Fascia – What is it? 5 Facts – by Vancouver Massage Therapy RMT Monica Cleland

Fascia – what is it? We hear about it, we talk about it, it has a hum on the street .. it’s important! .. But .. what is it? Here we’ll take a look at it in simple terms – through 5 points of understanding.  

1.  Fascia is pervasive.  That means it’s everywhere in your body.  Fascia lines your organs.  It lines and infuses with your muscles.  It helps attach your muscles to your bones.  It lines your bones too.  It forms pathways for your delicate nerves, arteries, and veins to run through – tunnels to transport the fluids that sustain you.  Fascia is a 3 dimensional web connecting every structure in your entire body – from head to toe – without interruption.  It is a continuous unit, flowing from one form to the next, changing shape and tone depending on the structure it infuses with.

2. In simple terms, Fascia is made of 3 main things: elastin – stretchy material; collagen – extremely tough, inflexible material exhibiting a huge amount of tensile strength; and matrix – a gel-like substance.  The stretchy elastic fibres lie at the core, with the extremely tough and much less flexible collagen fibers coiling around it – together they bathe in the matrix.

3. Fascia is designed to protect you, to keep your internal structures properly positioned, to allow the different parts of your body to slide and glide around each other as you move, and allow your body to maintain it’s shape.  If we took away all of you except your fascia, you would still maintain your shape.

4. Fascia has the natural tendency to become solidified, shortened, and thickened when the body goes through a trauma, an inflammatory process, or exhibits poor posture over time – either stress or injury induced.  Fascia will organize itself along the lines of tension that are imposed on it.  These lines of tension created at the time of injury tend to stay in the body through time, they don’t re-set after the tissue heals. Over time these trauma / injury induced fascial lines of tension will pull the body into themselves, and out of it’s natural, crucial,  3 dimensional alignment, as fascial lines of tension are stronger than healthy tissue.  This pulling and distortion from our natural alignment forces the body into exerting an enormous amount of energy to sustain centred balance, and it often results in chronic physical pain symptoms developing at the site of the distorted and stretched tissue.

5. Thickened, dense fascia that has adapted to lines of tension and pulled the body out of alignment can be manually mobilized and softened such that it moves with the body rather than in opposition to the body, freeing and settling nearby painful distorted areas once again.

Stay tuned – we’ll build and reflect more deeply on some of these points with finer detail at a later date.

For more information, or to have a fascial treatment with someone from the Vancouver RMT team at Broadway Wellness, give us a call at 604-732-5222, or review our list of therapists and then book your appointment online.  For more information on fascia, sign up for our newsletter – our September newsletter has some complimentary information on fascia and how it works.  Be well, more soon.

Monica Cleland RMT, BA – Owner / Operator