Stretch Your Bits or Stretch Your Mind?

I’ve had a few things come up recently that have me rethinking the common stretching belief that goes something like this: stretch tight bits in your body and they will get longer/more flexible/more supple.

The things that have me rethinking this are:

1. An interview I did on the Liberated Body Podcast with Jules Mitchell who is writing a book (and just finished a thesis) on the science of stretching.
2. A guide I am putting together on how to resolve short hamstrings (it’s out on Liberated Body >in October), which had me immersed in the research about how hamstrings specifically manage to return to a more functional length.
3. And last but not least, I am reading Katy Bowman’s new book Move Your DNA where her insights on sarcomeres have my attention (plenty of other things too, but I’m already trying to keep this post from becoming epically long).

I’ll do my best to summarize the a-ha moments that have sprung out of these three things.

Your Nervous System Runs the Show

In her interview with me, Jules Mitchell* talked about how she began her thesis with the intention of taking a biomechanical view into yoga asana, which is exactly what she does. However, because she started her work from the perspective of a yoga teacher- with all the training that had told her that stretching leads to increased flexibility, she was surprised to discover that the research on stretching did not bear this idea out.

She discovered this idea – that if we stretch more and stretch harder that our tissue will change – was untrue. In reality, we are not lumps of clay that can be molded by persistently tugging on things. This is because our nervous systems are running the show.

So what does that mean? That means that unless you are under anesthesia (where you will miraculously gain full and even excessive range of motion, but I do not recommend attempting to go through life under full anesthesia simply for its flexibility gains), your ability to stretch at any range is determined by your nervous system’s tolerance to that range.

As in, when you have super short hamstrings and you try to forward fold and meet rigid resistance, it is not that you need to pull on your hamstrings like they are inanimate taffy, because you can’t. Your nervous system is the thing giving you that firm end range, and it’s basically saying, “Nope. Sorry buddy. I don’t feel safe there, so I’m not going to let you go there.”

Getting pushy about it and trying to force your hamstrings into ever deeper end ranges will have one of three outcomes:

1. Nothing will change
2. Your hamstrings will get shorter
3. You will injure your tissue (which, P.S., has about a two-year healing period if we’re talking about a tendon injury).

I recommend not trying to force override your nervous system on issues of flexibility. It will win. It will be unpleasant.

Your Body’s Emergency Brake

Why would the nervous system not feel safe and therefore limit your mobility? Because that range is unfamiliar, or because compensatory patterns in your body have determined that certain parts of you need to function as an emergency brake in order to hold it all together (and of course these two things are not mutually exclusive). Both boil down to issues of motor control (plenty more to chew on here) and of Davis’ Law, which can be (over) simplified to, “use it or lose it.”

While working on the Liberated Body Short Hamstrings Guide, I kept coming back to the issue of how the hamstrings function, in some chronically short-hamstringed people, as an emergency brake. This kind of compensatory pattern happens for plenty of reasons, but top among them might be under active deep core musculature, too rigid core musculature (yes, underactive and too rigid can come together), weakened adductors, and more. If these or other key stability structures can’t fully do their job, the hamstrings are at the ready. They sub in for a lack of support elsewhere by battening down the hatches.

To go back to the emergency brake analogy – if your car were parked on the edge of a cliff and was held there only by its emergency brake, would you release it? Not if you are sane. This is the same decision your nervous system is making when you attempt a forward fold and are stopped prematurely.

Those Naughty Sarcomeres

In regards to the use-it-or-lose-it part of the flexibility equation, let’s talk Katy Bowman**, moving your DNA, and the sarcomeres. Bowman has been a champion of getting people to understand the difference between frequency and intensity. In short, that what we are doing with our bodies most of the time thoroughly trumps how hard we may be capable of working out (or stretching) for a small portion of our day. In relationship to flexibility, this means that if we, for example, sit in a chair with our hamstrings contracted from both ends all day long, we will gradually develop short hamstrings.

Here is an extremely pared down, Cliff’s Notes version of Bowman’s writing in Move Your DNA on the role the sarcomeres play: Sarcomeres are the basic contractile units of our muscles. Muscles move because sarcomeres generate force and move. When you are often in the same position – as with our contracted-hamstrings-in-the-chair example – your sarcomeres change on the cellular level in a way that makes it easier for you to do more of what you are already doing. Yes, those naughty sarcomeres will actually cannibalize themselves and grow themselves to set your chair-shape as your new normal.

That said, the way to approach rehabilitating this would be to move with more normal hamstrings length more frequently. For example: to use a standing desk for all or part of the day, to sit on the floor with our legs outstretched in front of us (if we can accomplish that without rounding our backs, another symptom of short hamstrings), wearing neutral-heeled shoes, and to walk and to take frequent movement breaks, among other things.

The road to rehabilitation would not look like stretching the bejeezus out of your hamstrings at their absolute maximum end range for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty and ninety seconds per day.

Bringing Mitchell’s and Bowman’s work together, this kind of rehabilitation accomplishes a few key things. First, it reminds your little sarcomeres what length you would like things to be by gradual, incremental loading of your body in healthier ranges of movement. Second, taking more opportunities for natural movement more frequently (oversimplified definition alert: natural movement = accomplishing the movements that our ancestors used to need to do to survive – like walking, or bending, or climbing – with proper alignment) develops strength and adaptability. This allows your nervous system to feel safe about testing out new ranges of motion, while simultaneously unraveling the compensatory patterns that make your nervous system put on the brakes in the first place.

A Tale of Two Feet

What might this look like in practice? Let me tell you about my feet. Last summer I still had to slap on my rigid hiking shoes in order to get out on the rocky trails here in New England. Whenever I attempted to wear a more flexible-soled shoe, I was one sore-footed girl. Determined that my feet could be more supple, I spent the year wearing only neutral-heeled, flexible-soled shoes, taking plenty of barefoot time, increasing my walking mileage, and intentionally seeking out as much diverse terrain as I could find.

Fast forward to the end of this summer and I have been hiking daily – up steep inclines, on slick shale, on rocky ground and tangled stumps – only in my Unshoes. And what’s amazing is that these hikes also manage to feel like a delicious foot massage no matter how long I’m out on the trail. I find myself intentionally stepping on the rockier areas of the trail because it feels good on my feet. What happened there?

I incrementally – over one year – loaded my feet differently, and as a result the 33 joints that live in my tootsies are now much more supple and flexible. My feet are also stronger. Flexible and strong like to show up to the party together. Go figure.

Some Stretching Movement Rules to Live By

So is stretching the devil? Nah. Frequent, intermittent stretching that is within your range and not red-lining it for your abilities helps you to explore your movement ranges and therefore helps you to (very gradually) remodel yourself at the cellular level to a more mobile version of yourself.

This is a complex issue for which much more could be said, but I have already written a short novel, so in closing here are a few bullet points that we might want to consider so that we can re-frame how to become more flexible. Perhaps we should:

• Stop with the no-pain-no-gain crap and instead accept that The Goldilocks Principle holds true for human tissue: not too much, not too little, but just right amounts of input keep us healthy and mobile.
• Stop with the “stretch tight bits to make them looser” and “we are inanimate lumps of clay” models. We are alive. Our nervous systems are in charge. We need to have a long-term dialogue with it, not pretend we can boss the CNS around.
• Stop pretending we can put movement into a bento box of “exercising” and “non-exercising” time when what we are doing all the time – movement not exercising -is what is determining our shape and mobility.
• Stop stretching at extreme maximum capacity at rare intervals and instead take kinder intermittent stretch breaks.
• And while we’re at it, let’s altogether drop the idea that being bendy is somehow better. Functional length is better; hypermobile is trouble.

*It’s worth noting that I am not trying to speak for Jules Mitchell. I can only report my take on our conversation, she may very well disagree with the way I phrased something here, so these are not Jules’s words, they’re mine. To read her words, you can visit her blog.

**I also can’t speak for Katy Bowman. So this is my take on her writings, and she may very well disagree with how I have presented the material. To read it straight from her fingertips, you can visit her blog.

The post Stretching Doesn’t Work (the Way You Think It Does) appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Those of you out there who have spent your fair share of time cursing out your own hamstrings know what I mean. Often any attempts at lengthening the hamstrings are at best useless, and at worst – in some evil and spiteful repayment for your efforts – they get shorter.

Because I had this set-up from day one, and because I have made my career in the manual and movement therapies, I have spent a long time cracking the code of short hamstrings. So here’s what I’ve discovered on the road to functional hamstrings (and a video of my very favorite hamstrings lengthening stretch is below):

1. You can’t contract them all day long and expect them to get longer

I know. Duh, right? But it’s actually what most of us do. Our hamstrings muscles (there are three: biceps femoris, semitendinosus, and semimembranosus, but for the purposes of this post I’ll discuss them broadly as a group) attach on our ischial tuberosity proximally, and on the femur, tibia, and fibula distally. So they attach on your pelvis, your thigh, and your lower leg. We usually think of their action as a group as knee flexors. As in, if you need to bring your heel closer to the back of your thigh, they’re on the job. But we commonly neglect to pay attention to their other action, which is to posteriorly tilt the pelvis. As in, if you want to flatten out your low back and tuck your pelvis under, they do that, too.

Sadly, many of us sit on our sacrums instead of our ischial tuberosities (the fictional “sit bones”), which means we are sitting in a posteriorly tilted pelvis all day long. Your lumbar discs and sacroiliac ligaments greatly dislike this, and so do your hamstrings. Sitting like this means the hamstrings are constantly contracted. So it’s really just plain unfair to contract your hamstrings for eight to fifteen hours of your day (because even when our workday ends, we then go home and sit on our sacrums on the couch, right?), and then get mad at them when, for somewhere in the range of two to forty minutes of your day, you attempt to stretch them and they don’t comply. I mean, talk about mixed signals. (Pssst: If you want to clean up your sitting, I have a video on things that you do everyday to set yourself up for shoulder injuries.)

2. You can’t contract them while you try to stretch them and expect them to get longer.

Most people with short hamstrings, and even many without this affliction, forward fold without moving from the pelvis. If you are used to your pelvis living in a posterior tilt (being tucked under), you will usually keep it in this position and just forward fold by bringing your trunk closer to your legs. But the pelvis needs to move as you forward fold if you want to lengthen the hamstrings. By “moving the pelvis” what I mean is that your ischial tuberosities should go from pointing roughly at the floor, to pointing in the direction of the wall behind you. You can forward fold with a static pelvis forever and not only are your hamstrings never going to get longer (because you are contracting rather than lengthening them), but your lumbar discs and sacroiliac joints will continue to mount a rebellion against you. I go through forward folding with appropriate movement in the pelvis in detail in the video down below. So get ready to grab your ischial tuberosities and join me!

3. The floor is not the goal.

If the goal is to touch the floor, you will usually bypass lengthening the hamstrings. As I talked about in point number two, there are plenty of ways to get to the floor without actually having to do the work in your hamstrings, but they won’t do you any favors in the long run. While it can be embarrassing just how shallow your forward fold is when you get honest about it, if you want to make progress you usually have to back up. Getting into the chronically contracted nooks and crannies of your hamstrings may not land you a cover shoot for Yoga Journal, but it will actually rehabilitate the tissue. People, please, I’ve been there. I make a portion of my living teaching in yoga classrooms and fitness studios, so I have to expose the true length of my hamstrings all the time. And while they have come a long way from where they were, I still don’t have the typical yogini body. If I can keep it real, so can you. Because the floor is not the goal. Lengthening your hamstrings is the goal.

4. You have to slowly learn how to take off the brakes.

We’ve all had that moment in our driving histories when we wonder why the car feels like it’s dragging a concrete block and we realize it’s because we forgot to take the emergency brake off. Driving with the emergency brake on is an ineffective way to drive. Jamming ourselves into unreasonable forward folds with contracted hamstrings is also ineffective. For many of us our hamstrings function as “brakes,” and then we go slamming the gas to the floor in our forward folds hoping that will get them to let go. As you may have experienced, this is not a super useful strategy. In fact, it’s usually the strategy that causes the hamstrings to get maddeningly shorter even if you’ve been dedicated to stretching them every day.

Not everyone has the hamstrings-as-brakes pattern (for example, the yogis on the mats next to you who are happily nuzzling their noses between their shins in their forward folds have never experienced this sensation), so of course the question is why does it happen to some people? Tackling that in any kind of thoughtful way is too intricate a tangent for this post, as it is about the larger issue of aberrant support patterning in people’s structures. However, the short version is that people who have lost intrinsic support from the deeper layers of musculature and fascia tend to have this delightful configuration. This happens regardless of how strong the more extrinsic musculature is, which is why you usually see the big dudes at the gym hating on their hamstrings. It’s an issue of imbalance surface to deep.

To address it, you must first slow down and embrace the idea that while you can slowly transition into longer, more functional hamstrings, you cannot force them to rapidly bend to your will. In short, you’ll have to suck it up and get patient. Secondly, you will want to take on work that wakes up those deeper core layers to give you more balance in your structure, in particular your transversus abdominus, and your adductors. Pilates work and Yoga Tune Up can be good options for this.

So without further ado, here is the video of first, how to forward fold with lengthened rather than contracted hamstrings muscles, and second, my all time favorite (and magic wand-like) Yoga Tune Up pose for lengthening the hamstrings: asymmetrical uttanasana.

The post Help for Your Shortie Hamstrings appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Jill Miller is the creator of Yoga Tune Up, a fitness therapy that combines conscious corrective exercise with precise self-myofascial release using therapy balls.

In her new book The Roll Model, Miller has extracted the self-myofasical release portion of her work, The Roll Model Method, and has created a tremendously thorough resource guide.

A Thorough Guide

One would think that writing about one-half of a fitness therapy would yield a slim book, but that person never met Jill Miller. Jill is insatiably curious about the human body, incredibly well-educated and well-read, and also deeply thoughtful and heartfelt about her work. This book reflects that and then some.

“The stories run the gamut from recovering from surgeries and injuries, to recovering from chronic disease processes like lupus and MS, to recovering from emotional wounds and traumas such as rape and depression.”

A delight for full-on body nerds and laypeople alike, The Roll Model is without a doubt the most thorough resource guide not only on self-myofascial release, but on self-care as a whole, that I have ever come across. Weighing in at 432 pages, if you want to know how to help yourself heal the issues in your tissues, this book has what you need.

READ: Yoga Tune Up Therapy Balls vs. Lacrosse Balls vs. Foam Rollers

Book Structure

To give you a taste of the goodness that lies within, the book is structured as follows:

• Chapter One: A New Model of Self-Care Healthcare – A rallying cry for all of us to empower ourselves by addressing our needs in a proactive and compassionate way. This chapter defines self-care, and covers the basics of “self-care healthcare.”

• Chapter Two: How to Use My Program – Miller introduces people to the magical Tune Up Fitness therapy balls – grippy, pliable rubber balls that come in three sizes, and one Coregeous ball, a gushy, air-filled, pliable ball that is used, as its name suggests, for abdominal work. She also gets into some frequently asked questions, like how often can someone roll and what is the difference between good pain and bad pain?

“True to the promise of this book being the most thorough resource on self-care out there, Miller does not simply talk about our cranky joints or sore muscles.”

• Chapter Three: Posture, Pain, Performance: Stand Up for Yourself by Getting on the Ball: – Tackles the woes of modern posture, the costs of bad posture, and what supported posture looks like.

• Chapter Four: The Science Section: Fascia and Proprioception – Body nerds rejoice! If you want to really dive in and get to know more about what fascia is, how it remodels itself, and proprioception – or your “body map” of where you are in space – this chapter dives deep.

• Chapter Five: Know Your Body Better: An Embodied Orientation to Bones and Muscles – Miller helps people to better get to know what’s on the inside by introducing them to 36 “knead-to-know” bony landmarks and 44 “knead-to-know” muscles.

• Chapter Six: The Nine Essential Roll Model Ball Techniques – Like a mini-massage therapy course, Miller takes people through the myriad ways you can use the therapy balls to mimic the hands of a skilled therapist. She covers sustained compression, skin-rolling/shear, stripping, crossfiber, pin and stretch, contract/relax, pin/spin and mobilize, ball plow, and ball stack.

• Chapter Seven: Breath Reset – No book on self-care would be complete if it didn’t turn its attention to the breath. Miller dives deep into how our breath functions, our stress response, and how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system work. She also details strategies for using the therapy balls to open and facilitate good breath, while saying goodbye to “bad breath.”

• Chapter Eight: The Sequences That Reset Your Body – If you want precise, innovative, deeply useful strategies to give (pretty much) every nook and cranny of your body some self-myofasical release love and attention, this chapter is the motherlode. Bright, clear photographs document every strategy, along with good test and retest check-ins.

“A delight for full-on body nerds and laypeople alike, The Roll Model is without a doubt the most thorough resource guide not only on self-myofascial release, but on self-care as a whole, that I have ever come across.”

• Chapter Nine: The “Roll” of Relaxation – Diving even deeper into a tour of your nervous system, this chapter addresses the lost art of downregulating ourselves so that we can reap the benefits of deep relaxation.

• Chapter Ten: Soul Rolling: When You “Knead” More Than a Physical Fix – True to the promise of this book being the most thorough resource on self-care out there, Miller does not simply talk about our cranky joints or sore muscles. She also addresses how unassimilated emotion finds a way of expressing itself in the body, and how people can heal deeper emotional wounds with “soul rolling.”

• Chapter Eleven: What Next? Tune Up Fitness and Corrective Exercise – Miller finishes with a teaser that addresses training to complement rolling, and defines the method that gave birth to all of this: Yoga Tune Up.

RELATED: The Top 5 Ways Fascia Matters to Athletes

Personal Transformation Stories

What you can’t see in the chapter breakdowns is perhaps my favorite part of the book: scattered throughout the text are stories from 22 people who have used The Roll Model Method to heal themselves. I am a bit of a junkie for stories of transformation, so I realize I’m an easy sell here, but I challenge anyone to make it through all of these stories with dry eyes. Not possible.

The stories run the gamut from recovering from surgeries and injuries, to recovering from chronic disease processes like lupus and multiple sclerosis, to recovering from emotional wounds and traumas such as rape and depression. The stories give so much heart to this book, and also demonstrate the broad range of its application.

I’ll end with a quotation Miller uses in the beginning of The Roll Model:

“Everyone has a doctor in him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well.”

Right on. Go, read it, and then get on the ball!

The Roll Model” is available for $24.68 at Amazon.com.

The post “The Roll Model” (Book Review) appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Movement (or Lack Thereof) in the Modern World

Before we get to the video – you may have noticed from my articles here that one of my primary preoccupations is with how everything we do outside of our training life affects what happens in training. There is no magic bento box of movement that allows us to separate what we do all day from what we do in the box, the gym, or on the trail.

Add to that the fact that culturally we are living in a time where the movements we make most of the day (in our case sitting, typing, texting, and watching a variety of screens) are causing us to not be molded particularly well. By “molded” I mean how we come to be in all ways, but especially muscularly, fascially, neurologically, and cardiovascularly. The frequency of these restricted movements set up patterns that make it challenging to move with integrity.

How to Fix Your Typing Claw

So today I come back to one of my all time faves: how typing affects us. Our daily lives used to rely on frequent full-body movements. Now they rely more and more on stasis through most of the body while our fingers move really, really fast. Considering what human bodies have been up to for hundreds of thousands of years, it’s a weird thing to do.

In part one of this series we covered how to resolve the “claw” shape that our hands make as a result of this. But as Lillee points out in today’s video, the extensors are also doing a bunch of work to hold the hands up into the typing configuration.

If your main concern is grip strength, then for the sake of balance (balance being one of the main places where strength comes from) you will want to get to both sides of the issue and try out this extensor stretch. Do not be deceived! It’s more intense than it looks.

Be sure to use what Lillee describes as the skin lock, and gently pull the skin of the hand forward towards the knuckles as you do the stretch (it’s almost as if you are trying to take off a glove). This is also handy, of course, for all you keyboard warriors out there.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Fixing the Flip Side of Grip Strength Issues: Tight Extensors appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

So, I figured I’d take a peek at the issue through my manual therapist lens and talk about the opposite issue – when your grip is weak from overuse and more.

You Have No Finger Muscles

The important foundational piece to know is that there are no finger muscles. True story! There is not a single muscle that only attaches on your finger itself and whose job it is to “just” move your finger. All the muscles that move the fingers live farther upstream in the palm and forearm. This means that to take a look at grip strength, we’re talking mainly about what’s going on in our forearms.

The other interesting and important thing to look at is how much the way we use our bodies has changed in the last forty years of human history. Sorry. I have to pause here – this is pretty fascinating to me. Modern humans have been kicking around on the planet for around 200,000 years, and for only the last forty of them have we developed an interesting new physical habit. That habit being that our fingers (and, therefore, hands and forearms) increasingly run the show. Ever since home computers became a part of everyday life, we spend a significantly larger portion of our time sitting (or standing) with our hands out in front of us T-rex style, moving our fingers rapidly along a keyboard.

This new movement that we now do for large quantities of time asks the fingers to move very quickly (unless you’re still a hunt-and-peck type), while exerting little force, and in only one main direction, which is down on the keys. We don’t get a lot of the grip strengthening that is a benefit of lifting or carrying, and we don’t get a lot of movement in our hands out of the “claw” shape.

So here are a few of the things, in our typing-heavy and lifting-carrying-light culture, that can also cause weakness of the grip:

Osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis in the hand most commonly occurs at the place where the thumb joins the hand (helloooooo texting!). Pain and swelling here can make it difficult to appropriately grip things.

Tendinitis

This is common these days and is almost always a result of repetitive stress injuries. As in, typing can frequently cause it, but it is also seen in sports like lifting, tennis, and golf (hence the terms “tennis elbow” and “golfer’s elbow,” which are two common forms of forearm tendinitis). When the tendons in the forearm get inflamed and swell, there will be pain locally at the site of the unhappy tendon. So if you have pain at the elbow, your grip strength issues might be related to tendinitis.

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

This is another common overuse injury frequently brought on by typing. People with carpal tunnel syndrome are experiencing a problem with their median nerve, which is under pressure from the surrounding soft tissues. If you are dealing with any numbness or tingling (including waking up with those symptoms), dropping objects, having difficulty with fine motor skills, as well as grip weakness, you may want to look into whether the median nerve is the culprit and get some good manual therapy to address it.

Nutritional Deficiency and Low Thyroid

Moving on from looking just at the forearms, these are two larger systemic reasons why people can often have weak grip strength. I’m lumping these two together simply because they are in the “other” category, but they don’t necessarily show up together. You can have excellent nutrition and still have low thyroid, and since we’re living at a time of record rates of thyroid conditions (especially in women, but also in men), it might be worth checking out. I highly recommend Dr. Sara Gottfried’s book The Hormone Cure if you think this might be your issue.

How to Fix Your Dreaded Claw-Hands

Whew. Okay, swinging back to the idea of our new normal claw-hand shape that we make for most of the day. This default position can shorten up all the tissue in our hands and forearms leaving us susceptible to all but the nutritional and endocrine reasons for grip strength that I listed above.

Fortunately, I recently attended a workshop given by my colleague Lillee Chandra, a massage therapist and Yoga Tune Up teacher, in which she primarily addressed this issue of the claw. She had hours worth of great content addressing this in a really holistic way (i.e. attending to the patterns elsewhere in the body that lead to this issue), which I can’t get to you in full today. However, she did agree to do a great video on one of the more delicious pieces of self-care that she created for the workshop. Thank you Lillee!

Do not be fooled by how simple this intervention looks. Pay attention to the slowness and nuance that she stretches each finger with, do it at home, and tell me if you aren’t having some pretty enlightening moments about un-clawing your paws.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Un-Clawing Your Paw and Other Impediments to Grip Strength appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

People are frequently given the cue to intentionally and constantly contract their butts to find better core support or stability.¹ That said, let’s first talk about stability and support as it pertains to the human body more broadly before I get all snarky about butt clenching in particular. (Spoiler alert! I’m not a fan.)

We are designed to be supported from the inside out. Sometimes I give the analogy of a suspension bridge, which, although simplistic, gives an idea of what I mean.² If you picture the Golden Gate Bridge, you want to drive over that bridge because all of its cables are doing their correct job. If some of those cables were too short and some were too long, you wouldn’t want to drive over that bridge.

In an ideal world – one where we are never injured, sick, or stressed out – we are like the fully functioning Golden Gate Bridge. All of our cables are doing their proper job and we are happily supported, or suspended, from the inside out. We are springy, bouncy, secure, and mobile in all in the right places as we move through life.

Let’s now enter the real world where injury, stress, and dysfunction happen. Now we have a suspension bridge with some cables that are too long and others that are too short. Our bridge is not accepting loads properly. It has lost spring in important places, and its stability has being worn away in important secure places. This bridge is no longer safe to drive on and is not going to last long at this rate. There need to be some repairs, so how should we repair it?

Two Ways to Repair Your Suspension Bridge

Option one says we can repair our bridge by accepting that these cables are not doing their proper job and instead of repairing the cables to their original supportive and springy positions, we decide to bolster the bridge by building support structures underneath it, next to it, on top of it – anywhere it seems to need new, extra stuff. This approach is basically propping up the dysfunction by adding on more material anywhere that seems weak.

The problem with the add-on approach is that it’s difficult to predict the impact of these new structures, as you have now completely altered the original engineering of the bridge. The reason you don’t see the “keep propping it up” approach in architecture and engineering is because it doesn’t work long term. These new structures are going to add new and often surprising problems to the whole.

Option two says we can go back to the blueprint and repair the cables to their original design, thus restoring the optimal structural integrity to the bridge based on how it was engineered to function best. This is the less risky (long term) and less clumsy, or random, approach.

Butt Clenching Your Bridge

Butt clenching for support is, you guessed it, a bolster-the-dysfunction tactic. Just to clarify: I’m not talking about never activating your gluteals or deep lateral rotators. Clearly they are meant to work. In particular, I would want them to work when I am lifting heavy things, getting up and down, and when I am walking (not clenching while walking – give that a try and see how fun it is – I just mean the activation needed for normal leg extension in walking). They work plenty in normal, natural movements, so they really don’t need to be perma-clenched.

Perma-clenching is often an unconscious habit created by deep core weakness, pelvic misalignment, pelvic floor weakness, and lumbar instability. Ironically, though people are often trying to gain more support by butt-clenching, the long-term results of it can include increased wear on the lumbar discs and the sacroiliac joints, hip pain, decreased core support, and a too-tight pelvic floor (which isn’t as much fun as it sounds).

If you find that you are the person who is gripping when simply standing in line at the grocery store, or washing the dishes, or even when trying to walk down the street (which will also cause your legs to externally rotate giving you a duck waddle), you’ll need to replace it with things that get you back to your original supportive architecture.

Rebuilding Your Architecture

First, see if your pelvis is habitually forward of your ankles. If you usually feel most of your weight in your forefoot, this is almost certainly the case. Try backing your pelvis up so it is supported right over your ankles. Stop when you have more weight toward your heel, but before you need to contract your quads to keep from falling backwards.

This should be an effortless position – no clenching is required anywhere – so don’t trade quad clenching for butt clenching. Also note that I am not talking about tilt – this is not a tuck your butt or arch your back exercise. Please skip out on doing either of those things and just let your lumbar curve be in its natural shape.

Next, see if you also live in a perma-corset. This means your abdomen is always rigid and your extrinsic muscles, in particular the rectus abdominus of six-pack abs fame, are overly developed. It also means you will have lost not only some breath fluency and capacity, but will also have a harder time getting the deeper core musculature, in particular the transversus abdominus of Pilates fame, to be active. Try some of the Coregeous self-massage that I demonstrate from the Yoga Tune Up world in the video below, and also back off of any regimen you have that is overtraining your more superficial abdominal musculature.

Sometimes these bolstering habits that we develop can be challenging to let go of as at some point our nervous systems decide that they are our normal. Other systems that can help you to find your way back to your innate support, or “blueprint”, are Rolfing or other forms of Structural Integration, Alexander Technique, and Feldenkrais.

Unraveling compensatory patterns may be more complex than the quick-fix of just clenching a muscle group (just as going back to the drawing board and reestablishing support in the bridge’s cables would be more complex than simply propping it up). But taking the more complex path in this case is a solid investment in the health of your bones and soft tissue for the rest of your life.

1. “Butt” is hardly an anatomical term, so what I am referring to are the gluteals and deep lateral hip rotators, though the tensor fascia latae can get involved as well.

2. We’re actually built more like geodesic domes, or tensegrity suspension structures. The Kurilpa Bridge in Australia is a good example.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post To Clench or Not to Clench (Your Butt), That Is the Question appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

As a Rolfing practitioner (a form of manual therapy), I sometimes feel like the cardiac surgeon who wishes she could instead become a nutritionist and then travel back in time to see her patients twenty years earlier – before they needed the bypass surgery. Although in my case, having a practice where I work mainly with people who are dealing with chronic pain, I wish I could go back in time to teach my clients smart movement interventions to help them avoid suffering down the road. (Though, clearly, I do teach movement interventions with them. All hope is not lost.) It’s staggering just how much of our chronic pain stems from poor movement patterning.

First, some depressing statistics:

• In the United States alone, musculoskeletal conditions such as back pain, arthritis, and osteoporosis are reported more than any other health condition (far outpacing cancer, diabetes, and heart disease).
• The total number of painkillers prescribed in 2010 in the United States was big enough that they statistically could have been written for 80% of the population, including children.
• The demand for total joint replacement is expected to rise so sharply in the next 25 years (a 673% increase for knee replacements and a 174% increase for hip replacements), that experts anticipate there will not be enough orthopedic surgeons to perform the surgeries.

We’re a mess. So the question has to be why, and the simple answer is that we live in a time and a place where we no longer need to use our bodies in order to make sure we are fed, clothed, and sheltered. Instead we live in a time and a place where we earn money to buy what we need, work primarily in static positions (hey look! I’m doing it right now!), and segregate our movement only to the small portion of time we may spend exercising. This lack of natural human movement is causing a plague of chronic pain and physical dysfunction, as well as contributing hugely to the disease processes of contemporary culture. In short: it’s a big problem.

Since movement is a passion of mine, I was delighted to get the fantastic resource Exploring Functional Movement, which is a three-disc set (or download) created in partnership between Erwan Le Corre and Gray Cook. Erwan Le Corre, founder of MovNat, is one of the main people who I believe is a visionary leading the charge back to natural human movement. Gray Cook, founder of Functional Movement Systems and author of Movement, is one of the main people who is taking fitness out of the realm of beating one’s body into submission, and instead is using it to restore mechanically sound movement patterns via screening and correctives. So seeing that they did this project together was basically a chocolate-meets-peanut-butter moment for me.

Let’s take a look at what it the series covers. Each of the three discs takes a slightly different approach:

Disc One

In Disc One, Cook and Le Corre work together as Le Corre takes Cook through some of the MovNat movements. Le Corre points out that humans have a hierarchy of movement skills: locomotive, manipulative, and combative. And he says that in MovNat they always start with locomotive because we need to be able to stand up, run, walk, climb, and perform other basic movements before we progress.

Le Corre and Cook begin their locomotive warm ups on the ground rolling and transferring weight in a number of planes. They do this by rolling onto their side and shifting weight sideways for example, or by crawling on their backs to move backwards, or rolling backwards completely (my new favorite movement from this is rolling backwards on one shoulder until you wind up lying flat in a prone position – it’s an amazing spinal mobilization). They then progress to kneeling, lunging, and transferring weight in more gradually upright positions.

I made the humbling mistake of only watching this first section of Disc One a day before I re-watched it and actually went through the movements. As I watched it initially I found it really interesting, but assumed that I wouldn’t find anything in these movements that would prove challenging or expose a blind spot in my movement abilities. Ba-ha-ha-ha! Not so! While some of the movements came easily, others surprised me with fresh challenges and illuminated discrepancies side-to-side. If you get these DVDs, do be sure not to treat it like watching television. Clear some space and go through the movements. You’re sure to find some surprising insights into your movement patterns.

In the second part of Disc One, Le Corre and Cook progress to some manipulative skills, by using first a stick, and then a log balanced on one shoulder while squatting (and eventually Le Corre kicks it up a notch by walking and running with the balanced log). As Le Corre says, “Manipulating objects does not rely on brute force. We look at postural integrity and good efficient movement patterning… Manipulating objects can be very helpful for feedback.”

Helpful, indeed. It is clear that this balanced log is the best squatting teacher anyone could hope for. As soon as you lose spinal integrity, whoops! – there goes the log falling forward or backward. Cook summed it up well when he said, “You’re setting up movement opportunities that intensify sensory awareness so much.” So instead of using things like gym weight machines, which profoundly shut down sensory awareness, these movements add a profound mental component. You have to be totally engaged in what you are doing.

Disc Two

Disc Two is an opportunity to watch a thorough coaching session by Le Corre as he takes two people who hadn’t met him before through several of the movements from Disc One, as well as plenty of new ones. You get the benefit of both watching other people go through MovNat and hearing Cook’s commentary on how the movements function as screens and simultaneously as correctives. For example, when Le Corre is having the two students rock back and forth onto their spine with knees bent and no help from their extremities, Cook points out how this movement demonstrates limits of thoracic flexibility. He also explains how, when they are rolling this way, the grass becomes like nature’s foam roller (my words) and gives them some tissue mobilization.

Watching Le Corre and Cook take two people through movement progressions will steep you in their philosophy of quality first. Once quality has been attained, you do not increase volume or intensity, but complexity. As Cook put it, MovNat sets up a circumstance where you just plain “can’t do more than you can do correctly.”

Disc Three

Disc Three basically functions as an encyclopedia of all of the MovNat movements that were covered, with Le Corre demonstrating each. This disc looks at each movement independently and deconstructs their relevance. The MovNat exercises are broken down by type: rolling, crawling, creeping, transitions, and biped. For those of you who utilize the Functional Movement Screen with your clients, this disc also lists the relevant FMS tests that correspond each movement, thereby correlating them directly to the screen.

If I’m pressed to come up with some down side of this educational resource, really all I can come up with is that it was filmed in Virginia in the summertime. The sheer lush, green, sunny, humming insects, summery-ness of the whole thing was a torment as I watched it in the heart of one of New England’s coldest winters. Okay, I kid – I have nothing negative to say.

In the words of Le Corre, “What most of us need… is a good healthy dose, if possible a daily dose, of natural human movement to thrive.” For anyone who has an interest natural movement, or who wants to learn how to prevent or treat pain, dysfunction, or injury, Exploring Functional Movement is an invaluable resource.

“Exploring Functional Movement” is available for $49.95 at FunctionalMovement.com.

The post Review: “Exploring Functional Movement” Featuring Gray Cook and Erwan Le Corre appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

We tight-tissued folk don’t exactly have to worry about magically becoming hypermobile. We all have been told “tight” equals “bad” and so we work on flexibility in the hopes that we can enter the anointed realm of The Bendy. Oh, if only we could instantaneously drop into a full split, then we would be living the good life!

Really? Are those people at your gym who are flopping their torsos down onto the floor in a spread leg forward fold actually experiencing less pain and discomfort in their bodies? And did they get there through conscientious effort? Effort that you – oh, Shameful Tight One – have lacked the discipline to follow through on? Usually not.

Let’s look at both points one at a time because understanding which tissue type you are – whether you are in the tight or the bendy camp – will help you to know how to navigate your way to balance. Ah, balance, the magical place where less pain, fewer injuries, and more power lives. We like this place.

Do the Naturally Super-Flexible Feel and Perform Better in Their Bodies?

In my Rolfing practice, I hear over and over again from the hypermobile types that being super flexible was really fun as a kid (who doesn’t like freaking out their friends by wrapping their legs behind their head after all?), but that as they age they experience more persistent and pervasive pain from chronic joint hypermobility, and are more easily susceptible to slow healing sprains and osteoarthritis. They often feel like an eighty-year-old long before they get there, and also feel as if they are moving cautiously all the time to avoid something going “out,” which is just their term for their experience of joint instability.

Unfortunately, the people who are in this condition often wind up this way because their hypermobility was praised as a virtue during formative years, and so they participated in activities that encouraged yet more hypermobility like some forms of yoga, gymnastics, and dance. Sadly, it leaves them feeling like crap no matter how pretty the shapes are that they can make. Had balance and integrity been praised over contortionism, they would likely be able to age with much less angst. (All hope is not lost. Hang in there with me. We’re getting there.)

Sometimes the bendy people who are having physical problems as a result of it are characterized as having joint hypermobility syndrome, which leads, as I mentioned above, to pain, a higher incidence of dislocations and sprains, and a higher incidence of osteoarthritis (which happens from the over-mobile joints sliding around and damaging tissue). Ouch.

In joint hypermobility syndrome (don’t let the word “syndrome” irritate, this is basically just a label for the common experience of hypermobility) the ligaments, which basically function as the strapping tape of our joints by connecting bone to bone, are considered the problem for being too loose. This is indeed a problem, as ligaments have no recoil property. Meaning, they don’t bounce back from their end range. Imagine the difference between a rubber band and Silly Putty. Stretch out the elastic and “boing!” back it goes. Stretch out the Silly Putty and you have stringy globbery-goop. This is the trouble with hypermobility, and why it shouldn’t be glorified.

Fortunately, we are not just a bunch of parts. We are a unified organism. So, if your ligaments are too loose, you have a whole lot of other soft tissue to help you out with support, provided they have the opportunity to come into balance. Remember those things we love to talk about called muscles? Their job is actually to determine appropriate range for a joint (i.e. where the bones get to go). This means if they are functioning in a balanced way, the ligaments do not need to take on a load. And our muscles weave into the bones via tendons, and all of this is living in a sea, inside and out, of fascia. So you’ve got oodles of support if you can find your way to balance. (More on finding balance soon.)

Did They (the Bendy) Get There Through Conscientious Effort?

In reality there is a gray scale of tissue density from the tight to the bendy. Why do some of us get nicknames like Thick Tissue Mama while others earn the nickname Gumby? It’s tough to say, though certainly genetics plays a role (even including genetic diseases in more extreme cases like Ehlers Danlos or Marfan syndrome). Probably a sedentary lifestyle and food also play some role, but I just can’t seem to find straight up information on why we come in a range of tissue densities as humans. But we do.

The important thing to know is that no matter which flavor you came in, it doesn’t mean you’re doomed. While the people who consider touching their toes to be an impossible task probably won’t be competing in the National Yoga Competition (yoga as a competition in contortionism still blows my mind), and the people who are competing yogis (sorry, again, combining “yoga” with “competition” just gets me) will likely never lack for a close-up view of their shins in a forward fold, we can all nudge the needle of where we start. And if we do it with the goal being integrity and balance, then we can arrive at a place of less pain, fewer injuries, healthier joints, and more powerful movements.

For the Tight People:

• Move in varied ways: Whether it’s while working out or in your day-to-day life (hello, butt in chair!), you become the shapes and movements you make most of the time. To avoid congealing into yourself, broaden your movement repertoire. Stand or sit on the floor for part of your workday, go climb a tree, juggle some kettlebells – just take yourself out of whatever is your norm and explore.
• Manipulate the fascia: Whether you choose to work with a manual therapist who practices one of the forms of fascial manipulation (Rolfing, Structural Integration, and Myofascial Release come to mind), or you choose to work with a method of self myofascial release (like Yoga Tune Up and MELT), you’ll want to hydrate that tissue and get your structures back to gliding on one another instead of sticking to one another.
• Don’t “punch holes” in your system: I had a Rolfing instructor years ago who used to describe spot tissue work as akin to “punching holes” in the system. There are no “holes” to punch out, but what his analogy is getting at is that it does contribute to imbalance if you just keep hammering away at the same place. So if you do work on yourself, don’t decide that one part of you is the “tight”, i.e. “bad,” part and just ream the hell out of it every time you do tissue release. Your IT bands really don’t need that much punishment. We’re connected, remember, so work your whole self and mix it up.

For the Bendy People:

• Avoid what harms you: Skip out on classes with teachers who want you to be your bendiest self, and skip highly repetitive or sharp, cutting movements as well.
• Pull yourself together: When moving, instead of yearning to pull out and away from your midline into stretches, think about shoring yourself up into your midline and into your joints.
• Turn your attention on: In many ways you have the harder job because you have to utilize very focused attention when you are moving and learn how to appreciate the small ranges. People who are hypermobile also tend to lack the proprioception that tells them when they are going too far in a joint, as in, there is no sensation that says, “Stop!” So you have to tune deeply into yourself and learn what an end range of movement actually is for you, because you have likely been blowing way past it for years.
• Get a teacher: On that note, when you lack a feedback loop that easily tells you what you’re up to in your joints, having a movement educator or trainer who can work with you to tell you when to stop and to shine a light on your body blind spots can be invaluable. Be sure to work with someone who gets that you need to build integrity in your joint ranges. Unfortunately our glorification of bendy means that many teachers subscribe to the “more is better” philosophy of flexibility. Restorative Exercise is a great system for learning your own appropriate, healthy biomechanics.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Mobility’s Dark Side: Why Being Super Bendy Isn’t All That appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

A couple of months ago I wrote a shortie primer on fascia here, The Top 5 Ways Fascia Matters to Athletes, and I was delightfully pleased to hear from a number of teachers, trainers, and practitioners of all stripes who wanted to use it as a resource for educating their students, clients, or patients.

So I decided to edit and expand upon that article to create a free resource so everyone could do just that. Whether you’re just a body nerd, someone trying to rehabilitate yourself out of injury and pain, or someone who wants to educate your people, the free eBook Why Fascia Matters is now available for download and sharing.

And on that note, here is an excerpt from the book of some of the things that weren’t fully discussed in the original article:

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 this school of fish that has decided 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 – i.e. which motor units are firing- 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.

Sure we’ve managed to catalog those actions as resulting from around 640 discrete structures, but they 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.

A Masterpiece of Tensegrity Architecture

Speaking of “no local problems” and “no local movements”, let’s talk tensegrity. The term “tensegrity” was created by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s as a way to refer to “tensional integrity,” and in his case he was talking about it as it relates to an engineering principle in architecture.

You may be familiar with his work with geodesic domes and his geodesic dome home.

The short version is that these structures utilize distributed tension to create structures that are both lighter and stronger. If you want another good visual of this distributed tension, the Kurilpa Bridge in Brisbane, Australia is the world’s largest tensegrity bridge (and as a tensegrity nerd I think it’s stunning).

But this engineering principle applies to life as well! Donald Ingber applied a theory of tensegrity to molecular biology (as one example, the cell’s cytoskeleton is a tensegrity model), and Dr. Stephen Levin coined the term “biotensegrity” to apply this to biology and in particular to the musculoskeletal and fascial networks that we’re talking about here.

It’s gobsmacking, but it appears that from the molecular level on up, our body is a miracle of tensegrity architecture. We are composed of millions of geodesic structures (specifically icosahedral geodesics).

Phew. Ok, why do we care?

Well it (again) totally changes our framework from parts to whole. In tensegrity – in this case in regards to the human body – structures are stable and functional not because of the strength of individual pieces, but because of the way the entire structure balances and distributes mechanical stresses.

Tension is continuously transmitted through the whole structure simultaneously. Which means that an increase in tension to one piece of the structure will result in an increase in tension to other parts of the structure – even parts that are seemingly “far” away.

I had to put “far” in quotation marks because we have to realize how silly it is that we think of our head as “far” from our feet – or any other distance between two body parts – and therefore that it would be strange for those two parts to impact one another because of their distance. At most we are talking about a matter of feet here. We’re not exactly packing on the mileage to get from point A to point B.

The fascia is the essential structure that suspends, honeycomb-like, our structure from the inside out and, if you recall from chapter two when we talked about how it’s all connected, fascia is the one system that tethers into every other aspect of our physiology.

Which means that balanced fascia makes for a healthier and happier structure/body, whereas unbalanced fascia sends us into the domino effect of a compensatory pattern, which we will discuss in more detail in the next chapter.

If you are a visual person, take a look at pictures of the Kurilpa Bridge. This bridge is a functional bridge because all of its support cables are doing their appropriate jobs.

If one of those support cables gets too short or too long, er, you probably don’t want to drive over that bridge.

Its structure has been majorly compromised. The same goes for our bodies, while we don’t “drive over them” we sure do “drive” them around plenty via our every day moment-to-moment movements, and moving through a compromised tensegrity structure creates its fair share of wear and tear.

As Dr. Rolf used to say, “Balance is strength.” Indeed.

DownloadWhy Fascia Matters e-book.

References:

1. Schleip, R., 2003. Fascial mechanoreceptors and their potential role in deep tissue manipulation. In: Fascial plasticity- a new neurobiological explanation. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies 7 (1): 11-19 and 7 (2): 104-116.

2. Levin, S.M., 1981. 34th Annual Conference Alliance for Engineering in Medicine and biology. The icosahedron as a biologic support system. Alliance for Engineering in Medicine and Biology, Bethesda, Houston, p. 404.

3. Langevin, H., 2006. Connective tissue: A body-wide signaling network? Med. Hypotheses 66 (6), 1074-1077.

Geodesic dome photo by Cédric THÉVENET [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Kurilpa Bridge photo by Kgbo (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Why Fascia Matters: Excerpt From My New eBook appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Our breath is our primary nutrition. We can go without food for somewhere in the range of twenty to forty days, and we can go without water for a significantly shorter period of time at about three to seven days. However we can go without breath, or oxygen, for only three to seven minutes. Try to hold your breath and eventually your nervous system will shut the experiment down by making you black out so it can get some air into you again.

That we need oxygen is clearly well established (duh). But what we talk about less is when people are restricted in the full expression of their breath due to structural compensations, and therefore are receiving sub-optimal cellular nutrition. Are you going to black out or get brain damage from this kind of low-level restriction? Nah. But as an athlete if you have some kinks in your breathing you will be slower to recover and to heal, and you will at some level have subpar performance (i.e. if you pay a little attention to training your breath you are likely to feel like you’ve been given some super-powered training mojo).

There are two main ways that people develop breath restrictions they may not notice:

1. They decide, either consciously or unconsciously that there is such a thing as “good” breath and “bad” breath.
2. Their abs of steel start getting in their way.

Good Breath vs. Bad Breath

First, we have three main kinds of breath – clavicular, thoracic, and abdominal:

Clavicular breath happens up high by your collarbone and first ribs. It lifts your shoulders up rapidly and dramatically to get as much air in as possible. This is emergency respiration and you may notice it comes in handy when you are at the end of a race (people leaning forward with their hands on their thighs panting furiously are engaging in clavicular breath), or when you need to move quickly in an emergency (people who sprint to the road to get their child out of traffic are also engaging in clavicular breath). In both of these cases, your nervous system decided that you needed to get as much air as possible and pronto. This gets the job done without the blacking out.

Thoracic breath happens where your lungs are, i.e. everywhere you have ribs. Thoracic breath happens most naturally when standing or sitting, as you need your core and pelvic floor to be more “on” in these positions to support your upright spine. If you force extreme belly breath while sitting or standing you are creating a kind of plunger effect on your pelvic floor, which may be ultimately good for the adult diaper industry, but probably isn’t great for your long-term quality of life.

Abdominal breath, sometimes called belly breath, occurs most naturally when we are lying down or at rest. This is when, because of the position of your body, the full expression of your respiratory diaphragm descending and moving the organs downwards can occur. This is a very relaxing breath for the nervous system, unlike its buddy clavicular breath.

Of course none of these types of breathing occur in isolation, so it’s more a matter of which you are doing most at any given time. You may also notice that none of these kinds of breath are bad. It’s just that some are more appropriate to certain circumstances than others. Trying to fall asleep while doing rapid, shallow clavicular breath won’t really do you any favors in the insomnia department, and belly breathing while you sprint to grab your child out of traffic won’t do you or your child any favors (as you will pass out before you get there from not having enough oxygen to get the job done).

Sometimes we choose a “good” breath and a “bad” breath and convince ourselves that we should only be breathing one way and commit to it. This can happen consciously if you had a teacher who at some point told you there was a holy grail of breath. This can happen unconsciously if you have restrictions in your soft tissue from injury, movement patterning, or trauma of both the emotional and physical variety.

In reality, what we want is to have the ability to breath in all ways and in all dimensions, and then leave the day-to-day decision making up to our nervous systems. I am by no means advocating against using certain kinds of breath for training – whether it’s the more bracing breath of powerlifting or the breath explorations, called pranayama, of yoga – but we should not have to think about our breath most of the time. We should just be fluent and adaptable and let our nervous system choose what is going to be most helpful.

When Good Abs Go Bad

Now on to the abs of steel issue. Whether it’s the six-pack, shredded up, wearing the cobra hood up at all times kind of abs, or the perma-corset abs that are advocated by some forms of Pilates and dance, constantly splinting like this can cause trouble. Our core – meaning the hard and soft tissues of our abdomen, spine, and pelvic floor – should not be like wearing a rigid metal back brace on the inside of our skin.

Our core is the center of our structure and has so much gorgeous movement potential, and with good reason. The core is really meant to function like a movement conduit, translating input across our center and into our limbs and upper and lower body. To shut it down rigidly shuts down a lot of potential, including our breath.

Meet Your Respiratory Diaphragm

While breath is complex, for the purposes of adding a little breath training into your work at home, let’s work on freeing up the capacity of the respiratory diaphragm. The respiratory diaphragm can kind of be seen as the mob boss of breath, if you will. It says what goes first, and everything else follows.

Since your respiratory diaphragm can’t be trained the way, say, your biceps can (though I would love to see someone make a video Respiratory Diaphragms of Steel), it becomes less about making it “stronger” and more about making it responsive and allowing all of the other tissues it affects to react to its movement. We need core musculature that is strong and mobile.

You can picture the diaphragm muscle as an umbrella that lives, dome-shaped, high up under your ribs. It’s a pretty fascinating muscle because while it originates by lining the inner surface of the lower six ribs, and also attaches at the upper two or three lumbar vertebrae and the inner part of the xiphoid process on the sternum. Its insertion is a little wacky because it is on itself, via the central tendon (the handle of the umbrella for visual purposes, though it does not function at all like the handle of an umbrella). All breath occurs by a change in internal pressure, and this change is produced when the central tendon pulls down, increasing the volume of the thoracic cavity, which pulls air into the lungs and displaces the organs downwards (this is the belly swell of abdominal breath).

So, watch the video below and let’s give your diaphragm some love via soft tissue work with a Coregeous ball. This is from the Yoga Tune Up world, and the Coregeous ball is an air-filled, super gushy, slightly sticky ball. Perfect and delish for doing home core tissue work. Do not do any work in your abdomen with any ball that is harder than this – no lacrosse balls, therapy balls, etc. And while the ball should be air-filled, it should be pliable and air-filled, so no basketballs or soccer balls! Be kind to your abdomen, okay? Last caveat – this work is a no-no for anyone with a hernia or a diastasis.

Photos 1-3 courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post The Neglected Training Mojo: Breath appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

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

First, many think 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 it is a richly multi-dimensional tissue that forms your internal soft tissue architecture.

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.

So imagine for a moment 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, and how your colon wraps. To say it’s everywhere is far from over-stating things.

In fact, it turns out fascia’s everywhere-ness is one of the reasons it was overlooked for so long. Until recently it was 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 the cadavers could be tidily made to resemble the anatomical texts from which people were studying. Poor, misunderstood, and underrated fascia. Sigh.

Fortunately research is catching up to what turns out to be a remarkably communicative sensory and proprioceptive tissue. What fascia researchers are discovering is pretty amazing not just for fascia nerds like me, but for anyone who wants to put their body to good, healthy use. (Like, for example, all of us at Breaking Muscle!)

So without further ado, here is some of the newly emerging information about fascia and how you can use it to maximize not just your athletic performance, but also just your plain old ability to feel good in your body.

1. Fascia is a tensional fluid system

While it’s difficult for us to understand how a support structure could be a fluid structure – because we’re not exactly making hi-rise buildings out of Jell-O – it’s true. Juicy fascia is happy fascia. The best analogy I can give is of a sponge.

When a sponge dries out it becomes brittle and hard. It can easily be broken with only a little force because of how crispy it has become. However, when a sponge is wet and well hydrated it gets springy and resilient. You can crush it into a little ball and it bounces back. You can wring it and twist it, but it is difficult to break.

Once we understand that we’re like that on the inside, keeping our fascia hydrated takes on more importance. Our mobility, integrity, and resilience are determined in large part by how well hydrated our fascia is. In fact, what we call “stretching a muscle” is actually the fibers of the connective tissue (collagen) gliding along one another on the mucous-y proteins called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs for short).

GAGs, depending on their chemistry, can glue layers together when water is absent, or allow them to skate and slide on one another when hydrated.^1,2 This is one of the reasons most injuries are fascial. If we get “dried out” we are more brittle and are at much greater risk for erosion, a tear, or a rupture.

So drink more water, right? Well, yes and no. Staying hydrated via drinking continues to be important, but if you have dehydrated fascia it’s more like you have these little kinks in your “hoses” (microvacuoles), and so all that water you drink can’t actually reach the dehydrated tissue and gets urinated away, never having reached the crispy tissue.

To be able to get the fluid to all of your important nooks and crannies you need to first get better irrigated (via the microvacuoles.² And to do that, you’ve got to get work on your soft tissue to untangle those gluey bits.

Seeing a body worker who specializes in any form of myofascial work (Rolfing or other forms of Structural Integration and ART tend to be faves) will do the trick, but you can also work on this at home with the array of self-care tools for working your own fascia.

As I pointed out in last month’s post, I don’t like harder tools as they are less effective at actually “unkinking your hoses”, and Yoga Tune Up Therapy Balls and The MELT Method are my two favorite self-fascia-lovin’ systems.

2. Variation matters

Movement also gets the hydration out to the tissue as well, but that movement 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.

As Tom Myers, fascial educator and creator of Anatomy Trains, says in this video:

“Rest is how the tissues rehydrate. When you do heavy exercise you are driving the water out of the tissue in the same way that if you step on a wet beach you push the water out of the sand, and when you pick up your foot the water seeps back into that sand. You’re doing the same thing with tissues, when you’re really working out you are driving the water out of the tissue while you are working…The rhythm [of your fitness regimen] should include some rest… When you take the strain off of the tissues, like a sponge they will suck up that water and be ready for more exercise.”

This certainly makes a good argument for functional fitness work like MovNat that takes its inspiration, wisely, from the constantly varying movements of our ancestors, and also shines a light on the benefits of a good high intensity interval training (HIIT) program.

3. 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 it’s an example of a potential plotline for Dexter. Something has gone horribly wrong in this scenario.

Okay, okay, so we were not dropped on our heads as children and we get it that our 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 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 (thigh) bone, and inserts on the calcaneus (heel bones), via the Achilles tendon. It 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.

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) and that then becomes the calcaneus bone (by weaving more densely until tendon becomes bone).

I am not just trying to belabor anatomy semantics. This is important because it gives us a handier 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. 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. For athletes, this brings the dreaded domino effect into a clearer perspective.

Many of you have experienced the domino effect without having had a name for it. First, your neck gets injured in a minor whiplash in that teeny tiny no big deal car accident that you had when you were sixteen years old.

But you’re sixteen years old, so no biggie. You ignore it and it gets better. But once you enter college, suddenly you have this nagging shoulder pain with all the extra typing and sitting you’re doing. As the years go by you start to think of yourself as the “tight-shouldered” person, and sometimes you have a pinching pain when you lift your arm.

More years go by and you are now not only a “tight-shouldered person,” but you also suffer from occasional low back spasms and have developed plantar fasciitis, which you assume must be because you’re a runner and everyone says running is bad for you. I could go on, and this is just one quick sketch of one type of domino effect out of the infinite possibilities, but you get the idea.

The thing this person is experiencing is actually the long, slow drain of an unaddressed compensatory pattern on a body, but in our culture we call it, “just getting old.” The best way to avoid the domino effect is to keep your fascia healthy so that nothing gets jumbled up in the knit of the “sweater” and you are therefore at much lower risk for developing a compensatory pattern which, by its very nature, is always going to be global.

4. Its springiness wants to help you out

What do you get when you add juiciness to connectedness? Springiness! When your tissue retains (or regains) its natural spring, the rebound effect of the fascia allows you to use less muscle power, and therefore fatigue less rapidly. Want to jump higher, run faster, and throw farther? You’ll need to pay attention to nourishing the elastic quality of your fascia.

For example, when you run with healthy fascia the force you transmit into the ground gets returned to you through the whole tensional network of the fascia. It’s like you have a little built-in trampoline action going on.

So once you’ve done the work to rehydrate your tissue, you’ll want to embrace bouncy movements. Some good examples of how you can best play with this are running, jumping rope, box jumps, and kettlebells. All martial arts forms also rely on the inner spring. That’s why they’re so cool.

5. It is the largest and richest sensory organ of the body

Now this little tidbit of recent fascial research was a shocker. It turns out fascia is one of our richest sensory organs with between six to ten times higher quantity of sensory nerve receptors than the muscles.³ In fact, it is possible fascia may be equal or superior to the retina, which has so far been considered the richest human sensory organ.³

This makes your fascia a system of proprioception – i.e. of knowing where your body is in space, but also of graceful full body orchestration of movement. Therefore, well-hydrated and supple fascia is crucial to maintaining your natural settings for alignment and function.

And maintaining those natural settings will keep small problems from snowballing into larger ones, keep injuries from becoming chronic issues that flare in and out of life, and keep you mobile and functional for longer through life – as in moving well, but also the perks of that, some of which are avoiding nasty surgeries and joint replacements.

While it’s impossible to not be using at least some of the sensory qualities of fascia (unless you have a disease process that is interfering with it), a way to play with waking up the full potential of your own proprioception is to return, as I already covered, to constantly varied movements.

To really Zen-out on noticing your proprioceptive abilities, a barefoot (or minimal footwear) hike over varying terrain mixed with balancing across logs along the way will certainly get the sensory juices flowing. Again, this makes MovNat a great choice.

Whew. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it’s plenty to chew on for now! So go forth, love your fascia, and train happily.

References:

1. Thomas W. Findley, MD, PhD, “Fascia Research From a Clinician/Scientist’s Perspective,” International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork, (2011).

2. J.C. Guimberteau, “The Sliding Mechanics of the Subcutaneous Structures in Man Illustration of a Functional Unit: The Microvacuoles,” Studies of the Académie Nationale de Chuirurgie (2005).

3. Robert Schleip et al., Fascia: The Tensional Network of the Human Body (Elsevier, 2012), 77.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post The Top 5 Ways Fascia Matters to Athletes appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

1. Yoga Tune Up Therapy Balls:

Let’s just be clear that this is not an unbiased article. My vote, clearly, is going to the YTU therapy balls. So instead of pretending to be an impartial journalist, I’ll instead tell you why they get my vote.

I’ve been a manual therapist, as a Rolfing practitioner, for thirteen years now. For many of those years I struggled with how frustrating it was that I couldn’t find any tool or system to send people home with so that they could “Rolf themselves” in their time when they weren’t on my table. I do find that most people need the sophisticated eyes and hands of a practitioner to unravel their compensatory patterns, at least initially, but as a general rule I adhere to the belief that our ultimate goal as practitioners should always be to get people to be the best self-healing organisms that they can be. And often smart self-care systems make a world of difference towards achieving this goal.

Enter Yoga Tune Up. As it is a conscious corrective exercise form, Yoga Tune Up is vastly more than just balls [enter your favorite balls joke here]. But for the purposes of this article I will focus, ahem, on their balls, though I do utilize the corrective exercise work with clients and students just as much, if not more than I use the therapy ball work.

The perks of the YTU therapy balls:

Grippy: The rubber the YTU therapy balls are made of allows for a yummy amount of grab to your soft tissue, especially if you roll in the buff, which I highly recommend (but we do not actually do in my group classes, so don’t get on a plane expecting to show up to a room full of nudies or anything). This grip is important because it allows you to hook into the superficial fascia and create the all-important shear in that layer. This will also create an effect in the deep fascia because connective tissue being, well, connected, all the layers are tethered to one another. Most injuries are fascial and not muscular (more on this in next month’s post), that said, keeping the fascia hydrated so that all of our soft tissue layers can glide on one another, as they are designed to, will go a long way toward not only decreasing chronic pain and rehabilitating any current injuries, but also decreasing your risk for future injuries.

Pliable: The rubber the YTU therapy balls are made of is responsive. It has some give and therefore yields at bony prominences. This is important because you don’t wind up just reaming at your bones, which is at best unpleasant and at worst injurious. This also shields you from some of the risk of impinging nerves, which we clearly don’t want.

The YTU therapy balls start out firm and the more you use them the softer and more pliable they become. I like to have a mélange of YTU therapy balls in my life with different amounts of firmness and give depending on how long I’ve used them. That way when I want to get into my scalenes or my ankle at my lateral malleolus, I grab my softest set, while my upper trapezius yearns for the firmest, newest therapy balls.

Speaking of working at the lateral malleolus (the bony protuberance on the outside of your ankle), that’s the other benefit of the springiness of the YTU therapy balls. Because they are pliable, you can work quite close to the bones because the rubber will nestle in around the protuberances rather than impinging them. This is good news since you will often get a more dramatic result working at attachment sites of muscles, which are, more often than not, on the bone.

Firm, but not too hard: Yes, this is an offshoot of pliability, but I wanted to highlight this particular aspect of the therapy balls to make what is perhaps the most important point of this post. While it is totally logical to assume that a harder implement would penetrate our tissue more deeply, research tells us otherwise. At the Fascia Research Congress, Leonid Blyum presented a study in which he utilized engineering principals to test out how different mechanical stress transfer mediums (i.e. tools of varying hardness and softness) would affect human tissue. The result of the study showed that softer implements impacted the connective tissue about twice as effectively as the harder implements. (If you read Blyum’s study, note then when he mentions “rubber” as a hard tool, he was using hard tire rubber, not springy responsive rubber.)

But what about the fact that it often feels more intense when you use a harder tool? More often than not, what you actually perceive is your tissue’s kickback. In other words, your tissue tightens up, your sensory nerves get agitated, and it feels “deeper” as your tissue simultaneously blocks the implement’s depth and impact. We need to question our assumptions that if a feeling is more uncomfortable, that means it is doing deeper work. If you want to bliss out on agitating your tissue be my guest, but if you want your tissue quality to actually change, you may need a springier object.

This isn’t to say there is no sensation or no intensity when actually impacting your tissue, but it’s about finding that sweet spot. As a general rule, if you need to hold your breath, breathe shallowly, grimace, or reflexively clench muscles anywhere else in your body, you are not working more deeply in your tissue, you are just setting yourself up for spasm and potentially inflaming your tissue.

Three different sizes: Last but not least, the YTU therapy balls come in three different sizes that mimic different strokes of a massage therapist (and there is also an air-filled ball for doing abdominal self-massage). The original YTU therapy balls create a more trigger point, thumb type impact, the plus-size balls are more like an elbow, and the alpha is the broadest stroke, imitating more closely a soft fist of a massage therapist.

But what about the other tools?

Lacrosse Balls:

Oh the ubiquitous lacrosse balls. On the upside, they do have the grippy surface, which is a bonus, but they completely lack pliability. They are quite hard and therefore, counterintuitive as it may seem, they don’t penetrate as deeply, while simultaneously putting you at more risk for bony or nerve impingements.

Even Kelly Starrett of MobilityWOD, the veritable king of the lacrosse ball, (who I am quite fond of), has mentioned several times that he initially chose the lacrosse ball as his tool of choice in MobilityWOD primarily because it is a cheap and easily found tool, not because it is the best tool. In his excellent workshop on CreativeLIVE he describes them as “too hard” and “too square” for adequately assessing many areas of the body. And he walks his talk by having Jill Miller and her magical therapy balls regularly featured on MobilityWOD. In fact, the two have teamed up for a not-yet-released therapy ball project (stay tuned!). Starrett has also developed his own tools which are sold through Rogue Fitness, but I haven’t tried them and so can’t review them. Sorry folks!

Foam Rollers:

Hiding out in the corner of every gym you’ve ever gone to is the stash of foam rollers. Sadly, these lack pliability and stick, and are also too broad to be able to find their way into the important nooks and crannies. While they can break up some fascial adhesions and generate blood flow, both of which are good things, they cannot get into specific areas with any precision or refinement, and are therefore surface tools at best. Also, people generally flay themselves on these things by moving much too fast and grimacing through it. Fascia is slow to respond, so if you are going to use a foam roller, move slowly so you actually get benefit to the soft tissue instead of just riling things up.

All that said, self-care tools, when used intelligently and not as convenient personal torture devices, can yield significant benefits to your tissue which can decrease pain, reduce risk of injury, and help you to heal and recover more quickly. So testing out which benefits you the most is a worthy journey to take.

Ankle and lacrosse ball photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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