Understanding Fascia: What It Is + Why You

Should Care
by Melissa Putt

Think of fascia as the most sensitive, highly interconnected system in the entire body it's the
life force next to blood. Without fascia, toned and structured muscle would turn to hamburger
meat, organs would spread like wildfire and bones would crumble, as fascia is the single element
that organizes and suspends these parts of the body. It's the most highly innervated tissue,
sensitive to every hormone in your system, recoiling with every bump and bruise sustained.
Our understanding of fascia in modern science will revolutionize how we exercise, how surgeons
operate, how athletes train and how we address pain management. Fascia is the frontier of body
knowledge, and the better you understand what it is and how it works, the more in tune with your
body you'll be. Here's what you should know about fascia.
So, what is fascia?
Fascia is the system of connective tissue fibers that lay just under the surface of our skin. Under
a microscope, fascia is highly organized in a mesh formulation of tubules filled with water, and
its job is to attach, stabilize, enclose and separate muscles and internal organs.
What does fascia do?
Fascia is wrapped throughout the body on "lines of pull." It connects toes to brow in one
uninterrupted sheet of fascia, and fingers to chest and neck. The heart fascia is connected at the

collarbone, which connects to the arm and fingers. It coils around the bones, muscle fibers,
muscle bundles, organs, arteries, veins and nerves, applying tension and compression to the body
material it surrounds.
This is what you feel as a stretch or when you have physical pain. It's the tension of the fascia
around the area of sensation that causes feelings of tightness. Tendons and ligaments are layers
of fascia that are meant to absorb shock and distribute the impact. If tendons are tight,
dehydrated and shortened, they can't absorb impact and will fray, causing pain.
Fasica also has an organ suspension function. Have you ever wondered how your liver, stomach
and intestines stay put? Your organs are not suspended without any connection to the outside
body. Each organ is wrapped in a hammock of fascia that's connected to the spine, ribs, or pelvis.
These fascial connections connect with the muscle fascia that affects your movement. Your
breath, exercise and sitting posture will all affect the health of organs, as they're connected
fascially to the muscles being used for daily activities.
How does fascia work?
Fascia is sensitive to all movement. There's no such thing as isolation exercises or having a "legday workout" all movement affects the entire body because of the links to the body-wide
fascial network. Working at your desk with hands pulled forward on the keyboard pulls the fascia
in the low back and hips, and if you cross your legs, your knees and bladder.
Counting repetitions in your workout does affect the cells of the muscle, but ultimately muscle
potential is limited by the quality of the fascia that surrounds it. Movement is supposed to be
absorbed by fascia, not muscle. Watch a cat jump; that's not a muscular movement. It's the fascia
recoiling and creating a spring tension to propel the cat upward.
Humans are the same to some degree. Our body mechanics are meant to be spring loaded for
joints of the spine, hips, knees, ankles and ribs, so they can absorb impact and distribute the
strain throughout the body. Proper exercise should follow the lines of fascial pull in order to
distribute the impact. When you're tight and restricted, the fascia is stuck and doesn't glide
smoothly over the muscles and bones. In order for your body to work like a well-oiled machine,
you must focus on the fascia. Fitness ability is dependent on healthy fascia.
Why is fascia so crucial?
Joint health, injury-free sports, organ health and fluid movement are all dependent upon a
healthy integrated fascial system. This promotes the notion that you need to take care of every
part of your body in the same manner without neglecting any one part. Total body health
translates to total internal health and pain-free living.

The Web of Life - Tom Myers on the

Significance and Functions of Fascia
By:
Tom Myers
Fascia is the biological fabric that holds us together. You are about 70 trillion cells all humming
in relative harmony; fascia is the 3-D spider web of fibrous, gluey, and wet proteins that hold
them all together in their proper placement. How fascia works as a whole our biomechanical
regulatory system is highly complex and under-studied. Understanding fascia is essential to the
dance between stability and movement crucial in high performance, central in recovery from
injury and disability, and ever-present in our daily life from our embryological beginnings to the
last breath we take.
There are many designations for different areas, topologies, and histologies within biological
fabric. Traditionally, fascia as a medical term applies only to certain sheets of fabric within the
body what we call the plantar fascia, for instance, is actually the plantar aponeurosis.
Thoracolumbar fascia, the fascia lata, the pannicular fascia, the fascia profundis these are
recognized by science to be fascial sheets.
Here, though, and increasingly in scientific and research circles and professionals worldwide,
fascia has a wider definition: all the collagenous-based soft-tissues in the body, including the
cells that create and maintain that network of extra-cellular matrix (ECM). That definition

includes all the tissues traditionally designated as fascia in classical anatomy, plus all the other
very similar tissues arrayed in different ways around the body; tendons, ligaments, bursae, and
all the fascia in and around the muscles endomysium, perimysium, epimysium. Also included
would be the fascia around the organs: the coelomic bags that hold the organs in the peritoneum
and mesentery in your abdominal cavity, the mediastinum, pericardium, and pleura that hold the
organs in the chest cavity, and the membranes dura and pia and perineuria that surround the
brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves.

That expanded definition usually does not include the harder tissues cartilage and bone but
there is an argument that both these tissues lie within the spectrum of fascial tissues. These
structural elements form from the same mesodermal primordium, develop in similar ways, have
a core leather-like matrix of collagen, and are as responsive subject to Wolffs Law of
remodeling to sustained forces going through the body as is the rest of the fascia. Most
researchers would draw the line at soft-tissues, putting bone and cartilage into the hard tissue
category, but we prefer the wider view: From the fibrin in blood to the coral structure of bone,
we have a remarkable variety of building materials available to us based on alterations of the
fibers, gels, and water content of the ECM.
You would need a large shopping cart to purchase all the materials you would need to make a
body, but connective tissue manages to build all of them strings, wires, elastics, sheets, sacs,
insulating material, bushings, struts, and springs your connective tissue cells wrestle all of
these from three simple elements: water, gels, and fibers. The cornea of your eye, the enamel
covering your teeth, and the valves of your heart are just three of an extraordinary array of
connective tissues on display and at work in your body.
However you define it, fascia is everywhere top to toe, birth to death, micro to macro. The
expanded definition emphasizes two elements:
1) Fascia is one network, embryologically and anatomically. All these different names we give
elements within it this tendon or that ligament can tend to hide the fact that it is all one

connected system. When we injure the median nerve, we name it but we treat it within the
nervous system. If there is blockage in the saphenous vein, we understand that lack within the
whole circulatory system. But when we injure the Achilles tendon, we tend to treat just that part,
instead of seeing the part that failed within the context of the whole system. Our fascial fabric
constitutes one single biomechanical regulatory system we benefit from seeing it, training it,
and treating it that way.
2) it is our dissection method analyzing the body by means of a blade that separates, creates
individual structures that we (not God) name. Therefore our western science way of
understanding the body cutting it into smaller and smaller parts has led to great discoveries,
but it tends to destroy important connections, and otherwise ignore the whole system responses
of the collagenous net. Fascia is, in fact, our system of Biomechanical Regulation just as our
circulatory system is a chemical regulator and the nervous system is a timing regulator and
needs to be studied and treated as a system, not only as a series of parts.
Anatomy atlases and kinesiology texts tend to reduce us to Newtonian biomechanics of forces,
vectors, and levers as if we we are manufactured from parts like a car or a computer. This is a
very limited viewpoint that explains some behaviors of our system but obscures others. It is
rapidly falling before Einsteins Relativity (only 100 years late), fractal mathematics, synergetic
systems theory, and tensegrity geometry as applied to biological systems.

Our single fascial system starts about 2 weeks into development as a fibrous gel that pervades
and surrounds all the cells in the developing embryo. It is progressively folded by gastrulation
and the rest of the motions of development into the complex layers of fascia we see in the adult.
In fact there is no discontinuity in the layers of fascia, so layers is a useful but deceptive
concept (like muscles). Names such as hamstrings or sacrospinous ligament are convenient
and even essential to discourse, and it is a leap for most of us to give up the idea that there is a
reality attached to our terminology. But we do better to keep in mind that all such separations,
including the distinctions we call muscles, are best thought of not as separate structures but
simply as zip codes (post codes) for contractile centers within the unitary and responsive fascial
net.

Our collagenous network, often called the extra-cellular matrix (ECM), is made up of
intercellular elements. Emphatically: these fibers and gels are not cellular in themselves; they are
cell-products. Manufactured by cells and extruded into the intercellular space, they organize
themselves depending on the forces that go through them into dense or loose tissues, with
regular or irregular (felt-like) arrangement. These arrangements can and do change when the
forces acting on those tissues change either positively in skill-building or negatively in injury
or aging. Genetics determine only what proteins are able to be manufactured; the local
environment of how you use your body determines how they are arrayed from day to day.
ECM is not quite a substitute for our new expanded definition of fascia, because the ECM does
not include the cells, and fascia would definitely include the fibroblasts, mast cells, and various
other cells (like osteoblasts, chondroblasts, osteoclasts, etc.) that create, maintain, and break
down the ECM. Put the body in a vat of solvent and dissolve away all the cells to see that ECM
in its singular organic unity. ECM + connective tissue cells = fascia. One parallel that may help
to see this is an orange: the rind, pith, and the walls between the sections would all be like the
fascia of the body, organizing the juice into discrete but interconnected compartments.
If we could magically make everything invisible except the collagen network, we would see
dense leathery mesh in the bones, cartilage, tendons, and ligaments. We would see a very loose
mesh in the breast, the cheek, and the pancreas. Each muscle would be surrounded and invested
with a looser (but still structurally strong) network. Every bone would have a tough plastic wrap
layer around the outside. Every organ would be invested and then bagged in a fascial sac. Only
the open tubes of the digestive, respiratory, and lymphatic system would be utterly free of the
fascial net.
Now, the fascial net responds and distributes forces as a whole not just locally, as this research
from Franklyn-Miller pictured below demonstrates conclusively. They measured strain in various
tissues while doing the straight leg lift test, commonly though to measure hamstring resistance to
hip flexion. To everyones surprise, you can see how the strain distributes itself through the
myofascial net nearly two and a half times as much strain in the ITT, and even a quarter as
much strain in the plantar fascia (without adding any dorsiflexion at all). The distribution tracks
the Superficial Back Line, the Spiral Line, and the Back Functional Line.
This whole argument is not meant to denigrate the role of the muscles or the nerves it is the
neuromyofascial web acting as a whole that serves us from second-to-second in gravity and the
other forces surrounding and affecting us. Structure without function is a corpse. But function
without structure is a ghost. It is now abundantly clear that fascia is part of the whole picture, and
a part less studied than muscle or nerve, therefore the need to include it to get the complete
picture. Individual muscles acting on bones across joints simply does not adequately explain
human stability and movement. Once examined, the second element of fascial study becomes
evident: fascia responds systemically as well as locally, and to understand this systemic response
at its most basic level, we need to understand the geometry of tensegrity as applied to the body.

Tom studied directly with Drs. Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais and
Buckminster Fuller and has practiced integrative bodywork for over 30 years in a variety of
clinical and cultural settings. He is the author of the best-selling Anatomy Trains (Elsevier
2001), is a pioneering researcher in how fascia relates to the structural health of the body.