What is fascia?

You may be noticing that the word “fascia” is a hot topic right now in many body related fields, so before we get to why fascia matters, here is a brief primer about why it’s getting so much attention these days.

Many have thought of fascia as a glorified body stocking- a seamless piece of tissue that Saran Wraps you just underneath the skin. While this is true of the superficial fascia, it’s important to understand that it is a richly multidimensional tissue that forms your internal soft tissue architecture.

In fact, fascia has been defined as all of the soft fibrous connective tissues that permeate the human body (Findley and Schleip 2007). These tissues come in a wide range of densities on a broad spectrum from cotton candy to a leather strap.

From the superficial (“body stocking”) fascia, it dives deep and forms the pods (called fascicles) that actually create your musculature like a honeycomb from the inside out. Imagine what it looks like when you bite into a wedge of orange and then look at those individually wrapped pods of juice- we’re like that too!

Fascia also connects muscle to bone (tendons are considered a part of the fascial system), and bone to bone (ligaments are also considered a part of the fascial system), slings your organ structures, cushions your vertebrae (yep, your discs are considered a part of this system too), and wraps your bones.

Imagine for a moment that you could remove every part of you that is not fascia. You would have a perfect 3D model of exactly what you look like. Not just in recognizable ways like your posture or facial features, but also the position of your liver, and the zig zig your clavicle takes from that break you had as a kid, how your colon wraps, etc. To say fascia is everywhere is not overstating things.

In fact, it turns out that its everywhere-ness is one of the reasons it was overlooked for so long. Until recently it was basically viewed as the packing peanuts of soft tissue. Therefore, in dissections for study and for research, most of it was cleanly scraped away and thrown in a bucket so that the cadavers could be tidily made to resemble the anatomical texts people were studying from.

Fortunately research is catching up to what turns out to be a remarkably communicative sensory and proprioceptive tissue. And what fascia researchers are discovering is pretty amazing not just for fascia nerds like me, but for anyone who wants to feel good in their bodies.

This is taken from chapter 1 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/