What is Anti-gymnastique®?

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To practice Anti-gymnastique® is to embark on a voyage through one’s body and its history. You discover how, throughout your life, your body quietly reorganized, adapted, and protected itself. You learn to perceive and understand your body in a deeper, more accurate and more autonomous manner.

Discover new territories

Each Anti-gymnastique® class is an opportunity to discover, rediscover or awaken new parts of your body. Initially some of the muscles that you are trying to engage seem so foreign that you have no idea how to reach them! Little by little, a new connection develops between this unknown or poorly known muscle and your brain. Your muscular vocabulary increases, becomes richer. You explore new possibilities of movement.

Regain the natural amplitude of your movements

Class after class you learn to rid yourself of the contractions, stiffness, and muscular and joint pain that exhaust you, shrink you, and restrain your freedom. Your movements and your breathing regain their natural amplitude.

The origin of the term Anti-gymnastique®

Thérèse Bertherat developed Anti-gymnastique® in the 1970s and chose the term “Anti-gymnastique®” at the time when “ antipsychiatry ” was popular. She was not rejecting classical exercise, but was considering that certain movements, for instance, movements that demand forced inhalation or bending the spine backwards to open the ribcage, only aggravated diaphragm and spine problems.


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Thérèse Bertherat, the creator of Anti-gymnastique® explains her method

« We are told that the body needs to be stronger, that we need to sweat and to perspire. Therefore to be in shape, we bike, we hang upside down, we jog, we lift weights. What we should first be doing is to open our eyes and look at our body to understand how it functions » wrote Thérèse Bertherat in The Body Has Its Reasons.