What is fascia? Its a word you might be hearing more often in the fitness industry, and hopefully medical as well as holistic healthcare. But do you know what it is and what role it plays? I believe knowledge is power when it comes to your body. A gentle understanding of how absolutely everything works together for the benefit, growth, and survival of your brain, can empower you to help yourself. So let’s try to draw a clear, very simplified understanding of what fascia actually is. Our fascia is the framework of our body. If you can imagine removing all the muscles, skin, nerves, organs, all of it, and still being left with an entire structure of fine, fibrous, fluidy shell of your entire inner structure, this is the fascia. Kind of like a mummy wrapped in one continuous silk but on the inside. The fascia is part of the connective tissue matrix that is a conduit for information going from the nervous system to the brain and vice versa, via the spinal cord. I like to visualise a motorway (spinal cord), with exits leading to highways, A & B roads (peripheral nervous system) and eventually leading to country lanes all over the place (sensory receptors from the fascia). So what impacts the speed, accuracy and quality of the information travelling along these roads, will be the electrical current (we know we are electrical beings because doctors can measure these electrical pulses in our heart and brain via ECGs and EKGs). So can you imagine that where the electrical current is disturbed along these highways, that things get backed up and information gets distorted? Absolutely, traffic jams happen all the time! Except since we don’t really understand this or know what to do with this information, sometimes it takes ages to get the flow back on the road and the diversions cause an entire drama of their own.
So do you see the impact you can have on your movement health if you start considering giving your fascia your attention for a few minutes a day. So how? How do we take care of the fascia? Well firstly, fascia is about 70% water and collagen, so hydrate! Drink a pint of water before you let your feet touch the floor in the morning. Flush out your old proteins that the body has detoxed overnight, and start flooding your body with some buoyancy. Fascia needs to have viscosity where it can glide and slide easily without sticking, so when you don’t drink water, you don’t bounce, you get sticky and you can feel it because your body feels cranky. Stretching fascia is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts. Because fascia can withstand up to 2000 pounds worth of pressure per square inch, it has insane tensile strength and just stretching it without adding some sensory stimulation, imagery or complex coordinated movement, the changes you’ll experience will be limited. It’s also not going to be a one trick pony, because changing the state of tissue is an intentional, consistent practice. But brutalising the fascia is honestly not going to be the answer and pain is not always gain. Fascia of different tissues has a different consistency, for example visceral fascia is slightly different from muscular fascia or tendinous fascia, etc. The percentages of collagen and elastin differ and need to be activated differently. Elastin is bouncy and stretchy like an elastic band, collagen however has recoil, perhaps imagine snapping a belt by pulling on both ends, relaxing the tension and then snap it and it recoils. Our muscular fascia has more elastin so responds to lengthening and shortening. Our tendinous fascia has more collagen which is why when you jump repeatedly you can feel the spring of the recoil if you get the timing right – you get bounce. Wrong timing and you feel like a lump. Some fascia responds to touch, some light, some heavy. It likes tapping, sponging and brushing of the skin.
In order to clear the blockages on the highways, your best tool is movement. Movement makes electricity. The more you move gently through the sticky place, the better the flow will become and the information highway will clear and normal service will resume. I know sometimes its too painful to move, and its scary, it can be very very scary and you should never force anything, but even the smallest movements, in fact even the imagining of movements, can start to unwind that boa constrictor of tension from your body. Do you know what the easiest and hands down best simple movement you can do for any and all pain or fascia care is? Breathing!!! Breathing properly, intentionally and slowly. On that note, if you want to come breathe with me, if you’d like to be lead through a bit of intentional movement and breath to start taking care of this, the most sensory rich organ in your body, then please get in touch. I have an online class, twice a week, for 15-20minutes Mondays and Thursdays at 11am, and recordings are available.