Imagine this is one of your muscles and then imagine this plastic wrap is fascia. Fascia wraps around but also through your muscles and it gives them shape and form. It allows for sliding surfaces between tissues it’s also an amazing sensory organ. The first time I heard about fascia was years ago. I had a hamstring injury and I went to a bodyworker who I was hoping could cure me, help fix me, by rubbing his elbow into my hamstring.
The first thing he told me was that I didn’t have a hamstring issue, I had a fascia injury. I didn’t know what that was. The second thing he told me is that he doesn’t work on muscles, he only works on fascia. He said this as he was rubbing his elbow and some weird massage tools into the back of my leg and it just didn’t really make any sense to me. If you too are confused about fascia and you’re wondering about its role in flexibility, in strength, and also in pain, this video is for you.
Hey, my name is Lucas, I’m a yoga teacher and a trainer, and in this video we’ll talk about what fascia is, how it’s different from other connective tissues in the body, and why it’s really important to understand it. Number two, we’ll talk about why a lot of the bodywork massage therapist lingo and nomenclature around fascia, a lot of the mainstream fitness stuff talking about myofascial release, a lot of it’s overly complicated, and confusing, and not so helpful.
Number three, we’ll take a look at exercises that can be helpful for working on different fascial lines in your body. Lastly, we’ll finish up talking about some foods that can be helpful for giving you the building blocks for the collagen and the elastin that makes up fascia in your body. Before we get started, remember to hit subscribe down below, it’s a really quick and simple way you can support my work, support the channel, and get updated with my weekly science-based yoga videos.
OK, so what is fascia? In our body we have all kinds of different soft tissues and when you think about muscles we tend to think of something that looks like this. Blood red steaks or something and maybe you think of a marbled steak that has fat. But any muscle in the body is also intertwined and really inseparable from fascia, these sheets of connective tissues. And there are thick layers of fascia that are visible from the outside.
You could see this in a piece of chicken, you could see this in a cross section of beef, if you were in a deli section in a grocery store. But there is also tons of invisible fascia that’s so thin that it’s transparent and not even visible to the naked eye. To give you a little bit of reference for how prevalent this tissue is in your body, depending on your size, somewhere between 18 and 23 kilograms of fascia are inside you.
Just to give you some reference, in my body there’s probably about 20 kilograms of fascia, so that’s a lot of tissue. A helpful way to understand fascia is to look at a cross-section of an orange and you see the little pith, white bits that separate and hold everything together, without that pith this would just be sort of an orange smoothie.
The same is true in your body. You’d essentially have bloody muscle smoothies were it not for the fascia that holds everything together. A key thing to understand about fascia is that it has five or even six times as many sensory nerves as your muscles, which means if you have sore quadriceps after leg day, you’re very likely feeling some or even all of that signal coming from your fascia, simply because it has more sensory nerve endings. Unlike your tendons and your ligaments in your body, which often have very poor circulation, sometimes they’re avascular, your fascia also has little capillaries, so it has a little blood supply.
But also because of its proximity to muscle it can heal up pretty quickly.
Unlike a tendon or ligament injury, which can be major, a fascial injury can be quite painful, but in many cases, can heal up in half or even a quarter of the time of a ligament or a tendon injury. So, even though maybe in a 2D or a 3D drawing in a book your fascia looks something like a tendon or a ligament, the way it behaves, its innervation, is really quite different. Your fascia has a very interesting wavy pattern to the fibers and I’ll show you a piece of dough to hopefully articulate that.
The fibers run in parallel to your muscle fibers in a wavy pattern and that gives it some elasticity. What that means is, like a spring, the fascia can lengthen and then bounce back.
It has a limited amount of elasticity with that wavy fiber spring motion, but it’s mostly plastic and a plastic tissue, like the name suggests, changes shape. So, it can get thicker, it can get thinner, but essentially it remodels based on what’s underneath it. In this case what’s underneath it is the muscle tissue itself. So, do we stretch fascia? Not really.
Do we strengthen fascia? Kind of. Really what we do is we remodel or shape it. So, if you’re working on your quadriceps, if you are lengthening your hamstrings, the fascia that goes through and around it will absolutely change. In some places thicker, in some places thinner, but it will absolutely be different.
Your fascia is often layered into lots and lots of layers like phyllo dough and in between these layers we have lots of hydration, and so when fascia is damaged, oftentimes it’ll become dry and rigid. And one of the unique things about this tissue is in certain areas of your body it’s very, very soft and pliable, and in other areas it’s rigid and strong, almost like a ligament. For example, your IT band, your iliotibial band or your plantar fascia on the bottom of your foot, these act very similar to ligaments or tendons and yet they are fascia. It’s an extremely adaptive tissue and this is why it is important to train your fascia.
However, leading into my next point, you cannot work on your fascia outside of your muscle.
The term that’s used is myofascial training, myofascial release, and really this is referring to musculofascial. Myo just means muscle and fascia is this tissue we’ve been talking about and you cannot work on your fascia without affecting the muscle. You cannot train your muscles or lengthen your muscles without working the fascia. So, any form of strength training, any form of ballistic training, any form of plyometrics or stretching, all of those things are going to affect your muscles and your fascia that underlies them.
So, if you talk to a fitness professional or a bodyworker or a massage therapist who says they’re able to isolate fascia, that’s usually them using tricky language to overcomplicate something that is really pretty simple.
This acts as a single unit. However, this is my next point that’s important to understand, fascia is different in that there are these big lines in your body of fascia that crisscross the front of your body, that’s sort of wrap like a corset around your pelvis, there’s a big line along your arm here, and what that means is, similar to a wetsuit, you need to work on these big fascial chains in order to create dynamic, pliable, strong, and also resilient fascia. And what that really comes down to is working in a full plane of motion, which we’ll take a look at here in just a moment.
When you think about your fascial fitness, taking care of this connective tissue, it’s really similar to any of the other soft tissues in your body. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.
When it comes to fascia, what we really mean is you will lose range of motion. This is commonly seen in people who do hyper, hyper repetitive ranges of motion, like a cyclist who’s hunched over his bike for a decade, like a runner who spends 20 years in a very specific posture, very quickly you can see that they’ve lost range of motion.
A lot of that can be attributed to fascial changes, where they’ve lost range. Whenever we talk about fascial fitness, of course, we’re talking about myofascial health because these two go together. However, fascia does work in bands or sheaths or chains and we have, for example, our spiral chain of fascia, you have a lateral chain that goes up the side of your body, you have your fascia lata that wraps around your pelvis, and again, if you move in a limited range like almost all modern exercise, fitness classes, movement modalities in sports do, very quickly you’ll start to lose range of motion.
This is called the sagittal plane. Bicep curls, squats, and almost everything, whether we’re running, or cycling, or swimming, works in the sagittal plane. A key thing for fascial fitness, and to keep your dynamic range, is to also work in what’s called your coronal plane. That would be things like lateral raises, that would be things like jumping jacks, or side lunges, moving side-to-side, not just forward and back.
And lastly, this one is probably most neglected, in fact, most people over the age of 50 have almost entirely lost their ability to twist.
This is called the transverse plane. If you were to look at me from above and see a twisting motion, whether that was a baseball pitcher winding up to throw, or a shot putter throwing, or a golfer for example works in the transverse plane all the time, this is the third and probably most neglected plane of motion that you need to utilize. Lastly, we do want to stress just enough your fascia, so that it keeps that elasticity we talked about before. And that would be done through plyometric-style training, which doesn’t have to be extreme, it doesn’t have to be risky on your knees, but some form of hopping, skipping rope, bouncing, you could do this on a rebounder or a trampoline to make it easier on your joints, but it’s really, really crucial to keep the elasticity of your fascia intact.
When you think about the health of your fascia it’s really important to think about food and nutrition.
We had an orange before. Oranges actually contain vitamin C which is great for your connective tissue, collagen. Muscle tissue and fascia are made up of different things. The collagen content, for example, and the elastin content in fascia, is much, much greater. Whenever I mention collagen people automatically assume they should go take a collagen supplement and collagen supplements may or may not be beneficial, you certainly could do that, it’s certainly not harmful.
But in all cases, for sure, we want to provide your body with the full building blocks of nutrients so that it can make its own collagen. Whether that comes from a collagen supplement, maybe, maybe not, or whether it comes from whole foods that you might be getting at the grocery store. Things that are really helpful – zinc, the trace mineral, copper, the trace mineral, vitamin C, really, really crucial, sulfur-rich foods. I’ll put a list down below, a grocery shopping list, and these are also things that you you could potentially supplement. The last thing to take a look at would be your protein intake.
Now, most people eat adequate protein, but it’s true, when you start strengthening or stretching or changing your physical activity level, you might need to up your protein.
There’s also some research to suggest that as you get older you might need more protein as well. To give you a general reference range, maybe around 0.8 to 1 gram per pound of ideal body weight. For some of you that might feel just extraordinarily high, but if you aim for that target and end up a little bit lower it should make a big difference.
So, we’ve got protein, we’ve got zinc, we’ve got copper, and we have vitamin C. Before bed it can be helpful to have some magnesium, like 200 to 400 milligrams of magnesium glycinate can help you to relax in terms of your muscles, which will help your fascia. And lastly, to think about an omega-3 supplement which will help naturally soothe any inflammation that you might have from your exercise routine. The most important thing to remember with your fascia is that we can’t have a conversation about fascia without having a conversation about muscles and vice versa.
So, we’re talking about myofascial health and this happens through strength, it happens through flexibility, but as we looked at today, it’s really important that you move through dynamic ranges of motion, in your sagittal plane, yes, but also in your coronal plane, your transverse plane, and add in a little bit of plyometrics, a little bit of hopping, to keep your fascia strong, and long, and resilient.
Think about those foods we mentioned. Hope you found this video helpful. Click subscribe down below to get updated with next week’s video and, as usual, you can find my teaching calendar at yogabody.com..
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