Do we really have 600 muscles or is it one big muscle, a body stocking with 600 bags of the Fascia ?
Fascia is a system of flexible connective tissue surrounding everything in the body, from muscles and bones to organs and cells. It is the ‘suit’ or ‘body stocking’ that keeps all parts of the body in place, which facilitates movement, posture, balance, and allows us to cope with pressure of gravity.
If the ‘system’ is supple and running smoothly, all is fine, but when some parts become stiff, tense or inflamed, there will be consequences.
Many problems can be linked to the Fascia since it is such a critical part of our metabolism, stabilizing function, musculoskeletal system, has a force-transferring effect as well as helps us know our position.
The Fascia’s status affects our general health and the well-being of the body. A fault may give troublesome painful conditions that are difficult to get out of.
The Fascia facilitates all communications between every single body part. There are 6 times more nerve receptors in the Fascia than in the muscles. Fascia exists in solid form, in liquid form ( extracellular fluid)
and communication in the Fascia is 15 times faster than in the nervous system.
This is where we have our entire intelligence, intuition and feeling, an extension of the brain, if you will- this is what makes the body one whole, and not a lot of parts.
It has been understood for hundreds of years that muscle function presents as individual muscles acting in isolation on the skeleton, divided from its connections above and below, shorn of its neurological and vascular connections, and divorced from the regionally adjacent structures. This ubiquitous presentation defines a muscle’s function solely by what happens in approximating the proximal and distal attachment points. It has long been an accepted view that muscles attach from bone to bone, and that their sole function is to approximate the two ends together, or to resist their being stretched apart.
Fascial tissue, or connective tissue runs between everything in the body. Your brain, heart, guts and muscles are all encased in this fibrous tissue. It’s the biological fabric that holds us together.
We have talked about the musculoskeletal system, and in talking about the bones and the muscles, we leave out the system that connects between the two. We do talk about tendons and ligaments, but those are individual structures, and this whole biological fabric works together.
Instead of seeking help and finding out which body part failed or became injured, let's find out what has caused it in the first place. So, an injury to your foot could be a Dysfunction in the foot which could lead to a problem in the hip. A Dysfunction in your hip can end up as a pain in your neck. These kinds of things have not been considered, because we’ve just been looking at the isolated parts.
And this is practical to anybody who’s doing sports, who’s getting older, anybody who has a body, and it actually applies to our children too. Children are going to be more and more attached to their electronic devices, and more and more living in a virtual world, how do we keep their body literate, kinesthetically literate ? What do we need to teach our children so that they can successfully live in a body, while living in the world of the internet, because that’s going to be the world of the future ?
We are entering an era where less and less demand is on the body, and yet we still need that body to function properly.