Does this sound like you? You can leg press a million pounds but you throw your back out tying your shoe. You're the best Downward Dogger in your yoga class, but you hurt your knee walking down the sidewalk. You strengthen your core with every Pilates reformer exercise, but your neck is always bugggin' you.
To get to the root cause of pain, let’s compare food to fascia.
I knew a family that ate a ton of salmon. They ate salmon a lot. A LOT.
Every time we were invited for dinner, guess what they would serve? Salmon!
What’s with all the salmon, I finally had the nerve to ask. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. I like salmon, but there are other fish in the sea.
My hostess told me that salmon was the healthiest fish for brain and heart health. The essential fatty acids are necessary for blood flow and good eyesight. And, this part is super important, a salmon dinner was the only meal her children emphatically agreed on. Hail the mighty salmon to keep the peace.
She had brilliant children. I was more than a tad intimidated by these over-achiever siblings. They were elite athletes. They had crazy math skills. One was a Rhodes Scholar. Who was I to argue with a Rhodes Scholar?
Okay then. Salmon it is.
Food is information. Every single bite of salmon, salads, or Snickers gives your cells instructions. These instructions control cellular expression and either contribute to vitality or contribute to illness.
I think about movement in similar ways. Movement is information too. Movement translates into biochemical signals. Healthy movement signals the continued support of healthy structures and functions. Crummy movement signals cells to adjust their structure and function in less than ideal ways.
Let’s use bunions as an example. A bunion develops because the surrounding tissue received cellular information to bulk up, buttercup.
If your hips are internally rotated, your knees are knocking, and you’re always pressing your body weight into the big toe mound, you will grow a bony bump that forms at the base of your big toe. Blame your bunion on crummy movement information.
Think about the information you’re sending to your tissues. Are you
- protecting joint health or are you wearing out your cartilage with every step?
- creating whole-body strength or are you creating an over-use injury like plantar fasciitis or tennis elbow?
- maintaining balance and stability or are you chronically locking your knees, arching your back, elevating your shoulders or shifting your body weight onto one leg to keep you from tipping over?
- aware of your natural neutral alignment or are you spending time and money on fitness programs that reinforce crummy movement information that lead to injury and age-related issues of poor balance, falling and arthritis?
You can’t think your way into healthy, well-balanced movement, just like you can’t simply think about eating a well-balanced diet!
An excellent place to start giving your body healthier movement nutrition is to think about fascial rehydration as your appetizer and exercise as your entree!
As you sit here reading my blog, you are sending movement information throughout your body. The weight of your body is pressing the back of your thighs into the chair and you’re squeezing the fluid out of the fascia like you're squeezing a sponge.
When you sit, the muscles on your outer hip are naturally short. Sit for too long and you become an excellent sitter. The movement information is to shorten the outer hip. Always.
Your chin may be dropped to look at your cell phone. Or your head my be reaching forward to better read the computer screen.
You're stuck with dry fascia holding your body in this particular movement pattern. Nerves that live inside the fascia keep telling your muscles to hold their position.
Let's say you run out the door, drive to Pilates, and jump on the reformer. Your chronically dry fascia at the back of your legs may feel like tight hamstrings and a stiff back.
The shortness in your outer hip brings your legs forward and gives you tight hip flexors.
People never know where to put their head because of poor nutritional movement information. That leads to neck pain, headaches, migraines, shoulder issues and a bad hair day.
Dry fascia keeps your body from exploring a full range of movement and creates repetitive movement patterns that become your salmon for dinner rut. The nerves that turn on your muscles become the know-it-all bossy children at the dinner table.
When it comes to movement, your goal should be to explore your full range of physical expression and to create an efficiently stable body.
In order to explore that full range, you have to accept that the act of living is drying up your fascia. Fascia dries because you are an expert sitter. Fascia dries because of injuries and surgeries. Fascia dries because of depression and trauma. Fascia dries because you’re getting older. It just happens.
When fascia is dry, you get stiff and sticky. Your joints ache. You lose muscular flexibility. Your body becomes inefficient at moving and you send cellular information that is equivalent to the junk-food of movement.
Exercising with dry fascia reinforces these inefficiencies and strengthens the muscles that contribute to a poor movement diet. The strong muscles get stronger. The weak muscles get weaker.
Movement will either reinforce balance and stability or create massive misinformation that leads to joint compression, digestive issues, crummy sleep and more.
The good news is that rehydrating dry fascia is simple and only takes a few minutes.
A simple foot treatment, upper back glide and shear, or any move on the MELT soft body roller works to gently break up dry and viscous fluid within the fascial system. Add a quick neuro-strength move like arm and hammer or a mini bridge to turn on the nerves of the deep stabilizers of the shoulder girdle or pelvis for long lasting and efficient stabilization.
You’ll have less pain, better balance, noticeably improved flexibility, and your movement as you exercise or push the vacuum cleaner around will be healthier and well-balanced.