Somatic Movement, Posture and Pain-Free Living: What Elise Foss Shared at the ICAA Conference 2025

What Happens When You Stop Performing Posture

Most of us were taught that good posture means chest out, shoulders back, and spine rigid. It turns out that instruction may be doing more harm than good. At the 2025 International Council on Active Aging conference, Elise Foss sat down with Cheryl Soloway on the Rocking the Ages program to talk about a different approach, one built around somatic movement and what it actually means to live in your body with ease. The conversation covered breathing, posture, chronic pain, and why a 90-year-old client felt more connected to her body than ever before. Here is what came out of that interview.

What Somatic Movement Actually Means

The word somatic comes from the Greek word for body, and in practice it refers to movement that focuses on internal sensation rather than external performance. Instead of asking "does this look right," somatic work asks "what do I feel." That shift changes everything about how you approach exercise and physical awareness.

Elise describes it as a way of building two specific capacities:

• Interoception, the ability to sense what is happening inside the body, things like hunger, fatigue, or tension building in the shoulders after a long day.

• Proprioception, knowing where your body is in space and how it is organized at any given moment.

When both are working well, movement becomes more intelligent and more efficient. When they are dulled, which happens gradually to most people, the body compensates in ways that eventually lead to pain and restriction.

Why Breathing Comes First

Every pattern Elise works with starts with breath, and not breathing in the way most people think about it. She describes a three-dimensional approach where the breath expands forward, backward, upward, downward, and to the sides simultaneously. That kind of full expansion creates space in the body that no stretch or exercise can replicate on its own.

This connects directly to what she explores in her blog on somatic breathing and neck tension, where shallow breathing is identified as one of the root causes of chronic neck and shoulder tension in people who spend long hours at a desk. Restoring the breath is often the first step toward restoring everything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RTfNAwCFuw

Movement Patterns That Reorganize the Nervous System

From breathing, Elise moves through a progression of developmental movement patterns, the same sequence the human body learns from birth. She uses the image of a starfish inside a bubble to describe how the center of the body connects to the extremities, a way of thinking about core connectivity that is more intuitive than the traditional idea of engaging your abs.

The progression moves from breath to spinal exploration and eventually to cross-lateral patterns, the kind of movement involved in walking and crawling that connects one side of the body to the other through the center. These patterns reorganize how the nervous system coordinates movement, which is why the effect goes well beyond the session itself.

Practical Tools You Can Use Today

Some of the most grounded moments in the interview were the ones where Elise shared specific techniques anyone can try right away. Here are four worth keeping:

• To release shoulder tension, lift the shoulders up intentionally, hold for a few seconds, then release slowly. That sequence alerts the nervous system and creates a release that simply telling yourself to relax never achieves.

• For screen workers, redirect the gaze rather than stretch the neck. Looking sideways, upward, and downward while keeping the head still mobilizes the neck gently and immediately.

• For posture correction exercises that actually hold, start from the ground up. The feet are the foundation of everything. Walking on different textures and separating the toes restores the sensitivity that balance and upright posture depend on. Elise explores this further in her post on what good posture actually feels like.

• For chronic tension anywhere in the body, explore what happens when you move into the tension intentionally rather than away from it. The nervous system responds differently when it is led rather than pushed.

It Is Never Too Late

One of the most memorable parts of the interview is when Elise talks about a client in her nineties who, through somatic work, felt more connected to her body than she ever had. That story says something important about what this approach is and is not. It is not about correction or performance. It is about helping the body remember what it already knows how to do.

Elise also shares that despite dealing with personal injuries, she feels better now than she did years ago and expects that trajectory to continue. That kind of long-term relationship with your own body is exactly what this work is designed to build.

Work with a Wellness Coach and Personal Trainer in Chicago

If this conversation sparked something for you, whether it is curiosity about somatic work, chronic tension you have been living with, or just a sense that your body could feel different than it does right now, this is a good moment to take a step.

As a wellness coach in Chicago and corrective exercise specialist, Elise works with clients one-on-one to build programs that address the whole body, not just the symptom. And as a personal trainer in Chicago with over 30 years of experience, she brings both the science and the sensitivity this kind of work requires. If you are also looking for a health coach in Chicago to support broader lifestyle change alongside movement, Viva Elise offers that too.

Book your initial consultation and find out what your body is capable of.

Watch the full interview. Rocking the Ages. Somatic Movement, Posture and Pain-Free Living with Elise Foss

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Elise Foss, M.S. GLCMA, is a certified personal trainer in Skokie, IL, a wellness coach in Chicago, and a NASM Corrective Exercise Specialist with over 30 years of experience. She is a presenter for the International Council on Active Aging and the founder of Viva Elise, a holistic fitness and wellness practice serving the Chicago North Shore.