Elizabeth Deboo At Live Well 50, we believe in healthy living through Lifestyle Medicine. The 4 pillars of lifestyle medicine revolve around nutrition, exercises, restorative sleep, and stress reduction. Prescription medications are used as needed after we have first optimized our lifestyle.
Fascial Flow. Let’s Re-hydrate & Re-Organize Your Fascia
You may be saying…Great, I’m in, but what is fascia anyway?
Fair warning…It’s gonna get nerdy in here! But it will also be helpful.
FACTS… that hopefully will make more sense after you read this blog.
- 30% of your muscles are fascia
- Itself is NOT stretchy
- It can lengthen 1.6x its resting length
- Muscle fibers are encapsulated in fascial bags
- Fascia bags stop the muscles from stretching too far.
- To get longer muscles we need to work the fascial bags.
Fascia is a 3-dimensional continuum of soft collagen that lies beneath the skin and attaches to, stabilizes, encloses, and separates muscles and all other internal organs. It contains loose and dense connective tissue varying in shape and thickness in varying places in the body. It takes on the shape of the organ it encapsulates.
It envelopes all tissues: Adipose (fat), neurovascular, aponeuroses, deep and superficial, skin, joint capsules, muscles, tendons, organs/viscera.
Fascia is pervasive and ubiquitous! Interpenetrates and surrounds all organs muscles, bones, tendons, nerves, and endows the body with functional scaffolding that provides an environment that enables all the body systems to be integrated.
Fascia is a collection of stiff and elastic fibers and water-filled vacuoles.
Think 3-dimensional bodystocking made of water-filled bubble wrap that invests and supports ALL tissue.
Fascia is scaffolding in which other materials are laid down in the body. It is ubiquitous! Literally found enveloping every single organ as the same contiguous sheath throughout the body. It is found in sheets and forms bags and tubules that contain our other organs and tissue and in this way, permeates the whole body. In this way, it is very, very different than muscles. Muscles begin and end usually crossing one or more joint(s).
Because it permeates the entire body as one fascial bag that out pouches to encapsulate every organ, from a practical standpoint what this means is that tight facia up in the neck and tongue can and will affect fascia at the bottom of the feet.
This, in part, is why if you have ever seen Ed or me for manual therapy we don’t always, and in fact, rarely start at the place that is symptomatically causing you problems. It is not always the tightest or the area of greatest restriction. The fascia guides our way in treatment, especially with chronic and multiple points of pain.
One of its greatest functions is that it glides, lubricates, and absorbs force transmission and is a network for physical connections.
So why is this conversation relevant to the Arc of Ageing?
Aging bodies have a tendency to curl up and dry up. As we age we have fewer and fewer fibroblasts (cells that make up fascia) and those we do have are less productive.
Fibroblasts produce water and collagen and remember from above, fascia is made of water and collagen. Again, we have fewer fibroblasts as we age and our current fibroblasts become less productive as we age. So if collagen and water are not being replaced by fibroblasts, tissue droops, as in sags, because the scaffolding is losing its integrity, and it also gets dry.
The good news…
We CAN stimulate and wake up these fibroblasts cells!! One of my teachers, Bernie Clark says “Motion is the lotion of life”. As we move we get facial tissue sliding and gliding and it can absorb forces more effectively, reorganize and rehydrate thereby having a protective effect.
What does fascia need to be healthy?
Bernie Clark also says “comfort comes at the expense of health”. Bedrest is never the best option for recovery! The body starts to atrophy from immobilization.
Fascia needs movement to be healthy! And ideally unprogrammed movement, intuitive, fluid movement.
Moving intuitively and organically outside of straight planes instead of an automated unconscious movent pattern that we have been doing most of our lives. Picture in your mind walking. It happens in a fairly straight plane. Now imagine dancing, not at all a straight plane but very flowy with diagonal and sometimes unpredictable movement patterns.
Fascia thrives best and can reorganize and rehydrates best when thrown into some aspect of organized chaos. Jumping, dancing, twirling and spiraling. When is the last time you did any of those? Intuitive and unautomated, unhabituated movement counteracts the habitual movement of daily life.
To be clear, we are not pulling and forcing and in such chaos that it causes injury. If we force the fascia or pull it, it will get tighter. We are simply personalizing movement through mind-body wisdom, moving through novel and intuitive motions, and releasing ourselves from the structures that inhibited mobility that we are habituated to.
Inside the LW50 Membership site, when you see a class that says Fascial Flow, this is what we do. We release inhibition and move spontaneously. This doesn’t mean fast unorganized or uncontrolled. Just adds spontaneity and novelty to your fascial system. This results in the re-hydrated and re-organized fascia.
Leave a comment below or ask a question. We love to hear about your experiences.
Check out The Livewell50 Membership Site Fascial Flow class today. It feels good and will create a healthy scaffolding in which to live life!
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