What is fascia and how is it relevant to my health?
By Dr. Graham Taylor
The physiological importance of fascia has been overlooked for a long time, but more and more important information is now being discovered.
Fascia, which is made of connective tissue, is becoming more widely recognized as key to our health, especially in the area of back and hip pain.
Researcher Thomas Myers works on the understanding that many body areas are interconnected to others quite remote or on the opposite side to each other. This
model explains why a painful part of the body may be painful because of fascial tightness or dysfunction a long way away in the body. This could be due to an
old injury or even a twist or torsion of the body that has stayed stuck over time. It is the tightness or twist of the actual fascia, he says, that is the big problem here.
How may this be important for you? Have you have a muscle or pain problem that keeps coming back? Maybe after having treatment and temporary relief, that pain just won’t stay away?
How frustrating! Long term pain is distracting and drains our energy. It’s harder to get enthused about work or play and even harder to be relaxed or focused while we’re engaging. When assessing the problem, the painful spots are the ones that demand our attention and perhaps that of the practitioner as well. Fair enough, right?
But what if the real cause of the pain is away from or even distant from where the most painful part is?
Fascia does have a nerve supply and can compress nerves. However, over-tight fascia causes mechanical problems without nerve compression too.
Fascia is a body-wide network of fibrous tough strands that envelops muscles, blood vessels and organs. Fascia is so prolific that it makes up about 20% of our bodyweight. It is located directly under the skin and winds its way deeper, creating a web-like support network for our muscles.
The fascia has several jobs in keeping us well. One is to stop infection simply via a wall effect. Another is to support blood and lymph vessels and yet another is to
reduce friction created by muscular activity. A great example of this third function is demonstrated in the way the ITB (Ilio-tibial band, thick and wide soft tissue that often
gets tight and hard) on the outside of your thigh – contains and supports all of your thigh muscles. This tissue assists certain hip movements and plays a structural supporting role for the hamstrings and quadriceps muscles. If your pelvis is unbalanced it may change the pull-angle of the ITB fascia and you will get a horrible pain at the side of your hip. In more advanced cases when you lay on your side at night you will get sharp pain sometimes shooting down to the knee! This is known as “Trochanteric bursitis” or “Trochanter pain syndrome”.
Some specialized fascia can store and release elastic energy providing shock absorption and helping us propel our body in movement. An example of this is (you guessed it) in the arch of the feet, the plantar fasciae…..you’ve heard of plantar fasciitis, right? An expert on fasciae, researcher Thomas Myers has found reliably that plantar fasciitis is caused by muscle and fascial imbalances further up the leg!
Treatment for this problem must go beyond rubbing the sore spots only. To get the pain to stop permanently, all aspects of the plantar fasciitis problem need to be treated properly.
Next time you are seeing Dr Annika or Dr Graham you are welcome to ask about how fascia over-tightness may be influencing your posture and how this can be
helped.