Friday, March 18, 2011

Foam Rolling & Myofascia Explained

Fascia is of huge importance. It is one of only 3 networks that run throughout the entire body, the other two being the fluid and neural network. Anything that the body considers important enough to weave into every orifice of the body is simply vital, otherwise evolution would have thrown it in the trash long before we even made it out of the cave. So if this fascia stuff is so important how come we know so little about it and what the hell does it do anyway?

I believe it stems from the way anatomy is currently thought in school. We see pretty pictures of a muscle connecting to a tendon which in turn attaches to a bone; three perfect structures independent of each other. The truth is that it's far more like a continuum, everything flows gracefully from one structure to the next and the thing that ties it all together is fascia. Fascia is a matrix of fibrous connective tissue that runs throughout the entire human body, separating and binding together muscles and organs. Chaitow describes fascia a little more eloquently in this awesome blog as an "elastic-plastic, gluey, component that invests, supports and separates, connects and divides, wraps and gives cohesion, to the rest of the body". It's like a 3-D cobweb, but can also function as a sheath to wrap structures. It's simply fascinating stuff, and with research currently exploding in this area we're learning that fascia has more functions than we ever thought possible. Without going into a review of the current literature it's safe to say that it's far from a background material. 

Here is a superb video that will give you a better idea.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

My Final Year Project


In the last few weeks when I’ve been going through some self myofascial techniques (foam rolling) with my clients the topic of my final year project (FYP) has popped up a few times. I’ve decided to write a quick blog about my FYP so that people can get an understanding of what exactly I did in university, and what my research found.

I’ve also uploaded a full copy of my FYP to google docs so if anyone wants to get their nerd on, all they have to do is click on the title below.


For everyone else, here is a plain English summary.