How We Actually Move

Just as there are no local problems, there are also no local movements. We are taught to view individual muscles as the things the move our skeleton. And while they clearly participate in that, a large portion of that tensional force is transmitted via fascial sheets, which, because they are our connectors, affect not only the local joint, but also regions farther away. It is less like a simplistic lever or pulley than it is like a complex network

of sheets and bags (as what covers our organs) that transition into one another and orchestrate globally to create a body movement.

Or consider that muscles, which are presented as tangible and discreet things in anatomy textbooks, are not really a “whole”. As in, the central nervous system does not activate a muscle as one whole thing. “The functional units of the motor system are the so called motor units of which we have several million in our body. Much like a school of fish that have learned to swim together, depending on the quality of the sensory feedback, these millions of motor units can be individually regulated.” (Schleip 2003)

I love Robert Schleip’s way of seeing the motor units of a muscle as a school of fish! It helps us to see things on a more nuanced scale. Your triceps, for example, are not really such a set-in-stone solid thing. They are more like a school of fish that is designed to “swim” in a way that creates triceps-ish movements in that location. But if you’ve looked at enough human bodies it becomes clear that it really isn’t “a tricep, is a tricep, is a tricep”

.

Sure your triceps are not going to flex your knee (unless Dr. Frankenstein got ahold of you), but on a more refined level we understand that how we move is as important as what we move.

To put it another way, our central nervous system views us as having one system-wide “muscle” which has different actions depending on what motor units are firing. Yes, we’ve managed to catalog those actions as resulting from around 640 discrete structures, but the muscles just plain old aren’t as distinct as we tend to describe them. If you’ve dissected a human cadaver you know that it takes a scalpel to ferret out the

separations between things. You don’t just remove the skin and see everything laid out in a shiny red muscle topography of individual structures.

How we move then is about activation of muscles that then act on our skeleton, but it is also just as much a gliding of long sheets of fascial tissue that allows use to move (ideally) uninhibited when the layers/sheets of fascia are not stuck on one another.

This is taken from chapter 3 of the free PDF download, Why Fascia Matters. If you want a document of all chapters together, you can get your copy at

https://www.emeraldcityrolfing.com/