Fascinating Fascia
A fascinous buzzword and the rediscovery of bundling
Fascination with Fascia
You can think of fascia as the largest sensory organ in your body.
〰 Arielle Schwartz 〰
A Personal Fascia Journey
Fascia has been a little known verbiont in the wildwordwoods for centuries. Hidden in the undergrowth, a type of ground cover word, spreading like weed.
Fascia has survived as a wallflower in medical research 〰 long time winner of the title MUPHA (Most Unsexy Part of Human Anatomy) ~ if there was such a thing.
Until something unexpected happened…
Fascia became the new buzzword of the wellness industry!¡!¡!
I had a personal epiphany related to fascia about three years ago. This enlightening insight comes with a backstory of injury and healing.
During our annual olive harvest in the previous year I had slipped down the edge of one of our terraces. It wasn’t very steep or deep. I laughed it off and scrambled back up. Once back on higher ground, I noticed that I'd twisted (or sprained) my knee.
It was the first day of the harvest. One of the friends helping, a keen cyclist, advised me to keep moving, which was ‘the best therapy’, according to his expertise. I followed the advice. After a week of ‘keeping moving’ my knee was so painful, I had to give it a rest.
The knee took six months to heal. No sooner had I regained full painfree mobility I stumbled over a rock in our garden (doing some weeding, pruning, or whatever) and twisted the same knee again!
This time I took a rest immediately and embarked on a research excursion … It didn’t take long to find information about the role of fascia in knee pain.
While in my ‘wounded-knee-place' I was not able to bend my right knee without intense pain, so I had to drag the right leg when climbing stairs etc. 〰 you get the idea.
After the previous healing period of several months I was ready to try something new. That’s when I stumbled again. This time it was my non-physical self a.k.a. Researcher's-Mind ~ attention caught by keywords like #fasciaexercises and #fasciatriggerpoints and #fasciatriggerpointrelease.
Within hours of devouring this information I was travelling with my husband to visit friends who live about 45 minutes drive away. Josh was driving, me sitting in the passenger seat practicing the fascia-trigger-point-release-exercises I had just learned. The results were instant and overwhelmingly convincing.
Upon arrival at the friends’ house I got out of the car 〰 no pain!
At the friends’ house I was able to walk up the stairs 〰 no pain!
Unbelievable! I ran up and down the stairs a couple of times, just to make sure. Half an hour or less of pressing some sensitive points around my knee had resolved the issue completely 〰 and the pain never came back.
Needless to say, I became an instant #fasciafollower*. I was also instantly offered bundles of #fasciapainreleasetools, or simply #fasciatools, which means, I had tapped into the new #fasciaindustry of which I had been unaware until then.
This #fasciaindustry was already reasonably well developed, ready for a growing crowd of #fasciatherapists, #fasciapatients, and other #fasciaenthusiasts. Soon I found myself receiving offers to retrain as a #fasciatherapist and join this new #fasciamovement.
(The temptation was easy to resist, given the extortionate costs of the training.)
So what’s fascia? And why do they have such a powerful influence on our bodies and wellbeing?
* The sudden torrent of fascia related neologisms is real. All these words exist and are being used by people who are leaping on the bandwagon of the new #fasciaindustry. None of these words are in the dictionaries ~ yet. Hence the hashtags.
The Wordfamily of Fascia
Fascia [from Latin fascia = band, ribbon] adopted in English in the 1560s was originally used in architecture. Anatomical use followed in 1788. Botany, music and astronomy picked up the term somewhere along the way.
Fasces [from Latin fasces, pl facis = “bundle of rods containing an axe with the blade projecting”] is the older Latin term, which came into English in the 1590s. In Rome, fasces was used as a “symbol of power over life and limb: the sticks symbolized punishment by whipping, the axe-head execution by beheading.”
Bizarrely, fasces is still used in contemporary English in the sense of symbol of power, although physical punishment by whipping with a bunch of sticks or beheading with an axe would be condemned as a serious abuse of power (at least in the English speaking world).
In contemporary English fascia mainly carries the sense of
1 - a board covering the joint between the top of a wall and the projecting eaves
2 – a nameplate over the front of a shop
3 – tissue covering or binding together body structures
In the body we have superficial fascia ~ the connective tissues between skin and muscle tissue. We also have the deep fascia which surround all organs, muscles, joints, tendons and bones. Our physical fascia are not made of sticks, obviously. They are bundles of collagen, described as "the gluey, gooey, cellular matrix that binds tissues together."
Part of the 'new discovery' of fascia is based on the fact that someone decided to give a new name to the connective tissue and other similar tissues in the body. This means (at least in my understanding) fascia are not really a 'new thing' at all. The collagenous tissue has been relabeled and its functions are now better understood.
Fascia experts tell us that the deep fascia are responsible when we experience aches and pains related to mobility issues and stiffness. What we’ve blamed on ‘stiff muscles’ or a ‘dodgy knee’ in the past, is in fact the fascia tissue in those areas, which got knotted and sticky and such ‘knots’ need to be released.
Some fascia therapists claim that the majority of hip replacement surgeries could be avoided if people knew and practiced the appropriate fascia-release-exercises.
Fascia don’t only get stuck from accidents, or unhealthy posture, or physical trauma. Mental stress and emotional trauma also affect these sensitive tissue layers. We know that the emotional experience of fear has a direct impact on the body. Physiological responses related to excretions, changes in body temperature, perhaps uncontrollable trembling etc. are well documented.
Lesser known physical reactions happen in the fascia. And this can affect any body part. The tension (and pain) in your shoulders, for example might not be related to a physical injury but an old and unprocessed emotional trauma.
When emotional shock bundles the energy in mind and body, fascia bundle together and hold on to the memory. And vice versa ~ when knotted fascia are released during a massage, emotional memory can be released and trigger spontaneous tears.
Fascia belongs to a small but fascinating word family.
Fascination and fascinate [from Latin fascinare = to bewitch, enchant] captures a mental state of bundled attention.
The relatively rare English adjective fascinous [from Latin fascinum = charm, enchantment, witchcraft] has been in use since the 1660s in the sense of 'caused by witchcraft'.
Fascinator is an English word since 1677 in the sense of a fascinating person, before it became a word for a decorative type of headgear worn by women at weddings or other festive occasions, presumably because they are intended to bewitch, charm and enchant.
Fascism and fascist [from Italian fascio = group, association] developed first in Sicily from around 1895, when ‘groups of men organised themselves for a political purpose’.
Incidentally, the Italian Mafia (a Sicilian secret society of criminals) was born in 1875.
Since the Italian Fascisti who seized political power in 1919 the word became associated with the totalitarian right-wing nationalist governments which also sprung up in Germany and Spain a few years later.
Dating in the Cold Season to Fascia Release
Buzzed by the word fascia from whichever way, it’s easy to forget that the English language had its own word for fascia for centuries, long before the Latin symbol of power took over.
Bundle, a noun formed from the old Germanic verb bintan = to bind was used for packages of materials tied together since the 14th century.
Nowadays bundling refers to a sales strategy, when a company offers digital or physical products or services for an all-inclusive price. In the past, however, the same word had a less commercial and far more romantic life.
In the 18th century, bundling was known as a form of dating in parts of America. This may sound too good to be true ~ or even like a hoax ~ given the puritan attitudes of Americans. Perhaps it was a pragmatic solution to survive the harsh winter in those areas? Anyway, in New England, the word referred to the local custom of ‘sharing a bed for the night, fully dressed, wrapped up with someone of the opposite sex’.
In a general history of Connecticut The Reverend Samual Peters writes in 1782: “I am no advocate for temptation; yet must say, that bundling has prevailed 160 years in New England, and, I verily believe, with ten times more chastity than the sitting on a sofa. I had daughters, and speak from near forty years' experience. Bundling takes place only in cold seasons of the year—the sofa in summer is more dangerous than the bed in winter.”
Another unexpected connection between the words fascia and bundling goes beyond their linguistic bond. Bundling (the romantic version) is a form of hugging. Hugging releases a hormone called oxytocin, also known as the love hormone. And oxytocin has beneficial effects on the fascia.
“The release of oxytocin into the bloodstream by the posterior pituitary can reduce inflammatory activity affecting fascial stiffness and sensitization of fascial nociceptors.” says Simone Fortier, Founder of the Fascia Training Institute.
Some therapists suggest that stress and anxiety may contribute more to myofascial (= relating to the fascia of muscles) pain than physical injury!
You know what that means, don't you?
Take every opportunity you can to bundle up with your loved ones and let your pituitary gland do the work of healing your fascia.
Love it! I could go on for hours here. As a 33 year veteran of fascia and its intimacy, I can only say you “bundled” it all together really well. It’s taking a long time for science to catch up on the soft tissue consequences of stress and anxiety. For years those little techniques that you utilized have served us well in trying to break that pain pattern which if it sets in for a long time is much more stubborn. I agree on the hip front knowing only too well that we get people way too late to make a difference at times in the rehab industry. So yes to fascia. Knowing our way around it and through it can prevent a lot of agony and dysfunction. Thank you so much for a wonderful article.
This piece was so interesting and I was only familiar with bundling. I need to get out more maybe, lol.