Magic Happens When You Train Your Fascia

Over thirty five years ago I announced to my Grandmother Murray that I was studying yoga. “You’re studying yogurt?,” she queried with a twisted face.

Years later, sitting at a formally set dinner table, white folded napkins, silverware set, just so, with my family, I expressed my desire to become a Jungian analyst. “You want to become a union analyst?” they recoiled in horror.

So I can’t Imagine what any of them would say today about my current study of interest…fascia. I imagine they would say something like “You want to become a fascist?”

If you are in the yoga, exercise or bodywork world the word “fascia” is understood to mean the body’s connective tissue. Simply put, it’s the stuff that connects everything to everything else.

For a very long time, we’ve thought that strengthening the body was done via the muscles, but science now shows that we might also want to consider how we train our fascia. 

Anatomy Trains manual therapy magician…aka Tom Myers, says fascia is essentially like sausage casings into which the muscles are packaged. The muscles may generate force but it’s the fascia that transfers it. 

He and other scientists have shown through dissection that the body has a road map of these soft tissue continuities that give form and shape to the body. Not only does the fascia provide the body with tensile strength, but it is richly imbued with receptors that are four times as fast as nerves in relaying messages to the brain.

When this system goes into overdrive you get things like fibromyalgia. When it’s not working well, the body lacks resilience and adaptability. 

The litmus test of the health of your fascia is whether after doing the activities you love does the body recover quickly, or are you on the sofa getting cozy with a heating pad or bag of frozen peas? Or popping Advil instead of corn?

Massage therapists and Osteopaths have been intimately involved with manipulating fascia for years.  Mainstream science up until a few decades ago used to do dissections and throw this layer away. Little did they know that it was a Cinderella tissue. Now compelling research is giving fascia its due in everything from pain science to theories that fascia may be the mechanism for the spread of cancer in the body.

In the past ten years, the fitness industry has jumped on the fascia bandwagon. People have been foam rolling, stretching and releasing their fascia. While some of the schools of yoga claim that the ancient ones knew about it thousands of years ago, I’m not picking a fight on that point.  More importantly, I will say that different people have different levels of tensile strength in their fascia and for someone who can do a Yin Yoga class and pop out of a two-minute hold of a forward bend, there are many more people that holding a static stretch is a gateway to pain due to the tissue’s inability to recoil.

Some of us have fascia that has more recoil and resiliency and some of us don’t. That’s why it needs to be trained and not the same way for every person.

Enter Karin Gurtner

Three years ago I stumbled upon Karin Gurtner who developed a movement system that took equal measures of exercises from Pilates, Yoga and used Tom Myer’s Anatomy Trains system as a framework for training the connective tissue through movement. After a week of sliding, gliding, bouncing, self-massage and movements that looked like yoga and Pilates, but felt completely different under this woman’s direction, I was smitten.

I felt better than I had in years after that workshop and realized I had found the missing link in my own training and practice. Since then I’ve completed the Art-Of Motion Advanced Diploma and continue to study the work. 

What’s different about this, compared to regular Pilates or Yoga? 

Rather than moving into extreme positions, or going deeper into the pose, the emphasis is on tissue integrity. Instead of worshipping the altar of release, the focus is on balancing the myofascial continuities of the body and training the tissue to have adaptability, resilience, glide, buoyancy and tensile strength. The focus is as much on the movements as on training the qualities of movement. Instead of going to the end range of a movement, the focus is on feeling the support (through tensile tension). Turns out tension isn’t something you want to get rid of. In my classes we focus on finding support through core stability…aka an inner awareness of the body’s myofascial core from foot to skull, moving the spine in flexion, extension and rotation and moving through the limbs mindfully as tension contributors to our full body support system.

I am fond of telling my online membership tribe who study with me on a regular basis, that this work is a process and it’s a practice. There are no static end points or goals. Just the continual exploration of ourselves in movement. By improving our ability to sense ourselves in movement and modulate our actions and therefore reactions, the practice becomes a way of bearing witness and attending to ourselves.

And don’t we all need some of that?

If you want to see this work in action, make sure you sign up for my newsletter (below), check out all my courses and free materials at my online studio, and find something that will work for you.