Anatomy 101

fas⋅ci⋅a [fash-ee-uh] –noun, plural fas⋅ci⋅ae  [fash-ee-ee] – a band or sheath of connective tissue investing, supporting, or binding together internal organs or parts of the body.

ad⋅he⋅sion [ad-hee-zhuh n] –noun – the abnormal union of adjacent tissues.

Bodies are made up of tissues wrapped in fascia. Every muscle cell is wrapped in a sheath of fascia, groups of muscle cells are held together in another sheath of fascia and the entire muscle is again wrapped in a sheath of fascia. Tendons are actually just those sheaths continuing on without the filling of the muscle tissue. Tendon then wraps around bones in the same manner. When they attach bone to bone, they’re called ligaments, but it is the same tissue.

I like to think of fascia as plastic wrap. As we move, all this tissue slides across other tissue and sometimes sticks together, or if we hold a certain posture for long enough and the muscles lock tight to hold it, the tissue will adhere together.
If you think about this in a full body sense, it starts to make sense that when you’ve hurt yourself and held your body in a certain position to avoid re-injury, new parts of your body start to hurt as well. In the world of fascia, everything is connected with everything else. If you twist up one corner of a sheet of plastic wrap, it pulls from the rest of the sheet as well. Similarly, if you get an adhesion in, say, the fascia of your upper back, it will pull so that the rest of your back, your shoulders, and your chest will feel it. That in turn pulls on other parts of the body.

This is why stretching, hydration and massage are so important. Stretching helps to keep your body used to going through different movements so that even if you do have a locked posture, you move in other ways to help break up the locking pattern.

If we get dehydrated our tissues don’t have enough moisture to help aid in lubricating the space between tissues, making sticking much more likely.

Massage is a way to manually break apart the adhesions so that the tissues once again move freely.

So drink water, stretch several times daily and get massage regularly to keep your body working as it should.