Fascia's Springiness Wants to Help You Out

What do you get when juiciness, connectedness, and tensegrity harmonize? Springiness! When your tissue retains (or regains) its natural spring, the rebound effect of the fascia allows you to use less muscle power, and therefore fatigue less rapidly. Want to jump higher, run faster, and throw farther? You’ll need to pay attention to nourishing the suppleness of your fascia to enjoy its elastic qualities.

For example, when you run with healthy fascia the force you transmit into the ground gets returned to you through the whole tensional network of the fascia. It’s like you have built-in trampoline action going on.

However, walking, running, or just plain old day-to-day regular movements with dehydrated and compromised fascial health create an increased impact on your joints and other soft tissues. You can even hear this in people’s footfalls. If you’re hitting the ground with a loud thud each time you take a step, you have likely lost some of the literal “spring in your step”.

Alternatively, a fascial network that can take advantage of its trampoline-like rebound effect creates quieter movement. (This is not my suggestion to you to start tip-toeing through your house! The sound of your footfalls is more an indicator of a more global issue than something you can suppress by quieting your steps.)

And of course you don’t have to look at the gait patterns of too many elderly people to see that the disappearance of the spring is causing them plenty of grief. Or consider the much more basic and overlooked quality of springiness that we take for granted every day- that you can pull your skin away from its under-layers and it will spring back (Guimberteau 2005). This of course comes into play with aging as well, as we notice the “spring” start to diminish. As Thomas Myers said, “Aging

can really be considered a process of drying out.”

I am sad to report that I have not solved aging. No amount of manual therapy or movement will allow you to go untouched by the aging process. Skin will (sigh) not spring back as it once did as the years go by. However, the quality of how we age can be impacted a great deal by how you move and by manual therapy.

Everyone’s body has its own history with accidents, injuries, and illnesses. Some of us have lighter histories than others. In other words, some of us have had to cope with more than our fair share. If you have had to cope with a lot of illness or injury, it’s not because you didn’t do the right kinds of movement the right way. It’s not because you didn’t seek out a manual therapist sooner... And if you have a body that feels fantastic and has little history

of injuries or illness, likewise it’s not because you’ve done all the right things.

After many years in this field, I understand that luck is real. But within our own lucky or unlucky histories, there is hope that we can feel as good as possible because there are intelligent ways to address the “issues in our tissues”. Keeping as much of our springiness as possible is one of the ways we can help ourselves out.

*This chapter is an excerpt from the PDF Why Fascia Matters. You can download it in its entirety for free at the home page of Emerald City Rolfing.