You might attribute a painful neck or backache to tired muscles or stiff joints, but these symptoms can also be caused by a part of your body you probably haven’t heard of: your fascia.
Fascia is a thixotropic, thin casing of connective tissue that surrounds and holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber and muscle in place. The tissue does more than provide internal structure; fascia has nerves that make it almost as sensitive as skin. Also referred to as "connective tissue", it lines all the body cavities, provides the framework for the minerals that create cartilage and bone, and separates the muscles and their individual fibers. It so permeates the body that if you were to remove every other kind of cell and leave the connective tissues in place, you’d still be able to see exactly what you looked like! Unlike a salamander that can grow back a severed arm, humans don’t regenerate, we repair. Fascia is the material that repairs broken bones, torn muscles, deep wounds, cuts, and surgeries by also forming scar tissue.
Fascia has the ability to change state, depending on its level of energy and activity and it's environment. This property, called thixotropy, means that the fascia can move from a gel-like state to a liquid-like state and back. It’s easy to feel this in your own body when exercising. When you first start a workout, you may feel stiff and tight, but as you warm up, you notice greater ease and comfort. Your fascia is moving from a gel to a liquid state during the warm-up, which is why a warm up before vigorous exercise is highly recommended by fitness experts. If you go right into challenging movements, your fascia may still be too stiff and you are more likely to gain an injury from your workout.
The same process occurs to your fascia when you receive a massage. But instead of your own movement raising the energy in your tissues, the therapist’s hands add heat, energy, and motion to the fascia. And her specific hand placements and techniques can free and mobilize stiff fascia that exercise may not be able to!
Let's put fascia's usefulness in perspective: You're walking through the jungle and realize you're being followed by a tiger, so you start trying to run away. Right now, your fascia is liquid, allowing you to move freely, jumping and climbing over obstacles, sending signals to your extremities to move with precision and quickness. But the tiger catches up to you and you can see his mighty paw rearing up from the corner of your eye as he prepares to claw at you. In that moment, your fascia hardens to act like armor protecting your valuable muscles and organs as best as it can. Thanks, fascia!
But here's the bad news: many factors in your life may cause your fascia to go into a hardened state... and stay there. I like to call fascia the body's "overbearing parent", because it wants so deeply to protect you and care for you, often to the point of causing stress. Just like a kid who tried out for karate and got beaten up badly, the overbearing parent might say no more karate, or stress itself out when your competitions occur and ask you not to do karate anymore even if you really want to and feel more safe and capable now than you first did when you were beaten up. In these types of circumstances, your body experiences a trauma and responds by going into that "armor" state, often deciding to stay that way constantly or return to that state when it anticipates future traumas.
The toughest part is that when that "overbearing parent" stresses out and tries to stop you from doing something you want to do, the most common reaction is to be angry at it for holding you back. You get upset at your stiff, tense, and aching body. And that anger just results in more stress, and more stiffness, and more pain...
Until one day you finally convince your fascia that it can feel safe again, you can move the way you want to without causing further injury. You can engage in that activity that once brought trauma without feeling pain. You have convinced that "overbearing parent" that you've got this, you are going to be okay, and you've reestablished trust and comfort.
Most bodyworkers, at some point in their practice, have experienced phenomena that may be interpreted as representing a release of trauma when working on dysfunctional connective tissue. This feeling may have been accompanied by some type of sensory experience, for the therapist and/or the patient. In some cases, traumatic experiences may be recalled. When this happens, the potency of the memory may be erased or eased, along with restoration of tissue function. Modern research has proposed a variety of different interpretations as to how memory might be stored in soft tissues, possibly involving other forms of information storage not exclusively processed neurologically.
I myself decided to become a massage therapist after receiving a massage intended to alleviate some of my chronic back pain. During the massage, I was brought to tears when I suddenly recalled a traumatic event that occurred in my teenage years as the connective tissue softened under my therapist's hands for the first time since that traumatic event happened.
Determining whether your pain is due to muscles, joints, or fascia isn't too difficult. In general, muscle injuries and joint problems feel worse the more you move. Fascia adhesions tend to feel better with light movement and also respond well to heat therapy, which helps bring back the tissue’s elasticity. Adhesions in your fascia can worsen over time when left untreated, causing the fascia to compress and contort the muscles it surrounds. This can result in hard, tender knots in the muscles, called trigger points. Myofascial pain syndrome is a condition in which those trigger points cause pain to occur during movement, when pressure is applied, and/or in seemingly unrelated parts of the body (referred pain). Treatment focuses on relieving pain and getting tight fascia and muscle fibers to relax. Some people are able to achieve this with exercise, yoga, or meditation alone if they have a deep connection to their bodily awareness, but often the most effective way to help is through receiving massage and bodywork from a knowledgeable therapist.
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