Movement Variation is Important

Viscoelasticity is the combination of two words: viscous (like dripping, gooey honey), and elastic (like a rubber band which snaps back to its shape). Because human tissues have both viscous and elastic qualities, they are described as viscoelastic. When something is viscoelastic, it means that it experiences time dependent strain.

We will sometimes use the word “creep” to describe the the slow deformation of tissue under constant stress. (Dalton 2011) As in, we become the shapes and movements we make most of the time. So if you sit in a chair all day while sitting on your sacrum (i.e. in a version of a c-curved spine) it’s not surprising that the viscoelastic quality of your intervertebral discs often leads to a disc herniation at L5-S1. That’s an example of creep. So yes, disc herniations are just as creep-y as they sound.

“Creep” is one version of how we respond to loads. For another example, if you decide to only do bicep curls with very heavy weights every day, you will eventually have wildly out of proportion biceps muscles compared to the rest of your body. This is because your body responded to that load that you chose to put on it.

On the opposite extreme, if you have a cast on your leg for a period of months and that leg cannot move or fully bear weight, when you get the cast off you notice that it is a withered, tiny version of your other leg which was able to participate in normal movement and load bearing during the time you wore the cast.

All that is to say, how we move, and how frequently we move, and in what range of variation we move makes a big difference in how we experience our bodies in the present tense, and also how we age.

Movement also gets the hydration that we talked about in part 6 out to the tissue as well, but that movement also needs to be varied. This means variation not just of the movements themselves, but also variation of tempo. Not only does moving constantly in the same ways and in the same planes put you at further risk for joint erosion (a là osteoarthritis), but you are also dehydrating the fascia in a particular pattern, thus setting

you up for that brittle tissue that injuries love so much.

So fluid + loads = either healthy, juicy tissue, or brittle, dehydrated tissue. The outcome of that depends on the how, how much, and how varied parts of the movement equation.

*This is an excerpt from the PDF Why Fascia Matters. You can download it for free in its entirety on the Emerald City Rolfing website.