Let your "FASCIA" loose
Do you know what is your “FASCIA”, and how can you loosen it up?
Not many people know about fascia… I didn’t either until recently, when a good friend of mine mentioned it and I wanted to find out more.
Fascia is a sheet of connective tissue, primarily collagen, beneath the skin, that attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates muscles and other internal organs.
It is a three-dimensional web of support that facilitates and coordinates every move of your body. It is a thin connective tissue that wraps every muscle, every muscle fiber and every muscle group. It becomes the tendon that knits into the connective tissue covering the bones. It also forms sheets to transmit force between muscles. Nerves, blood vessels and organs also have fascial coverings.
Healthy fascia is smooth and slippery, so muscles can slide like silk. When dense and contorted, unhealthy fascia binds muscles and limits movement. Collagen fibers give fascia its shape and structure, which organize along lines of tension in the body. It feels like muscle pain, but unlike a tight hamstring that makes you yelp when you stand up, your ache isn't triggered by a particular movement, and you can feel it in different places at various times.
After a night's sleep or a long period of inactivity, like a car trip or plane ride or long hours sitting at the computer, the parts of your fascia that wrap around and through your muscle fibers, which are normally stretchy and flexible, can stick together and consequently make your muscle stiff. It can also make your muscles stick together and stiff when you move too much or do a repetitive movement or injure yourself through activity.
WHAT CAN YOU DO TO RELEASE YOUR FASCIA?
Common exercises at the gym, like cardio machines, weights and traditional stretching are two-dimensional, because they focus on contracting and lengthening muscle, and they are good for muscles, but ignore the complexity of the fascia network.
A more helpful approach for the fascia is to pay attention to the posture and choose non-repetitive movements, such as adding angles to weight exercise, stretching in multiple directions and using balance equipment.
One thing that you could do in the morning, as soon as you wake up, to release the fascia is to slowly and luxuriously stretch out your arms and legs and roll slowly from side to side before getting out of bed. This will gently pull the muscles apart and separate the connecting tissue. To get at the fascia in your calves, ankles and arches sit on the edge of the bed and flex and point your feet before putting the pressure of your weight on them.
A great tool to help loosen it up is the foam roller: it is really helpful in releasing overused sore spots. You can look at this video, from celebrities trainer Ashley Borden, to get a good foam-roller tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khC5J1lkC7s
Cynthia Ribeiro, the president of the American Massage Therapy Association and a massage therapist, stresses that you can’t have healthy muscles without well-cared-for fascia.
She says that There are different therapeutic methods to address keeping the fascia healthy, from intense, sometimes-excruciating Rolfing (Rolfing® is a system of soft tissue manipulation, often considered a deep-tissue approach, that actually works with all the layers of the body to ease strain patterns in the entire system) to gentle fascial unwinding to myofascial release, which usually involves loading the deeper tissues with force until they start to give.
If you’re chronically stiff and sore, or you have a muscle injury that just won’t heal, it could be that a body part you never knew you had is the reason of your misery… Now you know!
