Embodiment, Exercise and Wellbeing
The general discourse around exercise is that if we just had more motivation, discipline, or willpower, we’d exercise more. From the outside it looks simple - this thing is good for you, go do it. Yet for so many of us, it’s not that simple. Our relationships with our bodies and in turn with exercise and diet have been fraught and tense.
Embodiment research can help shed some light on what some of these dynamics are and how we can chose to start to foster a relationship with exercise that feels supportive and aligned rather than punishing and controlling our bodies.
A New Lens: The Developmental Theory of Embodiment
The Developmental Theory of Embodiment (DTE), developed by researcher Niva Piran and colleagues helps explain why our relationships with our bodies can feel so complicated. This includes exercise, eating behaviours and all of the domains of the body.
The DTE reflects how our sense of embodiment develops through our lifespan with influence from the culture, environments, and other people around us. It’s not something we’re born with and keep automatically; it’s shaped over time and is an ongoing meaning-making process. Through these relationships, we learn whether our bodies are safe to inhabit, whether movement is joyful or something to be judged, and whether we have permission to feel, express, and take up space.
According to the DTE, several domains shape our embodied experience, including:
Body connection and comfort: How at home we feel in our own skin.
Agency and functionality: Whether we experience our bodies as instruments of action and expression or as objects to manage and control.
Freedom vs. control: Whether we have space to live from our bodies, rather than constantly monitoring them.
Objectification and gaze: How being seen and evaluated affects the way we inhabit ourselves.
When these domains are disrupted, ie. by societal body ideals, trauma, shame, or exclusion, we lose a felt-sense of connection to our bodies. So if you’ve ever felt like exercise is something you “should” do but can’t bring yourself to do it, you’re not lazy. There are a lot of layers to understand about how we exist as a body and a person in the world. Fitness culture can often encourage disembodiment - acting on the body as an object, ignoring physical cues, distrusting body signals, and glorifying discomfort and pushing in extreme ways.
We are living in a system where embodiment hasn’t felt safe or free enough to move for so many people.
Why This Matters for Wellbeing
Research shows that positive embodiment, a deep sense of comfort, connection, and agency within one’s body, is strongly linked to wellbeing. (Including my research, which you can read here)
People who experience greater embodiment report:
Higher life satisfaction and vitality
More consistent and enjoyable physical activity
Healthier relationships with food and appearance
Lower levels of anxiety and shame
In other words, movement becomes sustainable not when we discipline ourselves harder, but when we rebuild access to our own embodied self and our aliveness.
Instead of using exercise to fix your body, you can move to listen to it. You can build a relationship with your body rather than chasing external measurements of success. You can get curious about what that resistance is trying to protect rather than trying to force your way through.
Through this pathway movement becomes a way to reconnect with your body rather than manage it and wellbeing, authenticity and self-connection follow naturally.
What This Perspective Offers Going Forward
The developmental view of embodiment offers a gentler, more compassionate path to movement. It allows us to recognize the context - your relationship to exercise didn’t form in isolation. It’s been shaped by social ideals, lived experiences, and what your body has learned about safety and belonging. Seeing that clearly helps loosen its grip. It shows us how we can reclaim agency when it comes to exercise and movement and self-define rather than forcing yourself to move. Perhaps most importantly, it gives us a place to practice attunement, rebuild the connection to our physical self, and get out of the cycle of overriding and control the body. We get to redefine success and make it about building a positive relationship with movement that is life-long rather than getting swept up in the next fix.
These small shifts, orienting ourselves away from constant control towards connection and curiosity are how we begin to rebuild trust with our bodies.
Coming Home to the Body
When we move with attunement, exercise stops being a project of self-improvement and becomes a practice of self-trust and connection. We’re not trying to become a perfect exerciser or have a perfect body. Rather we are choosing to become more embodied, more present, more connected, and more alive.
When we move from that place, movement stops being something we have to do and starts becoming a conversation between body and self. Your journey of embodiment is not over, regardless of how many years you’ve spent disconnected from and trying to gain control over you body, there are new ways of being to be explored
