The ultimate key to resilience
“We are after all only guides on the path to healthier lives. As guides we need to have a firm understanding of how to navigate in a trauma informed way in a trauma filled culture.” - Ericka Thomas
Transcript
It’s not the work - it’s the rest!
Here it is! The last 2 pieces of the puzzle. The keys to understanding how we build resilience and ultimate health from the nervous system out. The key to ALL health improvements and reaching any fitness goal.
Trauma recovery through the body is complex. It’s different for everyone. Even experiencing the same event can’t guarantee the same reaction. Sometimes it’s immediate, sometimes you can carry invisible baggage around with you for years before it spills over. Sometimes you carry your history for so long all of the ways your body has adapted to it become normalized and welded into your identity. But it’s rare that people will share that history with their health coach. This is part of the reason why I feel it’s so important for wellness industry + fitness industry professionals to have a grasp on what is going on with the nervous system so they can offer a way out for clients while staying within their scope and not having to retell the story.
We are after all only guides on the path to healthier lives. As guides we need to have a firm understanding of how to navigate in a trauma informed way in a trauma filled culture.. Over the past few weeks we’ve discussed the first half of that trauma informed navigation starting with the center point for yourself, co regulation and then activation. Now I want to share the secret sauce to anything trauma informed. It comes in 2 parts.
The first is release.
It’s literally the stop. But in this case we’re going to give our participants directed opportunities to stop AND we’re giving them permission to stop. We spoke last week with Colleen Jorgensen about the importance of language of permission.
Now we can offer permission to stop in a group exercise class, yoga class or even a 1-1 training all day long and people won’t take you up on it if they don’t understand why or how to do it and still get results.
This is where your skill as an educator comes in. Not only are there a lot of false perceptions out there about how people get healthy but there’s still a lot of ego in our programming. So trainers and coaches have an opportunity to reframe intention with their clients and focus more on the whole person rather than only the biceps or only the glutes.
The Release offers a way for participants to check in with their body, to refine their physical edge and build more mindful awareness and trust within their own skin. It’s also an opportunity to practice NOT overriding their body’s pain sensations.
Release can be woven into any format with purpose and intention and then depending on that format you can take the opportunity to educate your students based on what they are experiencing. You can use intervals of release to connect with your students and let them connect with other people in the class. And secretly you can help direct their awareness to their experience in the moment.
I get that opportunity often in my spin classes. Just last week towards the end of class the conversation turned to max heart rate, what it should be, how some of the intervals people were gasping for breath. Which opened the door to another conversation not just about max heart rate but over breathing and how to actively influence heart rate through certain breathing techniques even when you’re working hard. And how you can still work hard and back off in that release then come back when you’re ready.
As trainers and coaches you already know that strength, speed, health gains aren’t made during the workout, they’re made during rest. Release and being in control of it is important during the movement.
Integration is where you give the body time to be completely still for some small amount of time, as little as five minutes, to shift its state from an activated sympathetic state, into the sympathetic golden turtle state that we talked about with Colleen.
Integration kickstarts recovery.
Recovery from the exercise you just did and also recovery from previous moments of stress. In yoga, this time is called final relaxation. When I first started practicing yoga my teacher always did an aromatherapy scalp massage during final relaxation. It was the main reason I showed up everyday. But when I started teaching yoga I noticed so many people skipping out on that last 5 minutes of class (even with the aroma therapy) This would especially happen when teaching in a gym setting and I saw it a lot with other instructors coming to class.
The excuses that I heard so often were that I can't lay still. My thoughts are racing. I don’t want to be quiet with my thoughts. I think the perception of these last few moments of stillness was that because you aren’t moving, actively doing something there’s no benefit.
What we know now thanks to people like Dr Andy Galpin and others is the last 5 minutes of any workout are critical to start the recovery process in the body and the nervous system. So even if your workout/exercise is not yoga you still can benefit from final relaxation by laying still and bringing in the breath like box breathing.
This is literally what we mean by integration. It gives the nervous system time to integrate what you just did to the body and moves into the parasympathetic in order to begin repairing and building resilience.
I love it when modern exercise science catches up to eastern wisdom don’t you?
Release and integration, the last pieces to the puzzle when we’re creating trauma-informed classes for others or when we’re trying to use exercise as a way to resolve trauma and stress for ourselves. If you missed the earlier episodes that describe our kinetic grace navigation process please go back and check those out and stay tuned in the next few weeks you’ll be hearing from some incredible fitness and wellness professionals that are great examples of how all this fits together.
Thanks for listening! What you do and who you are is important, the world needs you in all your glory. Whether you’re a fit pro or a student of health and wellness if you’re looking for trauma informed resources I have a free guide to holding space it applies to all humans. This guide is one of the first steps into safe co regulation, so check it out along with our show notes at savagegracecoaching.com.You’re going to want to get that guide because once you’re on my email list you’ll be one of the first to hear about the next run of Kinetic Grace integration. The full online course that goes deep into all the concepts we are touching on here. Not only will you learn the whole Kinetic Grace trauma-informed framework, but you’ll get hands-on experience, practice with all the communication skills, and live support as you begin to use these things in your classes. Stay tuned for more information and details to come.
In the meantime, stop working out and start working in.
Hey there!
I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a resilience coach and fit-preneur offering an authentic, actionable realistic approach to personal and professional balance for coaches in any format.
Savage Grace Coaching is all about bringing resilience and burnout recovery. Especially for overwhelmed entrepreneurs, creators and coaches in the fitness industry.
Schedule a free consulttation call to see if my brand of actionable accountability is right for you and your business.