40-year-old reaches millions on TikTok as 'The Workout Witch': I found a 'deep sense of purpose'

CNBC

5 days ago

To better understand the cause of her chronic pain and insomnia, Liz Tenuto majored in psychology. Her studies led her to psychotherapy for healing, like EMDR, and a better understanding of how the nervous system operates.
While working as a professional dancer after college, a suggestion from her teacher put Tenuto on the path to becoming "The Workout Witch."
"It was actually my ballet teacher who noticed that I was very dissociated when I wasn't dancing," Tenuto, 40, tells CNBC Make It.
"[They] kind of nudged me to take a somatics class."
In 2008, somatic exercises were still pretty new to most people. "For me, it just looked like a bunch of people rolling around in their pajamas on the floor," Tenuto says. "So I was very skeptical at first, especially with an academic background."
Somatic exercises were created to relieve tension from the body and entail moving in slow and mindful ways that shift the focus from how you look to what you feel. Yoga, breathwork and dance are all considered forms of somatic movement.
"It's micro-movements. They're really tiny, and you do very little in a class," Tenuto says. In the sessions she attended, "we maybe did three or four movements in an entire hour and a half class. And it had profound effects."
Somatic movements can be beneficial for a number of reasons, but is most widely touted for its effect on the nervous system.
"Our nervous system has different ways that it can be activated — sympathetic activation, which is fight-flight, and parasympathetic activation, which is freeze or shut down," she says.
In between those two modes of activation is a middle ground called the "ventral vagal state," which is a state of homeostasis. "You're balanced, you're social, you're grounded, you're regulated," she explains.
The polyvagal theory indicates that doing somatic exercises may put you in the ventral vagal state, lead to better emotional regulation and get you out of fight or flight.
"You're just reinforcing safety in your body as you do them over and over again, and you're practicing this regulated state," Tenuto says.
"It's similar to building muscle. As you continue to build those new neural pathways and practice the exercises, that starts to become stronger than some of your trauma responses."
During the Covid-19 shutdown in 2020, Tenuto began uploading videos of herself demonstrating somatic exercises to the social media platform TikTok, which was gaining in popularity at the time.
"I was posting the exercises, really to just hold me accountable for doing one exercise per day. Because at that time, I was having a really hard time just getting out of bed," she says.
"I was very sad at the time. I was going through a divorce."
Tenuto says sharing that daily exercise was the only thing that helped, and she was stunned when her account went from zero followers to 10,000 in just two to three weeks. Today, she's at 2.2 million.
Before the pandemic, Tenuto taught Pilates and somatics classes and had private clients who she guided through injury recovery. Seeing how receptive the audience on TikTok and Instagram were to her videos filled her up with a "deep sense of purpose," she says, and showed that sharing her work online could be just as effective.
Now, Tenuto's somatic therapy demonstrations for healing trauma, alleviating symptoms of anxiety and shifting out of "functional freeze" go viral.
Tenuto deemed herself "The Workout Witch" because "when people experience these exercises, they do think that there's some magic, and some like woo woo stuff going on with them," she says.
"I wish there was, but it's really just using neuroscience with movement."