The Top 5 Reasons Why Fascia Matters To Pilates?

The Top 5 Reasons Why Fascia Matters To Pilates?

You may be noticing the word “fascia” (connective tissue) is a hot topic right now in all body related fields, such as in Pilates too. But before we get to why fascia matters to your Pilates practice, here is a brief primer about why it’s getting so much attention these days.

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Fascia your other body

First, many think of fascia as a glorified body stocking - a seamless piece of tissue that wraps you just underneath the skin. While this is true of the superficial fascia, it’s important to understand it is a richly multi-dimensional tissue that also forms your internal soft tissue architecture and connects your body from head to toes.

From the superficial (“body stocking”) fascia, it dives deep and forms the pods (called fascicles) that actually create your musculature like a honeycomb from the inside out. Imagine what it looks like when you bite into a wedge of orange and then look at those individually wrapped pods of juice. We’re like that too! Fascia also connects muscle to bone (tendons are considered a part of the fascial system), and bone to bone (ligaments are also considered apart of the fascial system), slings your organ structures, cushions your vertebrae (yep, your discs are considered apart of this system, too), and wraps your bones.

So imagine for a moment you could remove every part of you that is not fascia. You would have a perfect 3D model of exactly what you look like. Not just in recognizable ways like your posture or facial features, but also the position of your liver, and the zig-zig your clavicle takes from that break you had as a kid, and how your colon wraps. To say it’s everywhere is far from over-stating things.

In fact, it turns out fascia’s everywhere-ness is one of the reasons it was overlooked for so long. Until recently it was viewed as the packing peanuts of soft tissue. Therefore, in dissections for study and for research, most of it was cleanly scraped away and thrown in a bucket so the cadavers could be tidily made to resemble the anatomical texts from which people were studying. Poor, misunderstood, and underrated fascia...

Fortunately research is catching up to what turns out to be a remarkably communicative sensory and proprioceptive tissue. What fascia researchers are discovering is pretty amazing not just for movement specialists, but for anyone who simply wants to put their body to good, healthy use. So without further ado, here is some of the newly emerging information about fascia and how you can use it to maximize not just your performance in movement, but also just your plain old ability to feel good and move freely in your body.

1. Fascia is a tensional fluid system

While it’s difficult for us to understand how a support structure could be a fluid structure - because we’re not exactly making hi-rise buildings out of Jell-O - it’s true. Juicy fascia is happy fascia. The best analogy I can give is of a sponge. When a sponge dries out it becomes brittle and hard. It can easily be broken with only a little force because of how crispy it has become. However, when a sponge is wet and well hydrated it gets springy and resilient.You can crush it into a little ball and it bounces back. You can wring it and twist it, but it is difficult to break.

Once we understand that we’re like that on the inside, keeping our fascia hydrated takes on more importance. Our mobility, integrity, and resilience are determined in large part by how well hydrated our fascia is. In fact, what we call “stretching a muscle” is actually the fibers of the connective tissue (collagen) gliding along one another on the mucous-y proteins called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs for short). GAGs, depending on their chemistry, can glue layers together when water is absent, or allow them to skate and slide on one another when hydrated. This is one of the reasons most injuries are fascial. If we get “dried out” we are more brittle and are at much greater risk for erosion, a tear, or a rupture.

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2. Variation matters

Movement also gets the hydration out to the tissue as well, but that movement needs to be varied. This meansvariation not just of the movements themselves, but also variation of tempo. Not only does moving constantly inthe same ways and in the same planes put you at further risk for joint erosion (a là osteoarthritis), but you are alsodehydrating the fascia in a particular pattern, thus setting you up for that brittle tissue that injuries love somuch.

The Pilates technique will provide you with over thousands of movement variations all working in differentplanes with different rhythms to achieve ideal body or facial flow.

3. It’s all connected

So drink more water, right? Well, yes and no. Staying hydrated via drinking continues to be important, but ifyou have dehydrated fascia it’s more like you have the little kinks in your “hoses” (microvacuoles), and so all that water you drink can’t actually reach the dehydrated tissue and gets urinated away, never having reached the crispy tissue. To be able to get the fluid to all of your important nooks and crannies you need to first get better irrigated by moving the fascial tissue. You can manually move your fascia for better irrigation like trough specific massage technics or more simple irrigate your whole fascial system through a intelligent exercising that will reconnect your whole body. So thinking of that what better way to connect your body and move intelligently than through Pilates so your movements will teach your soft connective tissue to untangle those gluey bits.

Because of the way we all learn and study anatomy we know that somehow all our body is attached and connected thanks to ligaments, tendons and muscle but to what extend and to what depth?

In anatomy-speak we describe all muscles as having an origin and an insertion. So far we limited our attachments to single our multiple joint actions. That made it sound like the body is taped or stapled to be “attached” at its origin and insertion points - like it’s this separate thing that gets stuck onto other separate things. A very isolated way of looking at connecting the body and that does not explain how a pain in the neck can have its origin in your foot, right? A more clear and true view to human anatomy would be that the facial matrix connects your head to your toes. This is important because it gives us a handier understanding of how you just can’t have something happen to one “part” of your body and not have it affect every other “part” of your body. This brings the dreaded domino effect into a clearer perspective

Many of you have experienced the domino effect without having had a name for it. First, your neck gets injured in a minor whiplash when you were a teenager.But being young and resistant, you ignore it and it gets better. But a few years later working in an office, suddenly you have this nagging shoulder pain with all the extra typing and sitting you’re doing. As the years go by you start to think of yourself as the “tight-shouldered” person, and sometimes you have a pinching pain when you lift your arm. More years go by and you are now not only a “tight-shouldered person,” but you also suffer from occasional low back spasms and have developed plantar fasciitis, which you assume must be because you’re a runner and everyone says running is bad for you so you stop running but the pain still stays. I could go on, and this is just one quick sketch of one type of domino effect out of the infinite possibilities, but you get the idea and I am sure you can think of some client's stories that may have been similar.

The thing these people are experiencing is actually the long, slow drain of an unaddressed compensatory pattern on a body, but in our culture we call it, “just getting old.” The best way to avoid the domino effect is to keep your fascia healthy so that nothing gets jumble dup in the knit of your body and you are therefore at much lower risk for developing a compensatory pattern which, by its very nature, is always going to be global.

So once more what better way than to use the Pilates technique that will teach your students who to be aware of their bad moving patterns to re-establish, re-store and re-connect new ways of moving efficiently for a well balanced and uniformly shaped body. Hadn't Joe already spoke about that in his book "Return to Life"... remember?

4. Its springiness wants to help you out

What do you get when you add juiciness to connectedness? Springiness! When your tissue retains (orgains) its natural spring, the rebound effect of the fascia allows you to use less muscle power, and therefore fatigue less rapidly. Want to jump higher, run faster, and throw farther? You’ll need to pay attention to nourishing the elastic quality of your fascia. That is where the Pilates method is an ideal way to move fascia as Joseph Pilates has based all his method on releasing your inner springs through precise movements. Hence to learn how to find that recoil actions in your body, he developed his Pilates equipment all based on moving with spring tension.

For example, when you run with healthy fascia the force you transmit into the ground gets returned to you through the whole tensional network of the fascia. It’s like you have a little built-in trampoline action going on.So once you’ve done the work to rehydrate your tissue, you’ll want to embrace natural bouncy supple movements hence why Joseph Pilates had such a bouncy technique himself if you watch his videos.

5. It is the largest and richest sensory organ of the body

Now this little tidbit of recent fascial research was as hocker. It turns out fascia is one of our richest sensory organs with between six to ten times higher quantity of sensory nerve receptors than the muscles. So it has been proven that fascia moves faster than muscle and may even be the biggest and fastest sensory organ we have.

This makes your fascia a system of proprioception - i.e. of knowing where your body is in space, but also of graceful full body orchestration of movement. While it’s impossible to not be using at least some of the sensory qualities of fascia (unless you have a disease process that is interfering with it), a way to play with waking up the full potential of your own proprioception is to return, as I already covered, to constantly varied movements.

Referring all this information to the Pilates technique and the latest research of the importance of fascia In our body, we can say that fascia is simply everywhere and responds to everything around and inside of you. It is rather far complex system, that though, can simply be restored and kept healthy through conscious and unconscious movement patterns. Fascia will be moved by what you Think, what you Sense (hence feel) and what you Do with your connective body every second of your day. Your understanding of connecting your mind to your body to your spirit when you move "will lead you to the healthy uniformly shaped body", quoted Joseph Pilates.

So weather you know the anatomy of fascia or not, weather Joe knew this science of fascia in the late 30' (which I really doubt), doesn't matter. What truly matters is that Joseph Pilates most certainly knew what felt right in his whole body when he was moving with full awareness to his full potential to continuously restore all the resources the body had with its inner and outer ability through movement... Just like the fascial system moves you you everyday consciously or subconsciously, weather you understand fascia or not.

I hope that this article has opened up your senses to your 3D fiscal matrix and I am sure you have plenty to chew on for now! So go forth, love your fascia, move in all planes connecting your mind-body-spirit to your work and train happily with the Pilates method "for the greater enjoyment of life", just like Joe quoted in his book "Return to Life"in 1945.

by Brooke Thomas & Iva Mazzoleni

Author of original article "the top 5 ways fascia matters to athletes”Brooke Thomas on www.breakingmuscle.com

Re-edited and adapted by Iva Mazzoleni.

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