Fascia Training – A Bit of a Stretch?
It’s a beautiful Saturday morning. I’m enroute to a Pickleball outing and I say to my partner, “I need to lose weight so I can play more. My biggest fear is that I will get hurt, requiring months of recovery.” Can you picture it?
Little warm-up volleying, all good. First game – lost, but competitive. Second game – losing, I go for a Novak Djokovic-like “clay court slide” to make a valiant defensive play and there goes the ol’ hammy. Intense pain in my left hamstring. Exactly what I was afraid of. I limp off the court, done for the day. It’s now 4 days later and the pain remains. Rats! My friend’s advice that “we need to stretch more as we age” is ringing in my ears. I hate to admit it, but I must – I never stretch. Never have.
A little Googling takes me to the word – Fascia, a term I am familiar with. Per Wikipedia.com,
Fascia (/ˈfeɪʃə/) is an architectural term for a vertical frieze or band under a roof edge, or which forms the outer surface of a cornice, visible to an observer.[1]
Hmmm. Doesn’t seem to fit. Maybe the second definition:
band or sheet of connective tissue, primarily collagen, beneath the skin that attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates muscles and other internal organs.
The article, Fascia training may help you live with less pain, experts say, on CNN.com, hits my condition on the head.
This pliable web of tissue also plays an important role in proprioception — the body’s ability to sense movement, action and location — and thus helps with coordination. That’s because the fascial network is richly innervated, containing some 250 million nerve endings, according to Dr. Robert Schleip in the 2020 medical book “Fascia, Function, and Medical Applications.”
Stretching from head to toe, the fascial network also gives the body its shape, much like a sheet of plastic wrap or those fine, white fibers that bind and mold the inside of an orange.
If you’ve dealt with stiffness and pain in the recent past, you may have come across fascia training — an approach that many in the fitness realm are encouraging people to do. That means working to improve the health of your fascia, a web of connective tissue that holds the body’s organs, muscles, bones and tissues in place.
Give your fascial system a little TLC, proponents of fascia training say, and you’ll be healthier, have less pain and move more fluidly. You may even improve your athletic performance. If you ignore your fascia, though, you may develop a host of problems.
Fascia can shorten, stiffen and develop adhesions from repetitive movements like running or swinging a racquet, said Schleip, a pioneer in fascia research who co-initiated the first International Fascia Congress, held in 2007 at Harvard Medical School in Boston. In fact, a majority of sports-related overuse injuries occur in the fascial network, he added.
Fascia can also become tight and painful from inactivity, such as sitting at a desk all day or spending hours scrolling through your smartphone.
“A couch potato is the worst thing you can be,” Schleip said. (Boldings are mine.)
Ok – lesson heard, but will it be learned? Will I add fascial training to my regimen. Heck, maybe more importantly, will I add a regimen that includes fascial training?
My question for you – how is your fascia? Both definitions, if you dare:
1. Roof fascia is the vertical “board” under a roof edge that ties your rafters together and is visible to an observer.
Is your fascia structurally and functionally sound, or merely a facade, pleasing to the observer?
2. Body fascia are band or sheet of connective tissues, beneath the skin that attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates muscles and other internal organs.
Is your fascia a pliable web of tissue that enhances your body’s ability to sense movement, action and location, or has it become short and stiffened by repetitive movements or inactivity?