Ooh Ahh. Fascia!

Hello! As promised, I am back, and feeling (more or less) refreshed. The time change certainly helps one's outlook this time of year, no?

So, jumping right into it - there's a set of questions that I get a lot:

• "Why does my joint keep popping?" (usually asked about shoulders or hips)
• "Why am I more flexible in the evening than in the morning?"
• "Why can't I seem to correct this postural issue?"

And the answer to all these questions is ... fascia!

You know how when you cook a chicken, there's that membrane between the skin and the meat? That's fascia, and people have it too. And in people it can harden, depending on the person's level of activity and general postural tendencies, which is why we're all kind of stiff when we wake up - we've had at least a few hours of stillness, during which time our fascia starts to lock itself into place, but since that's only a few hours' worth of hardening it's easily corrected just by our regular daily movement. 

But that's also why it's so difficult to correct lifetime postural issues, because your fascia has had however many years you've been standing or sitting like that to make itself into that shape. The fascia becomes accustomed to the shape your body assumes and almost forms a shell around your muscles, holding you into that shape however healthy or unhealthy it may be for you.

And that is where the popping or sometimes crackling comes from (usually. Sometimes joint popping has other origins, but if it doesn't hurt then fascia is generally at least a contributing factor)! All those weird internal sounds are the sound of fascia loosening and rearranging itself, and you hear them less the more you stretch or move around because you're giving your fascia less opportunity to harden back up.

This is one of the reasons why regular massages are recommended, by the way. Not just to keep massage therapists in business, although we do want to keep the good ones around, and not just because it's a nice thing to do for yourself, although it is, but because (among other health benefits that I'm not qualified to intelligently discuss) massage is the best way to keep your fascia flexible and consequently help stave off the bad-posture-associated health issues I talked about way back when.

This is also why pilates and yoga are so great for one's posture, by the way, especially pilates - because the exercises are specifically designed to help retrain the fascia as well as strengthen the body's supporting muscles, which essentially builds us into a better literal shape than we had when we started.

So there you go! I bet you didn't think you'd be reading about membranes today, did you? But sometimes life takes us in unexpected directions. Which we'll talk a little more about tomorrow.

It's good to be back.
- Sarah