As a clinician, educator, sports enthusiast, and patient, I have come across many different descriptions and explanations of what ‘MYOFASCIAL RELEASE’ is, and I can honestly tell you that it is a bit overwhelming to hear so many uneducated and mis-informed publications produced, so many misleading marketing specific messages. Nonetheless, it sometimes needs to be released out into the public and then the public over time comes to an understanding of what it is by practice rather than by message.
It is my life passion to treat, teach and apply Myofascial Release for my patients, my family and myself. This isn’t some mass fabricated item that you need to scrap, roll, drag, suction, prick, pull, or tug on your body. It is a gentle sustained pressure to grab ahold of your body’s inner fabric, and with two of natures most influential forces (Time + Pressure) produce the vitality and release that our body craves for.
I will explain it in 3 steps:
- What is Myofascia?
- What it does?
- How is it released?
What is Myofascia?
More specifically, what is FASCIA. Fascia is your body’s conducting glue. It is formed in embryo from stem cells that also produce your brain and sensory nerves. Fascia is a fractal structural, like a scaffolding that acts like an inner fiber optic super highway for pressure, sheer, tension, and vibration distributions throughout your whole body. Fascia is composed of 3 primary ingredients:
1- Collagen, 2- Elastin, 3- Ground substance (a polysaccharide gel complex).
Fascia runs continuously throughout your whole body (head to toe), front to back and superficial to deep. There is no void space in your body of fascia, thus leading to a whole body influencing network that cannot be partitioned into fragments.
What it Does?
Fascia is the largest organ of our body connecting superficial awareness, intrinsic movement processing, fluid dynamics, metabolic waste removal, cellular communication, and many more roles. When there is balance in the fascia, it acts and conducts information almost instantaneously, but when life, trauma, injury, stress, and all the other little things in life that wreck our body show up, the fascia, in a protective state, will compress and tighten down. This vise like grip activity at first might not feel too bad, but over time with enormous amount of pressure sustaining, limiting normal body flow and normal conductivity, this fascia ends up transiting from a pristine conductor to a vicious Insulator. Impeding the normal somatic information of your body.
It really is the Ying and the Yang of your system. In balance, fascia is beautiful and effective to live life to its optimal potential. In dysfunction, it takes what you love, enjoy and hope to do and restricts you from your own quality of life.
How is it Released?
A manual gentle load, sustained depth pressure with a sheer, traction or gentle oscillation. Pressure and time are key fundamentals to this treatment approach. The clinician needs to be aware of not just the surface of tissue they are providing the intervention to but also the whole-body response.
It is IMPOSSIBLE for an in-organic object to affect the fascia system at a whole-body level. There is no pressure on earth that will break, tear, rip or open fascia apart. There is structural work that can be done to enhance the release, and most clinicians will apply most of their efforts into the soft tissue mobilization and structural tissue mobility but will completely miss out of the fascial release benefit for their patient. Usually for 2 main reasons:
1) lack of time 2) lack of patience.
Both variables are strongly limited and confined in the conventional therapeutic intervention course due to time constraints and/or lack of knowledge and skill by the practitioner.
In summary, the fascia is the single most important organ in our body controlling body function, communication, and movement. When stress comes into the human frame, it protects those areas with an aggressive force, however, that force becomes the dysfunction limiting normal balance and conduction to return. Manual, gentle, safe and effective releases are the GOLD standard of myofascial release.
Mass fabricated, inorganic tools for myofascial release are only affecting the vasodilatation and soft tissue mobility, but NOT releasing the true root cause of the dysfunction.
Knowledge is power, the more you know, the more power you have to take care of yourself and not let others influence you on what they feel they want you to do, buy or receive from them.
For more information request a free Discovery Visit at Rendon Physical Therapy. 909-796-4342
Be blessed.