Körperpraxis

Körperpraxis, literally “body practice” in German, is a term used in various German-speaking disciplines to denote the embodied skills, routines, and tacit know-how by means of which people engage with their bodies and with their environments. It emphasizes action, sensation, and social learning as opposed to abstract theoretical knowledge alone.

Applications span education, therapy, sports, dance, theatre, and everyday life. In pedagogy, Körperpraxis refers to body-centered learning that integrates perception, movement, and action, fostering bodily literacy and motor competence. In sports and performing arts, it describes the development and refinement of technique through rehearsal and repetition. In medical and therapeutic contexts, somatic approaches treat bodily states—tension, pain, regulation—as objects of practice, guiding patients to observe and modulate bodily signals. In cultural and sociological analyses, Körperpraxis is used to examine how social norms, power relations, gender, and class shape bodily comportment, labor, care work, and health behaviors.

A common feature across these uses is the emphasis on tacit knowledge and skill that is learned through doing rather than explicit instruction. The concept is related to broader ideas of embodiment, embodied cognition, and habitus, and it often aligns with phenomenological and practice-theory perspectives that treat the body as a primary medium of knowledge and action.