It's All Connected

Let’s say, for example, that you are in your kitchen and your leg is in your bedroom. This is an example of not being connected. You may also notice that it’s an example of a potential plotline for Dexter-- Something has gone horribly wrong in this scenario.

All kidding aside, we probably understand that our body parts aren’t detachable. But the problem comes when we think of them as attachable. Because of the way we all learn and study anatomy- whether the extent of your studying was singing “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone” song in preschool, or something more extensive- we tend to conceive of human bodies as “attached” by magical soft tissue versions of tape.

In anatomy-speak we describe all muscles as having an origin and an insertion. So for example, the gastrocnemius muscle (our most superficial calf muscle) originates on the lateral and medial condyles of the femur, and inserts on the calcaneus, via the achilles tendon. This way of describing the location of the gastrocnemius makes it sound like it is taped or stapled to be “attached” at its origin and insertion points- like it’s this separate thing that gets stuck onto other separate things.

It is convenient to think of ourselves as mechanical systems that get made by attaching parts, but we are not machines, we are living organisms. There is no point at which a human being gets assembled. We develop. A pregnant woman does not need to set time aside to remember to attach the fetus’s lungs. Because the fetus develops as a unified organism.

Back to the gastrocnemius description-- Rather than talking about its attachment points, a more clear and true to human anatomy description would be that the gastrocnemius becomes the achilles tendon (by weaving more densely until muscle becomes tendon) which then becomes the calcaneus/aka heel bone (by weaving

more densely until tendon becomes bone). No muscle attaches to the skeleton anywhere in the body. It only transitions into the bone via fascia.

I am not trying to belabor anatomy semantics. This is important because it gives us a more full understanding of how you just plain can’t have something happen to one “part” of your body and not have it affect every other “part” of your body, albeit in varying degrees of intensity. In other words,“there are no local problems.” (Oschman 2012)

Often in the fascia geek worlds we’ll use the example of wearing a tightly knit sweater. If you tug on one end of that sweater, you see the tug travel long distance to other ends of the sweater. Or to put it in clearer (and, in my opinion, mind-blowing) terms, “the fascia is the one system that connects to every aspect of human physiology.” (Langevin 2006) That’s pretty remarkable! This system weaves in to literally everything that makes us human at both the macro and micro levels.

This is taken from chapter 2 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/