integration

Releasing tension isn’t just about loosening muscles, it’s about reclaiming the full map of yourself.
When you begin at the centre, restore self-sensing, and then expand that awareness to the periphery, movement, and its coordination across the entire system, reorganises.
Your body and brain start working together again, in dialogue rather than in disconnection.

This is what Somatic Movement ultimately offers: a return to integration. The core leads, the limbs follow, and movement once again flows as one continuous conversation between sensation and action. You rediscover the quiet intelligence of your own body, balanced, responsive, and free to move with ease through life.