Bones, muscles, tendons: You probably know the things that make up your body. But have you ever heard of fascia?

Our bodies are made of connective tissue – blood, bone, and fascia, which adapt to our environment. Connective tissue also adapts to stress, too much or too little stress and the tissues respond negatively. If you’re chronically sedentary, the bones aren’t stressed enough, they decalcify, and osteoporosis sets in. Blood reduces in volume which raises your heart rate, thickens your blood, and increases the work/stress on the heart.

When movement doesn’t happen often enough, or with enough variation, the body develops adhesions causing thickening of the tissue. Basically, when our body is stuck in a position for an extended amount of time it will start to lay down tissue and literally grow itself together. Think of sitting for a while and then standing, or when you first wake up in the morning; you are stiff at first but then you loosen up as you move.

Similarly, if you play the same sport 12 months out of the year or perform the same exercises day in and day out, the body will start to break down and injuries will occur.

Fascia, or fibrous connective tissue, connects everything in the body to give it structure and support. Fascia is an important support system of the human body that holds us upright, not bones or muscles. Connected to literally everything in the body, fascia runs for long distances in the body, impacting other structures that are far from any given moving joint. Muscles don’t work independently, and you can’t think about muscles as just having an origin and an insertion.

Fascia optimizes the spread of force through the body on a functional level. When you create a line of stress in the body along a line of fascia it becomes depolarized and attracts fibroblasts (cells that make connective tissue) to the area, which begin laying down collagen and creating stability and shape. Moderate and varied stress is adaptive – the longer a line of collagen is, the more pliable, resilient and strong it becomes. However, this process doesn’t happen when there is rigidity or over-repetition of the same stressors. To optimize the health and function of our fascia, we need to apply different stress loads to our bodies and move at different speeds and at different angles.

If you want to stay healthy, you have to move your body – but you have to move it in different ways. So, what does this mean? It means you have to think about mobility and actual movement, not just “exercise.” Yes, walking, running and weightlifting are great, but your body moves in more ways than just front to back (sagittal plane), it also moves side to side (frontal plane), and it rotates (transverse plane), not to mention all of the many different ways in between. If you are an athlete you’re going to want to cross-train, but we’ll talk more about this in our blog on cross-training.

Beacon Physical Therapy

At Beacon Physical Therapy, we want to keep you healthy and pain- and injury-free. If you are having an issue with mobility or flexibility, make an appointment today. We’d love to meet you and get you back to doing what you love.

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