Weight racks, punching bags, kettle balls, weight plates.

All the typical gym accoutrements line the walls at The Den Somatics. But the health-hungry men and women in this morning’s primal movement class don’t lay one hand on any of it in the gym near Manitou Springs. Instead, they’re crawling, shuffling and slinking across the mats on their hands and feet. Bear crawls, cat crawls, crab crawls, lizard crawls, gorilla walks. Each exercise more physically challenging than the last, with the goal of working the whole body with different movements.

They’re moving under the guidance of coach and gym co-founder Dante Liberato, a man who knows how to train a body to do impossible things. He recently completed a 500-mile run from the gym’s doorstep to Moab, Utah. Yes, you read the mileage correctly. His long run, which started Sept. 22 and finished Oct. 2, was helped along the way by using psychedelics and by having friends pace him.

The physical challenge will be the subject of “Dante,” an upcoming documentary by the local company SFFR Films. A trailer is available online at youtube.com/@SFFRFILMS. The film is expected to drop next year.

“It felt like the adventure of a lifetime. I got to learn a lot about myself that I’m still sifting through,” said Liberato, a former professional mixed martial arts fighter. “We have a solid program and solid athletes who are working together to build something effective. I had the right recipe of community, and the training process went well. And we used psychedelics, and that’s what the documentary is about – advocating for a different type of medicine or supplement you can use.”

Now back home in his gym, he demonstrates exercises: Bear crawls mean taking short, stubby steps across the mats on all fours. Gorilla walks are like they sound – imitating primates by using your hands as support for moving your body sideways down the mat.

“Don’t come here if you want to feel worse after your workout,” said Liberato, 27. “A lot of coaches take pride in saying you’ll be sore later, you’re going to be feeling me when you wake up tomorrow, or watching people limp out of their gym. My goal, whether it’s a strength class or movement class, I want people to leave feeling better.”

This morning, nobody’s doing the standard gym fare of three sets of 15 reps, with lots of rest and looking at your phone. What’s happening looks more like playtime, like something little kids might do in their elementary gym class. And that’s exactly what makes it so beneficial.

“Being physically fit can be the deepest form of freedom we can experience,” Liberato said. “And being fit, in terms of linear movements and lifting weights, picking them up and putting them down, can give you some more freedom in certain aspects, but when you can combine fitness with play, people are going to remember things and be impacted a lot more. There’s a study that showed things can take six or seven times of repetition before we can really ingrain a new neural pathway when it comes to a technique, movement or skill. But if it’s done in play, it only takes once to remember it, for it to sit in the nervous system a little differently.”

After channeling the wild kingdom, Liberato has the class partner up, with one person on their hands and toes, knees hovering off the ground. The other partner walks around them, gently pushing on their hips, arms and thighs.

“Try not to let them move you,” said Liberato. “Try to be as locked in and as still as possible. Isometrics are what’s good for strengthening our tendons, our ligaments and our joints in a way that normal weightlifting won’t.”

An hour later, these humans are cooked. Liberato leads them through core exercises and a final legs up the wall resting pose.

“I feel like a new human,” said Den Somatics co-founder Ren Thorpe. She and Liberato are also engaged.

“Joy is such a big part of this, too,” she said. “When you’re weightlifting or going into a big box gym, I don’t go into those places thinking everyone is smiling or having a good time. People are locked into their headphones and zoned out, and everyone’s having their own individual experience. Dante’s vision of community and people creates a space that feels alive, and it’s good to be here and move our bodies and not just zone out.”

Thomas Hanks, a running coach who’s been running since 2010, has done two years’ worth of primal movement and strength training classes with Liberato.

“As a runner, I’m stronger, faster, more agile, and I have more mobility in my body,” he said.

He also paced Liberato for more than 250 miles of his 500-miler.

“It’s a different approach. You’re not doing the same thing every day,” he said. “This is well-rounded. It’s pushing and pulling and the opposite way you don’t necessarily train for.”

Liberato and Thorpe are the sole coaches at Den Somatics, where they teach about 20 classes every week, including strength and conditioning, women’s strength training, spinal decompression and Thorpe’s specialty – the steel mace, an unevenly weighted steel mace used in workouts to improve strength and mobility.

In today’s class are also two mixed martial arts fighters, whose fighting will benefit from the primal movements, by getting more into their bodies and learning the cross-body movement patterns. But anyone with any level of fitness is welcome at the Den.

“It’s mostly people who just want to move better and feel better,” Liberato said. “Fighters come and I do specific stuff with them that’s more martial arts-oriented, but they know it’s going to keep them injury-free. We want people to come here and feel like they’re not just getting a good workout, but feel like they’re growing mentally, spiritually, whatever that is for them.”

Liberato, who moved to Colorado Springs from Alaska with his family in 2008, has spent most of his life in gyms after deciding early on to become the youngest UFC champion. He started studying martial arts at 8 and at 12 went into boxing and wrestling to make his UFC dream a reality. Most of his schooling was online so he could spend time training, and at 16 he earned his first personal fitness certification. After high school, he went to Life Time Academy, an advanced personal training trade school, and came out as a behavior change specialist, corrective exercise specialist and performance enhancement specialist.

By that time, he’d also started fighting professionally, trying to get matches and manage his injuries. He looked for more unconventional certifications and different ways to move and take care of his body, including ELDOA, which are postural exercises done to create space within the joints by applying tension to the fascia, and Hakomi, a practice of exploring somatic experiences.

The training and the fighting culminated in him opening a gym in two previous locations before landing in the space near Manitou Springs, where they’ve been for about a year.

Fighting brutalized him with multiple serious injuries and surgeries. And when he found a therapist trained in doing psychedelic journeys, their work together brought about some fraught conclusions.

“I realized pretty quickly fighting is not what I’m supposed to be doing,” he said. “I had known that for a little while, but had a hard time accepting it because that’s what I identified with. I was able to not feel totally lost but realized this isn’t my path and I want to lean into something different. I went and signed up for Hakomi training the next day.”

Den Somatics also shares its building with Therapsych, a soon-to-be psychedelic healing center, one of the first of its kind in the Pikes Peak region. Liberato will offer support to the center’s clients through movement and finding ways to integrate their experiences resulting from psychedelic journeys.

“I started doing medicine work and realized I wanted to be in this space doing work that was more supportive of my body and others.”

Details

The Den Somatics, 32 Manitou Ave., Manitou Springs, thedensomatics.com, 719-648-5621