Fascia: It Might Be the Cause of Your Persistent Injury
- thefitbusiness
- Mar 5, 2014
- 7 min read
It can withstand up to 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch
It encases your muscles, organs, and bones, and just might be crushing them
It is the biological fabric that holds you together
Little is known about it, but it causes more than 3000 dysfunctions in the human body.
So you’ve got this nagging pain or injury that you just can’t eradicate. It’s holding you back, and you’ve tried everything. You’ve iced, and you’ve heated. You’ve soaked in Epsom salt baths, stretched, rested, and done everything every expert has told you to do – But it just keeps reoccurring? Before you WebMD yourself as a diagnosed, certifiably structurally flawed specimen of Homo sapiens, read this article.
Do Not Quit On Yourself Before You Know This
Healing and recovery is actually not impossible for you. The answer to your strife may be a shallow one; just a few millimeters deep ironically. Beneath your skin lies one of, if not the most, puzzling organ systems in the human body that only now is it beginning to be studied and given the respect it truly deserves. Just below your skin, encasing and entwining your muscles, organs, and bones (down to the cellular level) is a spider web of collagen fibers called Fascia.
What Is Fascia?
Fascia is the biological “fabric” that holds us together and is made up primarily of densely packed collagen fibers that create a full body system of sheets, chords and bags that wrap, divide and permeate every one of your muscles, bones, nerves, blood vessels and organs. Every bit of you is encased in it. You're protected by fascia, connected by fascia and kept in taut human shape by fascia. Understanding fascia is essential to the dance between your stability and movement – crucial in optimal movement, central in recovery from injury and disability, and possibly most astonishingly plays one of the largest roles of human movement as it is was created 2 weeks into your embryological development and will effect how well you move, your organs function, and your bone stability until the day you die… Why haven’t you heard more about it? Because not many people know that much about it. Fascia is messy stuff. It's hard to study. It's so expansive and intertwined it resists the medical standard of being cut up and named for textbook illustrations. Besides that, its function is tricky, subtler than that of the other systems. For the majority of medical history it's been assumed that bones were our frame, muscles the motor, and fascia just packaging. Now we know those assumptions to be incorrect.
Here’s the Need to Know Basics of Fascia as it’s related to a household product.
Think of fascia as Saran Wrap - the thin plastic wrap used to cover leftovers at Grandma’s. This thin wrap is continues. It folds and layers itself to wrap, or pocket, your muscles, organs, nerves, bones, etc. individually! It encapsulates absolutely every little thing in your body and the keyword to remember here is that it is continuous. Think for a second about Saran Wrap. If you tried to unroll the entire tube without it sticking to itself and everything else in the kitchen it would be a miracle, and I’m pretty sure no one ever has unrolled a piece longer than 2 ft successfully…. Saran wrap is a great analogy for fascia, but fascia is not Saran Wrap! It is an overseer of your body’s 600+ muscles carefully connecting them to bone, bone to bone, and it’s main purpose is to allow everything in the body to easily slide past one other as you move. It’s also a very rich sensory organ that has the ability to unconsciously contract, feel, and subsequently impact the way you move independently of the muscles it surrounds. That’s actually a very important thing to know about the body. For decades we’ve been taught that the bones are our frame and the muscles move them. However, we now know that the bones are suspended in the body by soft tissue and held in place by fascia. The muscles do move the body, but cannot also be moved themselves by the fascia.
What does all of this have to do with you and your pain?
Let me give you another analogy – this time with your winter gloves. As you are wearing your glove, tug on the back of the glove on top of your hand. Do you see how you cannot move one part of the glove without it affecting your fingers or palm of your hand extending? Now Tug the bottom of the glove under your palm. Do you feel your entire hand curl toward a balled shape? When the glove curls your fingers let that bring to mind your own “curled” shape as you lean in toward a computer screen or steering wheel. Now hold that curled glove for 8 hours. This is your typical workday. Or tug that glove about 3000 times. That’s about how many steps you take on a 30 minute run. That glove isn’t looking too good at this point right? Well, This is how your fascia acts as well, but more like a glove that encapsulates your entire body from the top of your skull to the bottoms of your toes layering everything in between. Thankfully, your fascia is more resilient than that glove, but it has its flaws. In a smooth and supple healthy state, your fascia can snap back to its supposed structure, but throw a few common items such as time, lack of activity, or mild dehydration in the mix and your fascia will harden like fiberglass around you. Over time your fascia, in an attempt to heal, thickens and hardens over the muscle because it thinks it is protecting it. Poor posture and lack of flexibility pull that glove-like fascia into an ingrained pattern. And no one likes a stretch out old glove. It doesn’t serve it’s purpose anymore.
Fascia is never forever!
Thickened fascia begins to form adhesions (sticky spots) that snag your muscles, nerves, and blood vessels entrapping them until… Well, until you begin to get moving correctly! Fascia is never forever, and its resilient properties allow us to heal it. Every bit of the damage you've caused your fascia is reversible, and every one of the problems it's caused you were avoidable. You take care of your muscles with stretching and foam rolling and massage. You take care of your bones with diet and restraint. You never knew that you needed to take care of your fascia, but now you do. You may just shake that nagging injury after all.
Great! Now how do I show my fascia some TLC?
Here is my recommended approach for healing, correcting, and maintaining healthy fascia.
1. Start drinking! – Water, that is… You should be drinking half your body weight in ounces every day! You cannot proceed to step 2 until you’ve been doing this for 3 days minimum (oh yea, and NEVER stop this one, guys. It helps about a million other bodily processes as well.)
2. Remove Your Stresses – You have two options. Eradicate the stress in your life that you can. I realize you can’t quit your job so #2. Learn to deal with it. Most people think they are managing their stress quite well, but the proof is in your fascia! Do some research and experiment with ways to manage your stress. Try a few of these on for size:Yoga or Tai ChiFifteen to 20 minutes in a warm Epsom salt bath. Make sure to follow it up with 10 minutes of light activity to keep blood from pooling in your muscles.Meditative Breathing breaks during your workdayTherapeutic Massage
3. Respect your body - If you're attempting to “work” through an injury, or returning from one with a limp, beware: Your fascia will respond to your new mechanics by implementing and remembering a new movement pattern, eventually, even after your injury is gone, you may maintain that same movement pattern. That's a recipe for an injury cycle. It's better to take some extra time than to set yourself up for long-term trouble.
4. Find a Foam Roller - No, not the kind your mom used in the 90’s to curl her hair. These are pivotal tools to aid you in whipping your fascia into shape! Careful though! You need to be taught how to use them properly. And don’t ask just any personal trainer – there is a method to the madness. Find an expert!
5. Implement a Stretching Routine: Stretch not only your muscles, but also your fascia. To properly hold a muscular stretch, maintain a stretch for 10-12 seconds. Fascia responds differently. Remember it works independently of the muscle by contracting slower and releasing slower. So Hold Fascial Stretches for 1minute up to 5 minutes. Fascial stretches are also very different than the traditional static stretching you were taught. Find an expert to learn them today!
6. Embrace Fascial Therapy – Everyone has differing degrees of fascial impairments ranging from light adhesions to severe myofascial structural malalignments. Seek an expert for advice. There are several methodologies circulating on the topic. So find what suits you: Rolfing is very aggressive, Rossiter is a technique that allows you to dictate the intensity, and some corrective exercise specialists teach you how to do these exercises on your own.
7. Re-Educate your muscle movement- Find a certified corrective exercise specialist to help you re-educate your muscles. Over time, the fascia that created a “new” less painful movement pattern for you taught that muscle how to do it. It was wrong and will lead to future reinjure if you do not reteach your muscles the proper ways to move. You must earn your movements and it takes time so be patient!
Our fascial fabric constitutes one single biomechanical regulatory system – we benefit from seeing it, training it, and treating it that way. So start thinking of your fascia as the important physiologic system that it is. Respect it, Rehydrate it, Relieve it, and Reform it! Your body will thank you for it!
If you live in the great state of North Carolina, Here are a few experts at your disposal
Kathy Howard – Advanced Certified Rossiter Coach in Greensboro NC
Nick Outlaw – Certified Functional Movement Coach in Raleigh NC
And a little about myself: I am a Corrective Exercise Specialist and Performance Enhancement Specialist located in Greensboro NC as well. Not to worry if you are not local. We host awesome webinars, and have mastered the art of online personal training. We can assess and correct a whole myriad of movement impairments no matter where you are! Check us out at www.carolina-personal-trainer.com. And like us on facebook to keep up with our events and programming at https://www.facebook.com/greensboropersonaltrainer
Author: Jess Williams NASM CPT CES PES
Owner of Carolina Personal Trainer
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