Habits and Hustle - Episode 550: Liz Tenuto: The Somatic Exercises That Calm Your Nervous System in Under a Minute

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

The Greek word "soma" means body. Somatic exercises were first researched in the 1970s as a way to release trauma and stress through tiny physical movements, bypassing the mind entirely.  Decades later, most people still think it sounds like a woo-woo wellness trend. That gap between what the science says and what people assume is exactly why I wanted to sit down with Liz Tenuto. Liz, better known as The Workout Witch, has nearly 5 million followers, 240,000 students, and a 99% success rate with her courses. She holds a degree in Psychology from UC Santa Barbara, is certified in Pilates and Reiki, and spent six years being mentored in the Feldenkrais Method under Augusta Moore. With fifteen years of hands-on teaching experience, she bridges science, movement, and somatic practice to help people release stress, stored trauma, and tension from their bodies, using the same methods that got her off beta blockers for anxiety. Her work has been featured in USA Today, BBC News, Harper's Bazaar France, and more.   In this Fitness Friday episode with Liz, part one of a three-part series, she shows me several somatic exercises live on the podcast. One of them nearly put me to sleep on camera! She also breaks down why your body holds onto stress long after your mind has moved on, what chronic stress is actually doing to the way you look and feel, and why so many people struggle with pain, bloating, and sleep issues that no doctor can fully explain. If you have ever felt like your body is working against you no matter what you try, this conversation will change how you think about where stress actually lives and what it takes to release it. What's Discussed: (00:00) What is somatic healing and how it differs from meditation, breathwork, and talk therapy. (03:20) How a ballet dancer with PTSD discovered somatics out of desperation. (04:06) The first somatics class that changed everything and why it made her cry in the bathroom. (04:42) How somatics reestablishes the mind-body connection when your nervous system is stuck in freeze. (05:27) The live forehead exercise that calms your fight-flight response in under a minute. (07:25) Why this simple exercise can make you feel like falling asleep almost instantly. (07:37) The cranial nerve behind the forehead exercise and why it works so fast. (08:23) The ear pulling exercise that stimulates your vagus nerve and gives you an instant energy boost. (10:40) How bilateral stimulation connects somatic exercises to EMDR therapy. (11:44) What CPTSD is and why somatic exercises help people heal trauma without verbalizing it. (12:21) The different schools of somatics that have been researched since the 1970s. (13:29) The somatic exercise for sciatica using a figure four position and gentle rocking. (15:19) How stress accelerates aging and why chronic stress caused a gray streak during a toxic marriage. (16:57) Why your body diverts energy away from repair systems when stuck in survival mode. (19:48) The scalp exercise that brings blood flow back and helps repigment gray hair. (21:41) The "chair twerking" bloating exercise that can make a difference in as little as three days. (24:18) Why sequencing matters and one exercise alone is not enough for lasting results. (25:11) How somatic exercises work as a full wellness modality for strength, stress, and emotional healing. Thank You to Our Sponsors! AirDoctor: Head to AirDoctorPro.com and use promo code HUSTLE to get up to $300 OFF today! AirDoctor comes with a 30-day money back guarantee, plus a 3-year warranty (an $84 value) FREE! Kion: Visit getkion.com/habits or 20% OFF Momentous: Ready to try supplements that actually do what they claim? Head to livemomentous.com and use code JEN for 35% OFF your first subscription.  Therasage: Visit Therasage.com and use code JEN to get 15% OFF your order. Your skin deserves this level of care. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code JEN at checkout. Prolon: Prolon is offering listeners 30% OFF sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program! Just visit https://prolonlife.com/JENNIFERCOHEN and use the code JENNIFERCOHEN to claim your discount and your bonus gift. Find more from Jen Cohen:  Website: www.jennifercohen.com Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements Find more from Liz Tenuto: Website: https://theworkoutwitch.com/  Instagram: @theworkoutwitch TikTok: @theworkoutwitch  YouTube: @theworkoutwitch Threads: @theworkoutwitch Facebook:The Workout Witch Embody App: https://theworkoutwitch.com/products/embody  When The Body Speaks Book: https://theworkoutwitch.com/pages/book 

Hi, guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it. Hey, friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. You guys, we have a great episode ahead. Well, I hope it's a great episode. I think that this is a really interesting topic.

I don't, you know, full disclosure, I don't know much about this topic, which is why I'm super interested and excited to have you on here. Never had a somatic healer. Is that what you would call you? Her name, though, is amazing on socials. It's the workout witch, which is, I love that name. Thank you. It's great to be here. Oh, thank you for being here. It's great to have you. Like, her name is Liz Tenuto. Her book is called When the Body Speaks and How Somatic Healing Sets You Free. Thank you for being here. Can you just tell us all just in layman's terms, what is somatic healing? Like, what is it? What are we dealing with here?

So soma is the Greek word for body. So somatic healing literally translates into body healing. What I teach are somatic exercises, which are really tiny micro movements that you can do in bed or on the floor or even like in your car waiting out of red light. or on the plane that release stress out of your body, release tension out of your body, release trauma, and regulate your nervous system. So is it like another modality? Like they say like, you know, breathwork is a very popular one right now. Of course, meditation, things like that. Is somatic, is it, what is that what you call it somatic healing? Is that just another modality that really just helps, like you said, calm your nervous system and do you? stress? Like, exactly. Yeah, okay. It's just another modality. I would say it's more under the

umbrella of therapy. Yeah. But it kind of spans therapy and wellness and, and therapy and even fitness. Therapy is considered like a top down method, which means that it's more cognitive mindset based. And then somatic healing or somatic exercises, what I teach is bottom up. So you're really working from the body. So don't you have to be, would someone have to be really in tuned with their body to have it even work for them or to, is it more like psychos, is it also psychosomatic? Because the reason why I'm asking is, I've recently gone through like kind of a traumatic experience and people were like, you should try somatic, you know, somatic healing. And it seems like such a, it seems so foreign to me that I couldn't even, like, I couldn't even wrap my head around it.

Right? Yeah. It seems woo-woo. And that's, I'm like the most, I'm the most un-woo-woo person you can ever meet. Yeah. So anything that seems or sounds woo-woo, it's like right away, like my guard goes up. Yeah. And, you know, I know that you do Reiki and you do, what other stuff? Other, other Pilates. Yeah, of course Pilates. Yeah. But this to me was, like I said, was really interesting because of, I have had friends who, who do it, who've done it. I've asked you about a couple of my friend I was talking about before and they're obsessed with it. Yeah. They think they get so much out of it. Yeah.

Which is why I wanted you on here today. Yeah. I had a really similar experience when I first started. I was actually invited to a somatics class by my dance teacher. I used to be in my early, early 20s, I was a ballet dancer. And my dance teacher was like, oh, you're so dissociated all the time and I knew I had PTSD at that time. And she was like, come to my somatics class. And I had seen her class and it was just people rolling around on the floor in their pajamas. And I was like, I don't know what this is going to do for me. I was so skeptical, but I was also desperate. I was in a lot of pain at that time. I had sleep issues. I had chronic pain, chronic anxiety, lots of dissociation. And so yeah, out of desperation, I tried it. And I cried in the bathroom after my

first class because it felt so good. And I had never felt that good in my body before. So like if you're just, if you're a dissociated person or if you were, how did you, how did you associate or how did you even feel anything the first time? Because the whole idea of dissociation or the idea of like being, you know, compartmentalized or whatever, like it is that you cannot associate, right? That you cannot feel. Yeah. And that like the mind, body connection. Yeah. So, you know, when we think of the nervous system, you can think of it essentially as like the highway, the connection between your mind and body. And when you're dissociated, your nervous system is kind of in a freeze state or it's dysregulated. And what somatics is really good at is reestablishing that connection.

So if you think about yoga, there's kind of like a right and wrong way to do the poses in Western yoga. And somatics is not like that at all. It's really about reconnecting you to your inner landscape. And my teacher used to say, like, your version is the right version of doing this exercise because the way that we cue people through the exercises really reconnects the mind and body and brings you back into that associative state. Oh, so if it's, can you give us an example, actually? Yeah.

Yeah. I think that'd be good. That'd be good because I can ask a million questions, but I think sometimes it's easier to learn when you have an example like that. Yeah. So let's do one together and I'll talk through. Okay. What do I do? We're just going to sit here. Oh, okay. We'll sit with our... Should I move this? You don't really need to. We'll sit with our ankle tip distance apart. Yep. And then you're just going to take your finger and place it in between your eyebrows. Yeah. And you can have your other hand resting. Perfect. Anywhere is fine. Great. And then we're going to swipe up on our forehead. Once it gets to your hairline, you'll lift off and come back to your eyebrows. We'll just repeat that action over and over again.

If at any point your arm gets tired, you can rest, put it down, and then pick it back up when you're ready. So I'm just taking my finger for those who are listening from my eyebrow to my head, right? And then just then taking my finger off. Yep. And we'll do medium to firm pressure here. You can go a little harder than you think. Great. And as we do this, how relaxed can your jaw be?

how soft can the hand that's resting on your leg be great how relaxed can your stomach be excellent can you unclench the sphincter excellent imagine be as lazy and unambitious as you do as possible as you do this as that you could drool as you do this and we'll just do like one or two more and at any point when you're ready you can rest. And we'll just pause for a moment, see how you feel. That is a really quick exercise that instantly relaxes you. It actually calms your fight-flight response. I can fall asleep right now. Yeah, I know. Oh my God, I should have waited at the end of the podcast. I know. I'm exhausted. I should have told you that before we started. Wow. I feel tired. Yeah. Yeah, it immediately calms the

fight-flight response. Why? It connects to a cranial nerve that connects down to to your brain stem, and that is where your fight-flight response gets activated. So by just taking your index finger or any finger and just pushing and pressing up from your between your eyebrows to the top of your head, that works? How long does someone need to do that for? What I teach is five to ten minutes a day. So I have an app. I have courses, and I do five to ten minutes a day of practice.

but, for example, on my way here, I was feeling a little tired. I had a late flight into L.A. last night. And so on my way here in the car, I did an exercise to stimulate my vagus nerve by pulling on my ears that gave me like an extra burst of energy. And I just did like a minute and felt immediately. And it works. It works. Yeah.

It works really, really well. Can we do that too? Yeah. You want to do it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should mine as well because now I'm going to fall asleep on your interview. So, yeah. Okay, great.

Are you wearing earrings? Yeah. Okay. So we'll just work around the earrings for now. We'll still have the ankles, hip distance apart. And you're just going to use your hands and pull firmly down on your earlobes. And you're going to pull right, left, right, left. And you can have medium to firm pressure here.

And we're going to start to walk up the earlobes all the way up to the top of the ear. And we're just pulling right, left, right, left. and we'll walk down the earlobes. We're just going to repeat that action several times. And it's almost like you're pulling them out. Yeah, exactly like that. Mm-hmm. And then as we do this, see if you can relax in the toes.

So your toes aren't clenched, unclunching the eyebrows. Great. Seeing if you could drool as you do this movement as well. It's looking at me like, what are you doing? This is the moon. And then go ahead and rest. Okay. I still need a coffee.

That didn't work as well. And then the first one worked. The first one is very relaxing. This one, you'll feel a little surge of energy. It can take, it can take, this one takes like maybe you'll feel brighter in your face. See, I just drink my magic minds. Yeah. What's by the way we should do right now.

See, to me, this is how I get my energy and my focus. But like, but I feel like, by the way, cheers. These are really good. Have you had one before? No, thank you. I'm excited to try it. Oh, yeah. This one has no caffeine. It's great for focus. So, mm, delicious. Have you, you've never had one? No. My God, they're amazing. People love these things. I usually just down them, but the reason why I'm not, I've had like four today. I don't know how many I'm supposed to have.

Hmm. Maybe we can do like a, this with the, with the, uh, pulling of the ears. Yeah. How does that like, so explain to me how that works. Like, number one, You have all these modalities that you've been taught through, like you said, like a coach or somebody who just is there like a book that says do this to feel that. And then with practice, it just helps. Like, tell me how you became the person that does all this stuff. Like you didn't, you didn't make up these things, did you? Or some of the exercises that I teach, I created kind of knowing the principles of somatic exercises. For example, what we just did with the ears. Yeah. Utilizes a principle called bilateral stimulation, which is. Also found an EMDR therapy with your eye movements right to left. I know that. So tell people who don't know what that is because that's another therapy, form of therapy, that's supposed to be extremely effective.

It is really effective. It's another bottom up therapy, meaning that you don't have to necessarily remember your trauma or even verbalize your trauma, and it will still help you heal from trauma. It's great for people with PTSD and CPDSD. What's it called CP? C-P-T-SD is complex PTSD, so folks who experienced abuse during childhood or if people were in like a really abusive relationship, just like long-term trauma. Oh, okay, okay.

Is C-B-T-SD. Essentially bilateral stimulation is done in EMDR, and I created some exercises that utilize bilateral stimulation, but just with different body parts in a different way. But the majority of the exercises that I teach are exercises that people have been researching since, like, the 1970s. And under the somatics umbrella, there are several different schools of somatics. There's EFT tapping. There is body mind centering. There's Feldenkrist. There's Alexander Technique. So there are all these different schools of thought. And I really discovered this and became good at it for my own healing from trauma. And then I was teaching, I was certified in Pilates. And so I started kind of

like introducing some of the somatic exercises into my client's lessons. Most of them were healing from injury. And they were like, oh, we love this. Can we, you know, can we start and end the lesson with this? And I just started teaching it more and more. And during COVID, I really started posting it online. and people became, I thought it was going to be very niche, but now I have like 4.8 million followers across platform. That is crazy. Yeah. Okay, so give me an exercise for sciatica.

Yeah. So you're going to be moving the whole time. So you would lay down on the floor. Oh yeah, another one of these. Okay, the brain fog and the sciatica, the two good ones. You would lay down on the floor and you would place your, actually have a free 21-minute class on YouTube. For sciatica? It's not for sciatica. It's just a full body relaxation class, but it will help your sciatica. But let me give you a specific. It'll like relieve the pain of sciatica. A specific

sciatica exercise would be you're laying down on the floor. You have both of your knees bent. They're facing the ceiling. Angles, hip distance apart. Arms down by your side. You make a figure four position with your leg, which means that your right ankle is on the bottom of your left thigh. And then you would just take that whole shape and rock it a little bit to your left and come back. And it just is this really, and we would just like, it looks more like the whole shape rocking like this. Yeah. Oh. Yep. And you keep your shoulders relaxed on the floor and it's a, you would just take it a little bit to the side and come back because you don't want to pull on the sciatic nerve. You don't want to experience any pain. But then if the small movement feels good, we could make it like 10, 10% bigger, 20% bigger.

We would just do that on both sides. If you tend to have more sciatica pain on one side than the other side, I would repeat the side that you experience more pain on one more time with you. And that's a great quick extra. I love that. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to try that. And then you do both sides, you said, right?

How about our faces? Yeah. And our hair. I see people who, when they're going through a lot of stress, they get much more gray hair. and their face starts to get more age, like more wrinkles and fine lines. How do we stop that? And besides just taking a peptide and injecting it, what can we do other than that somatically to look our best? Yeah. So with hair, for example, I was in marriage and it was a really stressful, toxic marriage, and the guy was not good to me. And I was quite young. I was like in my early 30s. And I got like this huge.

gray streak in my hair while I was married and then was doing somatics as I was getting out of the relationship and then just got out of the relationship and my hair repigmented back to my natural color, which is brown. So stress, essentially what stress. How is that possible? Yeah, stress, like extreme amounts of stress like that. It's all connected to your survival response. So when you're in fight, flight, freeze, your body diverts energy away. from non-essential functions like pigmenting your hair. And it conserves this energy only for the most essential functions. So that's why you'll start to experience faster signs of aging. You'll start to experience more wrinkles. You'll start to experience the graying of your hair or like bags under your

eyes can be connected to lymphatic drainage too. There can be other things, but essentially stress accelerates aging because your body is diverting energy away from its natural repair systems and from its non-essential functions. Once you get your body out of its stress mode, out of its stress response, then your body's like, cool, we can divert energy back up to the stem cells that are pigmenting the hair. We can divert energy back to collagen production, for example, in your face. But I've never seen people go from gray hair like because look at Obama like he became totally gray after the you know being the president his hair never went back to being the regular color or like people who age right like when you're 50 or 40 you don't have gray hair but then when you're 60 or 70 or 80 you have gray hair

I don't see the fact that like if that was the case when you're retired and don't work and don't have any care half of florida would be brunette and blonde without gray hair yeah so this goes up to a point So once you turn 60, then that's when genetic aging starts to kick in. And there's not much that you can do. Right. So there's a difference between getting gray because of aging. Pre mature, yeah. Or premature because of like chronic stress. Exactly. Yeah. So if you're getting grays and, you know, if you notice like, ooh, my hair is getting gray a lot faster. Like, and you're also in a really stressful period of your life. That's very, and you're also under 60. Like, that's all very connected. I mean, there are different. I mean, sometimes it's genetic. And like you're just, but like I will say though, like, of course, there's every extent of way, there's different circumstances. But I will say for the most part, if you really think about it, people who are highly stressed, they do look older. Like even the fact like, you know, every mom I know, right? They age. If a mom I see at 40 who has two kids, three kids and they're like, they're in it look older than a 40 year old who's basically has no kids who doesn't.

have that additional stress and responsibility, there is a difference. You know, it's just what it is. Yeah, exactly. And it's really how your body is processing stress. Processing it, right? So you're saying some of these exercises can actually help remove and release some of this stress. And then your body's natural repair systems can kick back in. You get out of survival mode, diverse energy back to the non-essential functions. your body is self-healing. So really you just need to like give it this catalyst of getting it out of its stress response and the body does the rest that work for you. And so is there a particular, a particular exercise we can do to kind of look younger like face-wise and bloating? I got a million. I you're never leaving. Yeah. So in terms of like your scalp, for example, and you can

do exercises where you're moving your scalp or even like pulling on your hair a little bit like this. So I'm just, for anyone who's listening, I'm just taking my right hand and I'm placing my fingers on my hair and I'm grabbing my hair close to the scalp and then I'm just giving it a little tug. And you can just do that all over your head and that brings blood flow back up to your scalp. That's a good one. Yeah. And what does that do? It helps with great with natural repigmented. your hair back to its natural color. Oh my God. That's such a good one.

It's such a good one. Yeah. So I teach a bunch of scalp exercises as well. So maybe Obama will do them one day. I don't even know why all the people I thought of him. The only presidents hasn't looked a day older is Donald Trump because, you know. Because he already is. Yeah.

Also, because he doesn't give a shit. He's not stressed. He's not stressed, you know? Yeah. Hold on. This is a really good one. Yeah. So can go on the top or just the bottom.

Yeah. Yeah, you can go on top. You can go all over just pulling your own hair a little bit. And it, brings blood flow back up to your throat. Oh, my God, I love it. Yeah. We're going to do this after. This is such a good one. It's so good. Oh, my, it also feels good. It feels good. I see why you're so popular. Oh, my God. Give me another one. That's what I'm saying is because it feels good. So people are, like, immediately like, yes. I want to keep doing this. Because so far, you gave me two really good ones that are really easy to do. Yeah. That it doesn't like require much effort. It's just like you're sitting here. You might as well, like, put your finger on your forehead and you know, press it up towards. It's like the easiest things. Yeah. Yeah. It's super, super easy. I do them on the plane like all the time. Yeah. Give me another one. Give me one for bloating. And I think that's a big one. Everyone I talked to is bloated. Yeah. Because that's gut health. Could you do a lot with gut health too. I do a lot with gut health. Yeah. So with bloating, there are, there is more of like a sequence that you want to do, but to get us started, we can sit with our ankles, hip distance apart like this.

Okay. Great. And then we're just going to think about the tailbone rolling towards our knees and coming back up. And you're just going to do that movement over and over again, and you can make it tiny, tiny. It's almost like chair twerking. Yeah, it is kind of chair twerking. I like it. Yeah. This is a seated pelvic tilt or seated pelvic clock for anyone who's familiar with somatics. You can also do this laying down on the ground. And this helps with bloating? This helps release some stress out of your body, which this is why I said that there's kind of like a sequence that you want to do.

But if you practice this for about like eight days and you do this little sequence for, that's like a five to ten minute sequence for about eight days, you'll notice the significant difference in your bloating. This is amazing. Okay, wait, I want to check something on your Instagram. So for the bloating one, when you do that, are you, able, like, like you're telling me within eight days, people's bloating will go down? Sometimes three.

Really? How long do you have to do the exercise for? Is it a minute? Is it 30 seconds? I repeat each exercise for about a minute. Okay. And then there's like an intentionally sequenced series of exercises that I take people through for different things.

So how important is sequencing, though? It's super important. It's super important, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, like, it's not just one exercise. Exactly. Like, you're, like, for, for, you know, today, because you're here showing me, like,

oh, here's one for this, here's one for that. But to get the best, like, best bang for your buck, you need to do, like, a series together, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's like going to the gym. If you do squats, yes, it's good for your butt. But if you do squats and deadlves and, you know, an RDRL and a, you know, Bulgarian, you're going to get the whole, every muscle in the, in your glutes.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Same thing. Exactly the same thing. Yeah. So now I'm really getting to understand this. So this is like literally like an entire different wellness modality to like like basically make you stronger. You know, emotionally and like everything. Yeah. Make you stronger and prettier. Yeah. Stronger, prettier. Spiritual more emotionally evolved. All the things. I love it.