What is Pandiculation? By Sarah Warren
Pandiculation is generally defined as the act of stretching and yawning and is our nervous system’s natural way of waking up our sensorimotor system and preparing us for movement, especially upon waking. Pandiculation is our innate response to the sensations of lack of movement and to tension building up in our muscles—which often go hand in hand so our automatic pandicular response has far more significance than simply prompting us to stretch and yawn. Pandiculation is a fundamental part of our neuromuscular functioning. When it comes to maintaining our health, pandiculation is equal to exercise and eating a balanced diet. When we stop pandiculating, our muscles become tight; we experience pain, poor posture, and limited movement; and over time, the structure of our body breaks down.
How does natural pandiculation work? Humans, along with all vertebrate animals, tend to automatically pandiculate when we wake up or when we’ve been sedentary for a while. If you’ve ever seen a dog or cat arch their back when they get up from a nap, or watched a baby stretch their arms and legs as they wake up, you’ve witnessed the pandicular response. Pandiculation sends biofeedback to our nervous system regarding the level of contraction in our muscles, thereby helping to prevent the buildup of chronic muscular tension. This is an extremely important function of the pandicular response. A pandiculation contracts and releases muscles in such a way that the gamma loop, a feedback loop in our nervous system that regulates the level of tension in our muscles, is naturally reset. This resetting reduces muscular tension and restores conscious, voluntary control over our muscles.
Preventing the buildup of tension in our muscles is critical to maintaining healthy posture and movement throughout our lives. Fetuses have been observed pandiculating in the womb, showing how deeply ingrained the pandicular response is in our nervous system and how fundamental it is to our musculoskeletal functioning. Unfortunately, as we age and develop habitual ways of standing and moving, our natural pandicular response typically can’t counteract all the learning that occurs in our nervous system. Our repetitive, sedentary lifestyles are quite different than the active lifestyles of our ancestors. We tend to build up muscle tension at a much faster rate than they did because we move less and tend to have less variety in our movements. As we gradually build up muscle tension and lose awareness and control of our muscles, our pandicular response often becomes inhibited.
Pandiculation as a voluntary movement
Thomas Hanna, the founder of Clinical Somatic Education, studied neurophysiology and the effects of the pandicular response. He explored how pandiculation directly addressed the habitual muscular tension that was the underlying cause of his clients’ chronic pain and posture and movement issues. Hanna developed hands-on movements and self-care exercises that made use of the pandicular response. The technique of voluntary pandiculation that Hanna developed is a highly specialized type of eccentric contraction—the action of muscles that are engaged while they lengthen under load. Picture what your biceps are doing as you lower a dumbbell, for example. The muscles are slowly lengthening, but are still engaged as long as you hold the weight.
A voluntary pandiculation must be performed very slowly and consciously so that the nervous system is able to sense and integrate the biofeedback that the movement provides. The opposing muscles should not engage during the pandiculation. And the resistance, or load, must be applied so that the actively lengthening muscles are fully engaged throughout the movement’s range of motion. In a hands-on pandiculation, the practitioner provides resistance to the muscles that are actively lengthening. These hands-on movements can be performed in any position relative to gravity because the practitioner can adjust the direction of the resistance as the student moves through the range of motion.
The human nervous system is plastic, meaning that its function changes based on the input we give it. Our nervous system is capable of changing and learning throughout our entire lives. Just as our nervous system learns to keep certain muscles tight, it can also learn to release that chronic tension. Pandiculation is the most efficient and effective way to release chronic tension, relieve muscle soreness and pain, and restore full voluntary muscular control.
Clinical Somatic Education is so effective because it is far more than a method of movement that someone made up—it’s an extension of our innate neuromuscular functioning. The technique of voluntary pandiculation allows us to reduce our resting level of muscle tension to baseline levels, restore our natural posture and movement patterns, and regain full voluntary control of our muscles.
Practicing Clinical Somatics exercises teaches you how to use voluntary pandiculation to reduce your muscle tension and restore natural posture and movement. It also increases your sensorimotor awareness, so you’ll likely experience your natural pandicular response more often. Pandiculation is so fundamental to maintaining our health that it is equal to exercising and eating a balanced diet. If we want to prevent musculoskeletal pain, poor posture, limited movement, and structural breakdown as we age, we must pandiculate our muscles every day.
For more information, check out the following books:
Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility and Health by Thomas Hanna
The Pain Relief Secret: How To Retrain Your Nervous System, Heal Your Body, and Overcome Chronic Pain by Sarah Warren, CSE
