Exercises for Complex PTSD: Movement, Strength & Trauma Recovery
Understanding Complex PTSD & Trauma Recovery
PTSD and CPTSD (complex PTSD) are mental roadblocks and dysfunction after a traumatic event. While PTSD typically results from a single incident, CPTSD stems from repeated, prolonged trauma, often from childhood trauma, although it can occur in adulthood by domestic abuse, repeated losses and grieving, and war. Those with CPTSD face the same symptoms of PTSD with additional challenges including emotional dysregulation, meaning how you process emotions is dysfunctional, most commonly seen in intimate relationships.
Recovery from complex trauma may therefore require more than one approach. Therapy can address thoughts, emotions, relationships, and trauma memories, while physical activity can support physical health, stress regulation, body awareness, and overall resilience.
Can Exercise Help With Complex PTSD?
Trauma is stored in the body, and while talk therapy only addresses the prefrontal cortex, it may not be enough. Physical exercise not only helps alleviate stress, depression, and anxiety, but also impacts brain regions like the hippocampus, which governs memory and learning.
Exercise supports the brain in forming new neural connections by promoting neurogenesis and neuroplasticity
How Does Exercise Affect the Brain?
You may have heard the phrase "trauma is stored in the body." This is because trauma can influence the nervous system, stress responses, attention, sleep, emotions, and physical sensations. PTSD is also associated with changes in how the brain and body respond to perceived threats.
Exercise may influence some of these systems through several pathways, including changes in stress physiology, mood, cognition, and neuroplasticity.
Research on exercise and the hippocampus, for example, suggests that aerobic exercise can support hippocampal health and may help maintain brain structure over time.
The key is to have structured and intentional training that programs intensity and breathing to both increase your capacity for stress and desensitize your nervous system that’s chronically in fight-or-flight mode.
What Exercises Can Help With PTSD and Complex Trauma?
There isn't one exercise that works for everyone with PTSD or C-PTSD. Your starting point should depend on your current fitness level, physical health, symptoms, preferences, and how your body responds to different forms of stress.
Here are several types of movement that may be useful to explore.
1. Low-Intensity Cardiovascular Exercise
Walking, cycling, swimming, or other low-intensity cardiovascular activities can be a practical starting point if you're returning to exercise or feel overwhelmed by higher-intensity training.
The goal isn't to push yourself into exhaustion. Instead, focus on your breathing, body position, movement, and how your physical sensations change as your intensity gradually increases.
Guide to Low-Intensity Cardiovascular Training for PTSD
2. Strength Training
Strength training can help you develop physical capacity while practicing control over your breathing, posture, movement, and effort.
For someone recovering from trauma, the experience of becoming physically stronger can also support confidence and a greater sense of physical capability.
The objective is to build capacity, learn methods to manage your triggers, and desensitize your nervous system.
3. Yoga and Calisthenics
Yoga and calisthenics can combine movement, body awareness, balance, breathing, and concentration.
These forms of exercise may be particularly useful if your goal is to become more connected to your body rather than simply increasing the amount of weight you can lift.
Beginner's Guide to Yoga and Calisthenics: Calm Your Nervous System and Ease PTSD
4. Breathing and Mind-Body Exercises
Breathing is one of the simplest ways to bring attention back to your body during exercise.
Controlled breathing can help reduce stress responses and can be incorporated into exercise, recovery periods, or daily routines.
Guide to the Top 3 Breathing Exercises for PTSD
It is to learn how your breathing changes under stress and how to manage your triggers through controlling your breathework.
What About CBT for Complex PTSD?
Exercise is only one part of trauma recovery. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) exercises for PTSD helps reframe limiting beliefs that have become a stronghold in your mind. After a traumatic event, the brain will create these beliefs as a way to protect yourself from engaging in the same type of trauma. Thoughts with “all” “every” or “never” are sweeping statements that do not allow room for logic or growth.
For example, trauma can lead someone to think in absolute terms:
"Everyone will hurt me."
"I can never trust anyone."
"I'm always going to feel this way."
"Everything is my fault."
These thoughts can feel protective because they are often attempts to prevent future pain.
Through CBT, you and your clinician will challenge your limiting beliefs with the goal to overcome your negative thoughts – not with false positives, but with truth and grace.
How Much Exercise Do You Need for PTSD?
Beyond mental exercise, there are many forms of physical exercise that encourage the rewiring of your mind through neuroplasticity. Where to begin depends on your fitness level.
General recommendations of exercise to receive healing benefits are at least 90 minutes per week for aerobic (cardio) based exercises, and 50 minutes per week for strength training exercises. The key to either form of physical exercise is mind-body connection, through breathwork and activity engaging your desired muscle groups.
Your program may include:
Aerobic exercise
Strength training
Mobility work
Breathing exercises
Balance and coordination
Recovery periods
Mind-body awareness
The right combination depends on the individual.
Training for Trauma Recovery at Drip Training
At Drip Training, we recognize that trauma and healing are personal experiences. Our tailored programs not only consider your fitness level and goals but also align with your PTSD triggers.
Although, we do not talk through your issues as one does in therapy, exercise elicits the same fight-or-flight response in mentally or emotionally triggering situations. By controlling the intensity of your workouts, we stimulate stress responses in a safe environment, teaching you to manage your triggers effectively. This reduces recovery time from stress and raises your resilience to emotional triggers.
We teach the body new movement and breathing patterns, to instill new patterns of thinking in the mind.
Resources for Trauma Recovery
If you're ready to begin building your support system, these resources can help:
Links to Therapists and Support Groups (found at the bottom of the page)
Minority-Specific Mental Health Resources (found at the bottom of the page)
Conclusion
Healing from complex PTSD may include more than one modality. Whether you engage in therapy or exercises for PTSD or both, is dependent on your personal needs. Combining physical exercise with therapy or CBT will accelerate and provide a well rounded trauma recovery due to neuroplasticity, which encourages the mental changes you are working on in therapy to hold ground.
About the Author:
COACH DEE | Certified Strength & Conditioning Coach, CSCS, ACE—CPT
Deborah Park, known as Coach Dee, is the owner of Drip Training LLC and an ACE Certified Personal Trainer and Health Coach. With a background in architecture and kinesiology from the University of Virginia, she has extensive experience in personal training and athletic coaching in a clinical (physical therapy) setting. Coach Dee combines her scientific knowledge with years of hands-on experience and generational knowledge of food as medicine to create programs that empower clients to regain control over their bodies and minds.
Her journey into personal training was deeply influenced by her personal struggles, including recovering from a life-changing car accident that led to PTSD and pain from scoliosis. This experience gave her a unique understanding of the connection between mental health and physical well-being. Coach Dee is committed to helping clients develop resilience, build strength, and rediscover their confidence—no matter the challenges they face.
