This past month I have had the great opportunity to learn about fascia. Needless to say, what I was exposed to was absolutely fascia-nating!
Fascia is an intricate network of aqueous collagen fibers (think of a wet cotton ball being pulled apart) that runs both around and through the muscles and viscera, connecting our head to our feet. It is the thing that literally holds our bodies together and thus is called the organ of form. When our movements are functional and tissue is healthy fascia helps everything move and glide with ease. When our movements are dysfunctional though physical/emotional trauma, repetitive movement patterns or lifestyle, fascia will tense up and dehydrate locally causing adhesions. These adhesions are more commonly known as muscle knots.
Many different modalities exist to help rehydrate these muscle knots including massage, rolling, cupping, gua sha, and acupuncture to name a few. Since the author of this blogpost is an acupuncturist that is the modality that we will cover here today. There are many layers to the meridian system going from the cutaneous regions (outermost) to the deep pathways of the primary and diverging channels (innermost). When treating pain from a fascia perspective in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) we are working more superficially in the jing jin, or sinew channels. Sinew channels govern musculoskeletal dynamics, posture, and are involved in many cases of acute and chronic pain. These sinew channels cover a wider area than the deeper meridians that they pertain to (think lasagna vs. spaghetti noodles) and connect various muscle groups. One of the reasons why acupuncturists can needle a hand or a foot and get a response in a shoulder or back is due the sinew channels and the paths that they follow. Interestingly, many of the 12 main meridian channels used for thousands of years follow fascial lines that are a more recent scientific discovery.
Tensegrity is a structural principle whereby a structure is held together by tension, like a sail on a boat or a circus tent. If we were to alter a side of a circus tent the resulting structure would be compromised to some extent. It would still function but would not be optimal. Within our bodies we have this on both a macro and micro scale. On a macroscale our bones and organs are held in place by a force that is working against gravity, and on a microscale each individual cell experiences this tension when looking at the size of the cell and the interplay with the cells surrounding it. An acupuncture needle is able to exert enough pressure on the fascia to create a ripple causing the movement of fluid throughout the matrix shifting the tension. By changing the pressure in one area of the fascial matrix the rest of the matrix shifts and adjusts. This matrix responds almost instantly. For context, our circulation system is considered slow as it can take a full two minutes for it to respond, our nervous systems are faster responding at about 200km/hr, fascia adjusts to force exerted on it at a rate of 1235km/hr! By releasing the fascial adhesion and relying on the fascia’s property of tensegrity we are then able to introduce the potential for movement as fascia transmits kinetic (moving) force to structures down the line.
Fascial research is still in its infancy so there is still lots to learn. I hope that this blog post was informative and brought up more questions than it answered. As practitioners, we are always learning and would love to continue the conversation.
