Tom Myers – Fascia as a System of Biomechanical Auto-Regulation

‘Fascia’ has become a buzzword and for good reason. It's vital to understand the processes that impact our long-term flexibility and mobility and how we can share our movement happens to facilitate fascial health.

You are about 70 trillion cells, all humming in relative harmony; fascia is the 3-D spider web of fibrous, gluey, and wet proteins that hold them all together in their proper placement. Fascia is the biological fabric that holds us together.

How fascia works as a whole – our biomechanical regulatory system – is highly complex and understudied. Understanding the functions of fascia is essential to the dance between stability and movement – crucial in high performance, central in recovery from injury and disability, and ever-present in our daily life from our embryological beginnings to the last breath we take.

What is Biomechanical Auto-Regulation?

So let’s talk about ‘biomechanical auto-regulation,’ which is a concept bigger than ‘fascia’. How do we build, maintain, and adjust our bodies to meet the mechanical needs of gravity and the other forces that come in from the outside, as well as the forces we generate inside with our muscles? (And of course, it all has to work thermodynamically – to maintain temperature – and hydrodynamically – everything needs to be wet – as well.)

Compounding the problem – but also the key to its understanding – is that it all has to be built cell by cell. You are somewhere around 100 trillion cells somehow working together to produce the event called you. It’s a bleedin’ miracle.

Up until recently, we were satisfied with the ‘muscles attach to tendons that cross joints between bones to produce movement (or stop it), limited by the length and strength of the muscle, its attachments, the shapes of the bones, and the limiting ligaments’ – something like that was the working theory.

The Extra-Cellular Matrix

Adding the extra-cellular matrix to the mix certainly produced some interesting new insights, many of which have been shown in the Fascial Research Congresses since 2007. Like:

• Muscles attach to the muscles beside them via areolar ‘fuzz’ and intermuscular septa that transmit significant force and allow the body to be much more efficient than the ‘isolated muscle theory’ (origin – insertion – action) would predict. (Hiding et al)
• Muscles attach to and affect the tension in ligaments, allowing ligaments to stabilize joints at all angles of us. (Van der Wal)
• Hydraulic amplification is happening all over the body all the time.

And, of course, my favorite:

• Muscles transmit beyond their attachments via the fascial fabric to structures both proximal and distal. (Myers, Vleeming, Franklin-Miller, et al)

How Cells Help Help Us Function

But below this macro-level of organismic or regional biomechanics is the underlying question of how cells – which are of course the actual engines of life – assess and respond to mechanical forces. How are the cells you are sitting on avoiding rupture? How will they adapt to the new stress when you stand up? What’s the mechanical component of cancer (exciting new arena)? How do we repair a strain, a wound, or a break at the cellular level?

A lot is known, but much remains unknown, as this article admits at the beginning. What is known, and what is so exciting in this new world for both manual therapists and movement teachers, is that the cells are ‘listening’ intently to what’s going on around them on a mechanical level (as well as the chemistry around them of course) and responding in a variety of ways.

Cells need to be in their mechanical ‘happy place’ to function. Too crowded can produce cell suicide; too stretched can stimulate reproduction, and every cell has a ‘Goldilocks’ tension – different for different cells – where they function happily. Organismic movement and stretching – yoga, pilates, training, manual therapy – can help cells to their proper tension environment by relieving pressure or strain, and this results in better functioning all over. Why should yoga help digestive problems or some of my bodywork clients report increased regularity of their periods? This points the way.

The fascial net responds and distributes forces as a whole, not just locally, as this research from Franklyn-Miller pictured below demonstrates conclusively. They measured strain in various tissues while doing the straight leg lift test, commonly thought to measure hamstring resistance to hip flexion. To everyone’s surprise, you can see how the strain distributes itself through the myofascial net – nearly two and a half times as much strain in the ITT and even a quarter as much strain in the plantar fascia (without adding any dorsiflexion at all).  The distribution tracks the Superficial Back Line, the Spiral Line, and the Back Functional Line.

This whole argument is not meant to denigrate the role of the muscles or the nerves – it is the neuro myofascial web acting as a whole that serves us from second to second in gravity and the other forces surrounding and affecting us. A structure without function is a corpse.  But function without structure is a ghost.

It is now abundantly clear that fascia is part of the whole picture and a part less studied than muscle or nerve; therefore there is need to include it to get the complete picture. ‘Individual muscles acting on bones across joints’ simply does not adequately explain human stability and movement. Once examined, the second element of fascial study becomes evident: fascia responds systemically as well as locally, and to understand this systemic response at its most basic level, we need to understand the geometry of tensegrity as applied to the body.