Just say NO to Somatic Strength

Sadly, you can't actually build strength just by squeezing a block between your legs really really hard.

Hi! If you’re new here, I’m Naomi. I’ve been teaching movement for 21 years and writing about all things movement, fitness, wellness, and health for nearly as long.

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"the yoga you were taught was not designed for your changing body"

“Menopause is not a mistake. The yoga you were taught was not designed for your changing body.”

This ad popped up in my facebook feed a few weeks ago and I was immediately curious.

The ad was for a workshop titled “Menobelly”, a topic I was writing about at the time. I wondered about their take on it, so I signed up to receive the replay, knowing I wouldn’t be able to watch live.

I didn’t think anything in the workshop would inform my menobelly piece, but I did question what 2 yoga teachers might have to say about menobelly and how it connected to the idea that “the yoga you were taught was not designed for your changing body.”

That phrase felt deliberately confrontational – clickbait designed to get your attention and possibly challenge deeply-held beliefs if you are a longtime yoga practitioner.

Of course they want you to not only click, but sign up for the workshop because the workshop isn’t the endpoint. Free workshops like this are usually intended to sell something else – something much bigger. So in addition to my curiosity about their hot take on menobelly, I wanted to know what they were selling – especially given that one of the women leading the workshop is the daughter of the woman who quite literally wrote the book on Restorative Yoga, a style of yoga that is fully rest-based and not physically dynamic.

If I’m honest, I sort of expected her to say that women in midlife need more restorative yoga, given that she is taking on her mother’s restorative yoga mantle, professionally.

When I finally sat down to watch the replay, I wasn’t entirely wrong.

The workshop was what I expected – a sales pitch for a more expensive course led by the 2 teachers. And while it wasn’t entirely problematic – they both mentioned many things I fully agree with – there are 3 major issues with what they presented and the course they sold.

Emphasis on strength training, but their method won’t keep its promise

The teacher who led the majority of the workshop said many true things about strength training and the importance of building bone, as well as muscle, as we age. “Asana isn’t up for the task,” she said bluntly.

She’s not wrong. Multiple studies have shown that yoga is inadequate in regard to increasing bone density and muscle mass. This includes higher intensity practices like ashtanga and power yoga.

According to multiple clinical trials, as well as systematic reviews and the recent position stand by the ACSM, the only thing that actually increases bone density and builds muscle is strength training, which means lifting weights.

If you want to increase bone density, you have to regularly challenge your bones by increasing the stress on them. This is called progressive overload. You’re not lifting the same amount of weight for the same amount of reps every time you do a particular exercise. You are either increasing the load or increasing the reps or possibly increasing the total number of sets. You aren’t necessarily doing this every time you lift – you’re aiming to get 1 or 2 reps shy of failure. So as you get stronger, that number will increase, which is why it’s less important how heavy you are lifting and more important to learn how to be aware of your capacity.

Anyway, the point is that bodyweight strength doesn’t typically cut it, either. At least not if you want to increase bone density.

Same is true for hypertrophy, aka increasing muscle mass. You need to repeatedly stress the muscle(s) you’re targeting in order to make those muscles bigger.

And yet, the 2 teachers leading this workshop stated that bodyweight strength and strength exercises with resistance bands were of primary importance, suggesting you could eventually “build up” to working with hand weights.

Friends….yoga is a bodyweight practice.

So if “asana isn’t up to the task” why are they telling the women in this workshop that bodyweight strength is somehow different from yoga?

I can think of a few reasons.

One is that they are playing into the fears that older women have around lifting weights. The LIFTMOR trial demonstrated that lifting heavy weight is a safe practice, even for women who are post menopause, who have never lifted weights before, and who are osteoporotic. But because most older adults aren’t up on the latest in bone research, the idea of lifting weights can seem scary and dangerous.

In a new ad for another upcoming workshop called “Graceful Aging: Osteoporosis”, one of the teachers mentions “functional resistance training.” The thing is, all resistance training is functional. She’s using this language to assure viewers and potential participants that they’re not doing anything crazy. No big, heavy weights. Just cute little dumbbells you can fit right in your hand.

I understand that when working with older populations, many of whom are de-conditioned, you do need to start slower and smaller. Additionally, bodyweight isn’t ineffective. In my own practice, I do bodyweight exercises regularly, as well as exercises with resistance bands. And I program them all the time for my clients. But there is a limit to most bodyweight strength exercises.

I get the sense that these teachers want to ease folks in. They also likely want to stay as close to their scope of practice as possible, which is the world of yoga.

However, for most folks, eventually graduating to those tiny dumbbells won’t really move the needle when it comes to building strength, increasing bone density, or muscle mass.

Putting limits on the kind of movement older women can do does not help them

The whole premise of this workshop is that the yoga we know is not the yoga we need in midlife and as we age. More broadly, they make the claim that yoga wasn’t made for older female bodies. There is some truth to the 2nd statement, but certainly not the first.

It is true that the yoga we know today was shaped by a man (Krishnamacharya) who taught several influential men in modern day yoga (BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Desikachar), as well as many young upper caste Indian boys. It’s also true that none of these men – Krishnamacharya, Iyengar, Jois, or Desikachar – had any training in anatomy or kinesiology. In fact, Krishnamacharya largely pulled the yoga poses that we are now familiar with from gymnastics and his imagination, along with perhaps some inspiration from ancient texts (although not as much as people would like to believe).

This is simply to say that he wasn’t thinking of any particular group of humans to teach this yoga to. That doesn’t mean that it’s somehow not suited for women in midlife.

More importantly, the whole idea of age-appropriate or female-appropriate exercise is absurd. There are women who run marathons into their 90’s. There are women who continue to set records for strength training in their 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. There are women who dance for as long as their bodies allow them to.

meet Liz Moore, 77 years old and lifting 223lbs

The notion that we should or should not move in a particular way as we get older is not only unhelpful, but it’s limiting.

It’s also worth noting that in spite of the fact that these teachers suggest the old yoga is out and their new way of moving is in, there is no real evidence that it is radically different from what you’d get in an average yoga class, although perhaps with more focus on the pelvic floor.

I scoured their community message boards, their Instagram profiles, and YouTube to see what they teach or practice. All I could find was a short demo of a bodyweight version of a Turkish Get Up by the lead instructor. On social media I found the other teacher doing a few exercises in a very low lit room with small hand weights. And another video of the same woman treating those hand weights like pom poms.

SMH.

To further the “women are not small men” narrative, the focus of the Menobelly workshop is exclusively on the pelvic floor. This is fair, given that many women have pelvic floor issues and doctors sometimes treat it as no big deal.

The lead teacher offered a sequence of exercises to “provide neuromuscular re-education” and “get organs moving back into their neighborhood” –referring to pelvic organ prolapse.

None of the exercises involved even resistance bands. Just yoga blocks. Could it help re-educate the pelvic floor? Maybe.

But is it strength training?

No.

Neither is the sequence they’re sharing in that “Graceful Aging” workshop, which they promise will support bone health. With the exception of 2 exercises featuring resistance bands (both of which are seated or supine), all of the exercises are yoga-adjacent. No deadlifts. No squats. No pulling.

This workshop is meant to teach movement that will support bone health, but offers nothing that will in fact support bone health.

Why is this relevant?

They are putting women in a very small box. They’re suggesting the women need to rewire their neuromuscular connections through a new way of moving that is relatively similar to those same, familiar yoga poses they just said were not right for these women.

And they’re saying women need to build strength without giving them the actual tools to do so, instead giving them a prescribed sequence of bodyweight only exercises that again, look suspiciously similar to yoga.

If you’re going to say that women need movement that is different than what they’ve been doing for years, but essentially offer them something very similar AND doesn’t actually do the thing you promise, you’re not helping women. You’re helping yourself.

Is somatic strength a thing? As a marketing term, yes. Beyond that, no.

The program the 2 teachers sell at the end of the workshop is called Somatic Woman and features something they call “Somatic Strength.”

The word “somatic” is showing up everywhere these days, from therapy to diet plans to writing workshops to fitness classes.

It’s so ubiquitous that the word “somatic” has sort of lost its real meaning, in that people overlay what they want to believe it means, mostly based on vibes.

Many people associate somatic work with calming the nervous system or releasing trauma. Gentle bodywork. Grounding, calming, and quiet.

The word “somatic” simply means “related to the body.”

So “Somatic woman” really just means “relating to a woman’s body,” which I guess tracks if you’re leading a program focusing on women’s health. But using the word somatic feels deliberate because it’s such a buzzword. They could have called it Embodied Woman, but that doesn’t have the same cachet as Somatic Woman.

And then there’s “somatic strength”, their version of strength training, which from what I can tell without purchasing the program, is a bunch of yoga poses dressed up occasionally with resistance bands.

What does “somatic strength” even mean?

In reality, it means absolutely nothing. Strength training is always related to the body. But the word “somatic” makes a certain kind of woman feel like she’s doing something that is both scientific and spiritual. If you don’t know what “somatic” means or what it’s rooted in therapeutically, that’s an easy assumption to make, based on how it’s used in a marketing context.

For example, on the website promoting Somatic Woman, some of the copy reads, “Learn to adapt your practice to your changing body. Strength, rest, and nervous system regulation working together, not against one another. Practices designed to lower cortisol, regulate hormones, and restore your nervous system. Deep rest as medicine.”

You might simply assume that somatic means therapeutic and gentle and somehow related to nervous system regulation.

That’s truth-adjacent, but not entirely accurate. The use of the word “somatic” as both a marketing term and practice has links to a specific type of therapy pioneered by a man named Peter Levine, called Somatic Experiencing. Levine’s theory is that trauma is stuck in the body and that the best way to release trauma is through the body via “somatic exercises”. A physical release.

Suffice it to say, this idea is really popular in the woo circles that want everything to be self-solvable largely through introspection and thoughtful movement.

I have lots of thoughts about this, as someone who was taught this belief in the yoga world, but I will save those for another time.

Instead, I’m going to refer to the words of Diana Fox Tilson, LICSW, who is an actual therapist and has written about Peter Levine and his dubious claims. She writes, “The more I dug into Levine’s work, though, the more it became apparent that Levine’s theories and his trademarked intervention, Somatic Experiencing (SE), are not evidence-based. Levine’s conjecture that trauma is “frozen” in the body and that SE will “release trauma” has given many people the impression that they have to engage in a mystical process to release their pent-up traumatic experiences even though there is no evidence to support this. While you may not have heard of Peter Levine or SE directly, his buddy Bessel van der Kolk widely disseminated Levine’s ideas in his bestselling self-help book, “The Body Keeps the Score.” These ideas have trickled down through the culture and spawned a genre of wellness influencers who create videos promising to release your trauma if you do their “somatic” hip-opening exercises.”

Tilson goes on to say that somatic experiencing is unsupported by current research and flattens trauma into a wide array of things from profound abuse to everyday stressors. It’s a little like Oprah saying, “You get a trauma, you get a trauma, everyone gets a trauma!”

Is the point of “Somatic Woman” to release trauma through somatic strength training, nonviolent communication, and restorative yoga? Because none of the women leading are truly qualified for that. Or are they suggesting that there is a specific way to do resistance training that is gentle and will relax your nervous system? Because that doesn’t make biomechanical sense.

Even if neither of those things is true, I think it’s pretty egregious to use a term incorrectly, solely for the purpose of selling something. That’s grifting, plain and simple.

If they’re unaware of what the word “somatic” truly means or its origins in a style of therapy that has little scientific legitimacy, why use the word? That feels scammy.

On the other hand, if they do know and don’t care, they’re intentionally playing on people’s ignorance and desire to create healing, which is unethical.

What I want to make clear is that I don’t have a vendetta against these women, nor do I actually believe they are acting unethically. I believe their intentions are good, even if their methods are questionable. I think they want women to feel stronger as they get older and want them to have a healthy relationship with their aging bodies.

My concerns are largely with their methodology and their marketing.

If you want to teach women how to reprogram their pelvic floor and you don’t want to incorporate actual strength training, choosing to use your proprietary sequence instead, just do that – but please don’t call it “somatic strength.”

That’s a bogus term that is genuinely meaningless but might lead women to believe they are both healing their traumas and strengthening their skeleton at the same time.

But if you are promising women that they will learn how to build strength, protect their bones, and increase muscle mass, you need to incorporate exercises that actually do those things. You need to do them with regularity, not just once a month. And you need to include actual weights.

You cannot just repackage the very same asanas that you say are not up to the task, call it somatic, and let them believe that they are preventing age-related frailty.

That is false advertising.

In fairness, I have not paid money for Somatic Woman. I’ve taken a free workshop, watched 1 very long YouTube video, and a lot of instagram reels. Many people sing the praises of the pelvic floor sequence and the work of these women.

But I will say that getting stronger doesn’t work if you’re not offering the reality of what it takes to build strength and are only selling the fantasy.

*****

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