Exposure by Antony Gormley

The extraordinary fascia gained more interest in the recent years. Becoming conscious of this biggest organ of a kind is crucial in maintaining your body in shape. Fascia is a conjunctive tissue that envelopes all our organs. It is translucent or whitish web that accounts for 30% of our weight. The fascial net is one continuous structure throughout the body. Fabulous sheaths of various sorts playing double role of connecting and separating at the same time.

“Fascia is the soft tissue component of the connective tissue system that permeates the human body; it interpenetrates and surrounds muscles, bones, organs, nerves, blood vessels and other structures. Fascia is an uninterrupted, three-dimensional web of tissue that extends from head to toe, from front to back, from interior to exterior. It is responsible for maintaining structural integrity, and for providing support and protection; it also acts as a shock absorber. Fascia has an essential role in blood flow and biomechanical processes that allow for intercellular communication. Fascia functions are the body’s first line of defense against pathogenic agents and infections. After injury, it is the fascia that creates an environment for tissue repair.”

Paoletti, 2006, cited in Oschman, 2016

Fascia is everywhere. There are no empty spaces in our body. All available space is occupied, filled with fibers that show apparent lack of coherent order. However, at the endoscopic level it has been confirmed that fascia has fractal property which is repeated self-similarity with repetitive patterns at increasingly smaller scales. The word fractal has been introduced by Benoît Mandelbrot in the world of mathematics in 1982. In early 2000’ as a young student, I had a chance to attend Benoît Mandelbrot’s keynote at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. I’ve been referring to his accomplishment is terms of fractals applied to finance in my master’s thesis. Little did I know at that time that I will refer to fractals years later while writing my blog post about fascia and yoga. At that time, I have not been preoccupied with my fascia at all in a conscious way. I of course did know that I should move as much as possible, exercise, drink a lot of water, don’t drink alcohol, and eat healthy, unprocessed food. I also thought that yoga is extremely boring and uninteresting discipline. Today, I’m interested in yoga and its beneficial effects on fascia. Fascia in terms of highly mobile tissue that allows for the efficient moving and gliding of the adjacent structures in our bodies. Dr. Guimbertau named this sliding system the Multimicrovascular Collagenic Absorbing System.  Fascia allows for push and pull relationship among structures, so called tensegrity which is portmanteau word for tension and integrity. Dr. Levin found that bones do not compress with each other and their joint surface (Levin 1981) but rather our bones float like the rods in Snelson’s sculptures in the fascia and associated soft tissue.

“Fascia is the organ of posture”

Ida Rolf

Without your fascia creating structure via the tensegrity, you would simply collapse into a heap. When your fascia is free and healthy you can stand strong and tall. When it is brittle and bound, you can’t. If you spend straight eight hours sitting every day for years your fascia takes a form of a sitting person. You really need to integrate some physical activity and multiple brakes to counteract the effect of sitting position.

Our 206 bones are being pulled and held aloft against the force of gravity by the tensile force of fascia, ligaments, and tendons. Fascia helps the body maintain structural integrity. Knowing that, makes me think about holistic approach to our health and body. That even apparently separated parts of us are highly connected. Have you thought how stress may travel through your body via fascia? Everyone knows that feeling when stress affects the tension level throughout your whole body. Fascia under stress may tighten, become thicker and irritated. If you stop moving your fascia becomes sticky.

Fascia is the constitutive tissue that creates the architecture, it is the home within which all of the body’s components develop, exist, and have their being.

Gumberteau & Armstrong, 2015

What can you do to undo these undesirable effects of stress and lack of movement? Yoga can seriously relieve the stress effects and help free your fascia.  Drinking a lot of water is not sufficient even though two-third of the ground substance of fascia is water. Research shows that to effectively hydrate your fascia you need to move, squeeze your body. Water is pulled there by a change in osmotic pressure (Schleip, 2016).

“Movements that load, stretch or compress will squeeze water from the sponge-like connective tissue of the neuromyofascial system. Fresh fluid from surrounding tissue and the local vascular network may replace the previous fluid that was removed along with accumulated waste products. In healthy states, the extracellular water of fascia is in a state of bound water rather than bulk water. A partial rehydration seems likely to occur when the fascia is squeezed again with an influx of bound water.”

Schleip & Baker, 2015, p.209

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