MATT LISTER
Fitness in focus
“The fascia is basically a glorified body stocking holding flesh in place”
We know a lot about our muscular system and body composition, with regards to bones, muscles, ligaments and tendons. But one key component that sometimes gets a little overlooked is our fascia. Until now...
The fascia is basically a glorified body stocking that sits just underneath your skin. It’s a web- like structured tissue that coats all our muscles, nerves and organs. To help you understand it a little clearer, imagine an orange. You peel the skin back, and underneath there is a clear membrane that surrounds each segment, holding the flesh and pulp in place. That’s like our fascia, holding our muscles in place under our skin.
Just like a body stocking, your fascia can wrinkle, stretch out or bunch up in places. Occasionally, it gets damaged which, of course, causes pain, not only at the time but even after you’ve recovered. This is because when it gets damaged, it repairs itself by forming scar tissue.
Those scar- tissue fibres form a criss- cross pattern, whereas healthy fascia fibres all follow one direction along the muscle. So sometimes it needs a little help to realign the fibres and stop them from causing discomfort. The good news is that your fascia is relatively easy to maintain, and you’ve probably been doing a great job of it up until now. But if you want to step up your game, it’s pretty simple.
You will probably have seen someone taking care of their fascia right in front of your eyes and you ( and perhaps even they) didn’t even know it!
If you’ve ever used a foam roller, a Theragun, or the less common and dreaded scraping therapy ( it works a treat but is excruciating), you’ve been taking care of your fascia.
The easiest of these to use is the foam roller: get your weight over the roller as balanced as possible, always roll slowly, and whenever you hit a tender point, focus on it by rolling back and forth until the tenderness eases. It may take some serious brain power to work out a position to get into to roll a specific area, but in the long run it’s going to help reduce your recovery time from the wear and tear of general training.