Anne returns from a 3 day workshop all about walking the lines!
If you have had any massage sessions with me you may have heard me talking a lot about how we are connected from the bottom of the foot to the top of the head. Well its true, we literally are. And in different lines throughout the body, some superficial, some deep. These lines of myofascia should be nice and elastic, ready to assist us in moving efficiently. As we age though and potentially through certain movement patterns, maybe continuously in one plane (think running) or in different planes but maybe always to one side (think golf swing), we can develop certain areas of tension in the fascial tissue, anywhere along the lines. These areas of tension can cause less efficient movement patterns and therefore more need to utilize muscular effort. There is also potentially a lack of ability to engage certain muscles due to a lack of ‘pre tension’ in the tissue. Maybe this takes some pressure off of the poor gluteal muscles that always get blamed for a weakness! It could be that the glut’s are not being engaged because some of the connecting tissue is not pre tensioned enough to be engaged!
So in a nutshell, we could be setting ourselves up for injury, or a whole load of potentially wasted time trying to strengthen a particular muscle that isn’t ‘firing’ during a movement because certain tissues need to be lengthened first and or simply just not moving as efficiently as we could be! Is it not worth paying some attention to our tissues to help keep us elastic and ready to move?!
Working hands on into the tissues and with movement (and also training in a ballistic way – but thats another blog sometime) can help keep the tissues elastic. Who needs help with that?…..