What are the 7 TRE® Exercises?

What are the 7 TRE® Exercises?

TRE® (Trauma Release Exercises) offers a unique pathway to healing through seven carefully designed simple exercises that activate your body's natural capacity to release stored tension and trauma. Developed by Dr. David Berceli, these simple yet powerful movements prepare your nervous system for the spontaneous tremoring that helps discharge survival energy trapped in your muscles and fascia tissue.

Understanding these seven exercises can help you appreciate how TRE® works with your body's innate wisdom to restore balance and calm to your nervous system.

The Foundation of TRE® Exercise Sequence

Each of the seven TRE® exercises serves a specific purpose in preparing your body for neurogenic tremoring. The sequence is intentionally designed to fatigue particular muscle groups, especially around the psoas muscle, creating the ideal conditions for your body's natural shaking mechanism to emerge.

The exercises progress logically, building upon each other to systematically tire the muscles that hold the most tension from stress and trauma. This methodical approach ensures that when tremoring begins, your body can access the deepest layers of stored tension patterns.

Exercise 1: Ankle Rolls and Grounding

The first exercise begins with gentle ankle rolls that help establish connection and grounding. This foundational movement awakens circulation in the lower extremities and creates a sense of stability and presence in your body. The grounding aspect of this exercise helps calm your nervous system and prepares you for the deeper work to follow.

Exercise 2: Fatiguing the Calves

The second exercise focuses on systematically fatiguing the calf muscles through specific movements and holds. This targeted fatigue in the lower legs begins the process of preparing your body's foundation for the tremoring response that will emerge later in the sequence.

Exercise 3: Fatiguing the Quadriceps

The third exercise targets the large quadriceps muscles in the front of your thighs. Through sustained positioning and movement, this exercise creates deliberate fatigue in these powerful muscles, which play a crucial role in our fight or flight responses and often hold significant tension patterns.

Exercise 4: Stretching the Adductors

This fourth exercise opens and stretches the adductor muscles along the inner thighs. These muscles often contract during stress responses, and stretching them helps release stored tension while preparing the pelvis and hip area for the deeper work of accessing the psoas muscle. This exercise incorporates deep slow breathing as well.

Exercise 5: Stretching the Front Body and Psoas

The fifth exercise focuses on opening and stretching the front body, including the crucial psoas muscle often called the "soul muscle." This exercise directly addresses the deep core muscles that hold our most primitive survival responses and emotional patterns. This exercise incorporates deep slow breathing as well.

Exercise 6: The Wall Sit

The sixth exercise involves a wall sit position that creates sustained fatigue in multiple muscle groups simultaneously. This challenging position builds upon all the previous exercises, creating the cumulative muscle fatigue necessary for your body's natural tremoring mechanism to emerge. It also “charges” the body up. Body temperature, pulse, and heart rate can increase, mimicking a fight/flight response which helps to elicit tremors.

Exercise 7: The Tremoring Position

The seventh and final exercise places you in the specific tremoring position where your body's natural shaking response can freely emerge. This position maintains the muscle fatigue created by the previous six exercises while allowing your nervous system to discharge stored tension through spontaneous neurogenic tremoring.

The Science Behind the Sequence

The seven exercises work together to activate your body's innate capacity for self-regulation. By systematically fatiguing specific muscle groups, particularly those that contract during stress responses, the exercises create space for your nervous system to release what it has been holding all while being in control and conscious of the experience.

This tremoring mechanism is the same response you can observe in animals in the wild after they escape from predators. Unlike humans, animals naturally shake off traumatic experiences, allowing their nervous systems to reset completely. TRE® helps us reconnect with this powerful mechanism.

Safety and Professional Guidance

While the seven TRE® exercises appear simple, they access deep layers of the nervous system and can bring up intense sensations, emotions, or memories. Working with a Certified TRE® Provider ensures that you learn the exercises correctly and have support navigating whatever emerges during your practice.

A qualified provider will guide you through proper positioning, breathing techniques, and help you understand how to work with the tremoring sensations safely. They can also help you integrate the experiences that arise and adjust the intensity of your practice based on your unique needs.

Building Your Practice

Most people begin TRE® with weekly sessions with a certified provider before gradually developing a home practice. The beauty of these seven exercises lies in their accessibility. Once learned properly, they can be practiced anywhere with just a small amount of floor space and 15-45 minutes of time.

Regular practice helps your nervous system develop greater resilience and capacity for self-regulation. Many people find that consistent TRE® practice supports better sleep, reduced anxiety, stress, and tension, increased body awareness, and a greater sense of overall well-being.

Integration and Healing

The seven TRE® exercises offer more than just physical movement. They provide a pathway back to your body's natural wisdom and capacity for healing. Through this gentle yet powerful practice, you can begin to release patterns and emotional armoring that may have been stored in your nervous system for years.

The tremoring that emerges from these exercises isn't something you create or control. Instead, you simply allow your body to do what it knows how to do naturally. This surrender to your body's wisdom can be profoundly healing and empowering.

Important Safety Disclaimer

If you are new to somatic practices or have experienced trauma, it is essential to work with a Certified TRE® Provider before attempting these exercises on your own. TRE® can access deep layers of the nervous system and may bring up intense physical sensations, emotions, or memories that require professional support to navigate safely.

Ready to Experience TRE® for Yourself?

If you're curious about how these seven powerful exercises can support your healing journey, I'm here to guide you through the process safely and skillfully. As an Advanced Certified TRE® Provider, I'll teach you each exercise with careful attention to your unique needs and nervous system responses. Together, we'll create a foundation for lasting nervous system regulation and deep healing. Contact me today to begin your TRE® journey and discover what your body has been waiting to release.