Fascia :
Problems Posed and Where the Learning is Leaning
Jane Birmingham | Remedial Massage Therapist , Studio Jarnie – Centre for Healing , Music and Learning
Most body workers today would agree that fascia has a vital role to play in muscle and joint pain or weakness , but the nature and extent of that role is not yet clear . We rely on scientific researchers to give us answers and the ground is shifting quickly in this area of science as new technological tools provide a more complete picture of what and where fascia really is and consequently , what it does . We all have a responsibility as practitioners to continue to drill down into the theoretical evidence being presented and distill this information into a clearer , truer and more focused image of what we are physically dealing with when we perform tissue manipulations of any kind . The onus is on us to establish better practical methodologies guided by this knowledge .
Early understandings of fascial integrity
A rudimentary concept of fascial integrity advanced in the early 1900 ’ s by Dr Ida Rolf was debunked as pseudoscience at the time , although her writing actually dealt with the philosophical and sociological as well as the physiological science of human biology . She attributed the structure of the human body to the presence of collagen which , endowed with life energy , formed a seamless , flexible network that could maintain structure independent of the earth ’ s gravitational pull .( 1 ) Rolf believed you could change structure and improve function by adding energy to this collagen in the form of pressure - the pressure of massage . Before this time anatomists generally saw the role of fascia as fairly arbitrary , but many Rolf disciples and other medical researchers have picked up the baton since then . It turns out she was not so far from the truth after all . Energy is generally understood as the ability to do work . According to the first law of thermodynamics it can be neither created nor destroyed , but it can be transferred or converted from one form to another and , in the biological sense , can take various forms such as kinetic energy , potential energy and chemical energy .( 2 )
In his highly publicised 2007 book Anatomy Trains ( 3 ) Dr Tom Myers wrote of force ( i . e ., kinetic energy ) travelling like a train along tracks of fascia connecting skeletal muscles in kinetic chains through the body , top to bottom and bottom to top , effectively facilitating their ability to work . This particular topographical approach is a useful reference for therapists when identifying fascial tension in a linear direction , but we may also need to register force and momentum across wide planes . Think of a parachute or the webbing on a flying fox , where the spread across a broad sheet creates enough resistance to counter gravity . So we see that every revelation generates another question to be answered .
Schleip and Klingler ( 4 ) tried to clarify the definition of fascial tissue as agreed by researchers during the 2009 Fascia Research congress : “ The term fascia here includes all fibrous collagen tissues whose architecture is primarily shaped by tensional loading ( in contrast to a locally dominant compressional loading ) and which can be seen to take part in a bodywide tensional force transmission network .” This definition incorporates the concept of biotensegrity , adapted from an architectural term coined by Buckminster Fuller , a contemporary
68 | vol28 | no2 | JATMS