A Quick Look at Fascia

A Quick Look at Fascia

Until recently, a model of human anatomy might start with the skeletal structure. Onto which one would, mentally, layer muscles like so many strips of Play-Doh. Stuff the middle with the squishy bits and lay some more Play-Doh for abdominal muscles on top. String it together with some tendons and ligaments, to hinge the joints. At about this point it might occur to the sculptor that muscles are rather spongy; that they need to be held together better, and attach somehow to the bone, so here our artist might opt to wrap each muscle like a haggis so it doesn't interfere with its neighbors. Put a command center at the top, with some wiring; add a supply chain (blood vessels), so it can feed itself. Finally, fit the whole thing into a presentable suit, and there you have it: the human body.

Sort of.

The difficulty with that model is the assumption that the skeletal structure is a basic stacked structure, like legs on a chair, or a Lego set. Unlike legs on a chair, the bones, in healthy, articulating joints, don’t actually touch each other. Hmm. There is stuff in between. Gooey stuff. That needs to be held in place or it leaks all over the floor and is no use to anyone apart from earning the janitor some overtime.

In fact, once it's off the artist's table, nothing in the body will stay where it is put of its own accord. When you add the fact that a body doesn't sit in a glass case, but is required to move in order to manage its own survival, you end up with a horrible mess: spleens and livers switching places while you sleep, intestines sloshing around while you run from that tiger. No good at all!

But, thankfully, we do have an organizing factor. A continuously forming, changing and adapting, structure that serves to embed all other structures. Instead of the stick and Play-Doh model of human anatomy, imagine all of the “important” structures, (organs, muscle, bone, nerves, vessels... everything), as being trapped in a fibrous, malleable amber. I give you Fascia.

Fascia is a continuous and finite web; embedding, permeating, supporting, constricting and relaxing; it surrounds and imbues everything. The fibrous strands are made up of collagen coils. Collagen, however, is not in and of itself elastic in nature. Its elasticity comes from the fact that it coils. Like a spring, the coiling allows the fiber flexibility and the ability to store and transfer energy. 

Fascia is the unifying factor throughout the body, but it presents in varying densities. It ranges from a loose, open weave like a gossamer net or candyfloss, to a compact linear structure with a clear directionality and ‘grain’ like a tendon, to a dense, matted immovable mass. Rather than imagining fascia as a sausage casing for a muscle that then anchors to bone, instead, the fibers permeate the muscle, trapping and grouping muscle cells within it.  

As you travel along the muscle, fibers then emerge and entwine into denser cords; tendons. Tendons attach to the bone, but some fascial fibers continue and wrap around the bone. It becomes the periosteum. Fascia doesn't just anchor the muscle/tendon to the bone, it actually becomes the bone casing itself. Traveling on to encase the joint, it merges into ligament and tendon and opens the weave to again permeate and direct another mass of muscle and so on down the chain.

To understand fascia is to begin to understand not just the interconnectedness of all things, but the singularity. No longer can we view the working body as discrete packages, however intimately interdependent, instead we must shift our perspective to encompass the whole. We are not just a collection of parts working smoothly in concert. Instead we are a single thing! 

What holds us together is not our skin. We, all the squishy bits we identify with and that make us go, are caught in a three-dimensional spider’s web. The fascial web is our form. In terms of our shape, posture and stature, our actual and potential for movement, and our perception and interaction with the world around us, it is literally our defining factor.

Fascia is itself embedded in a greater substance. As we will find throughout this investigation, nothing in our environment, neither internal nor external environment, exists alone. There are no empty spaces. There are always counterparts to our parts, always factors that define and shape; nothing exists in isolation and the fascia is no different. The fibrous network that shapes us is, itself, embedded in a matrix. The “amber”, if you will, to our fibrous web.

In practice, this intracellular matrix, this “amber”, is a protein solution. As such, it is sensitive and responds to changes in temperature; becoming fluid in warmth and thickening in colder temperatures. Circulating blood in our active body provides heat, maintaining the matrix as a fluid and allowing fibers the ability to move; to expand and contract as needed in a dynamic function. In the absence of movement, however, we have diminished circulation. Diminished circulation means diminished heat and, without heat, the matrix becomes thick like glue. 

This unyielding matrix makes it difficult for the fibers to meet the demand to expand and contract. Chronic tension develops. That means more work for the fibers to have to counteract the tension. Fascia proliferates based on need. The density, quality and direction of fascial growth is a response to the environment. 

If the matrix gets thick from lack of movement, it puts more strain on the fascial fibers in the area. In response the body produces more fascial fibers to share the load. Because the area now has no regular movement, the new fibers have no regular drag and therefore no direction in which to form and grow. Without a template, they grow matted and dense. Further reducing the ability to move freely, further constricting blood flow, circulation, and heat; compounding the lack of movement and exacerbating the cycle. 

If an area is in need of support either due to long term stasis or chronic excessive movement, the fascia will provide that support. If we change our habits and find the ‘support’ now to be inhibiting our new desire, we may consider the excess fascia growth to be a ‘problem’. In fact, the fascia did its job perfectly. We just changed our requirements. 

Does that mean we are now shut out of our new desire because our fascia adapted to support our old habit? Perhaps, after sitting on the couch for a few years, I find the inspiration to get up and play? I want to run and dance, but my hip flexors have modeled short from chronic couch flexion, my shoulders now hold a rounded hunch, my ribs barely open to take in breath. Am I doomed to this troll-shape? Is all hope lost?

No!

Fascia models based on need! It is fluid. Slow moving fluid, but fluid nonetheless. It can be molded, sculpted by conscious choice using sculptors' tools of Heat (breath), Force (mindful movement), and visualization of the potential (conscious adaptation). As a fluid, if you change the shape of the vessel you change the shape of the fluid. 

In the case of fascia, changing the vessel begins with changing the perceived potential. Literally, what you imagine you can do. Change the potential, and the need, the physical demand, will follow.  Then, working within the parameters of the physical make-up and characteristics of the material, apply the sculptors’ tools. Change the perception, change the demand, and the fascia will change.

But to change a thing, we must first understand the nature of a thing.