Stretching Revisited

Chapter 1

Function of Fascia

Okay. I'm very happy to be back at Pilatos anytime. And this time my topic is stretching revisited from a festival perspective and are prepared lots of new information from based on recent years of international research. And I hope at the end of this lecture you go out with new stimulatory questions and also perspectives of what you may be looking for when you're stretching. So I'll start with first to look at the function of Fascia and also very briefly why it had been neglected and not in complimentary medicine but in classical school medicine. And part of it you see on this picture here is because it didn't look aesthetically pleasing in their wrestling approach, body donor oriented formerly and fixated anatomy classes, the Fascia changes its color and their medical students, when they cut away the Fascia in order to see something, it takes them hours to get rid of this seemingly structureless and colorless and gluey tissue. And once it's off, then you'll see some elegant, very nice muscles in organs.

So that has been the disadvantage of our approach invest in medicine and everybody thought it has about the same importance as the wrapping of a Christmas present house compared with the content of the real present. So every organ has a federal wrapping the liver, every muscle, but people had had been throwing it away. So in the dissection clauses there have been throwing the superficial Fascia, for example, the subcode Dana's connective tissue into these temporary raised baskets. They were not really thrown away, but they were considered to be more or less just to rapping Oregon. Of course in complimentary medicine, there are some smart people already long ago who knew better but [inaudible] medicine. Another reason why it had been neglected is it could not be measured very exactly with quantitative tools.

You can touch it as a manual therapist. You can feel it in your body that if you stretch the right arm, there is more restrictions down there. Then the left one, but how do you quantify that with exact measuring tools, the ultrasound for example, that would be a really nice tool for examining in real time how your muscles are moving. Had not been refined enough to measure any significant differences in a fashional membrane, whether it's 30% fico or not. Even the fashion membrane is only one thick and it increases on your right leg to 1.2 millimeters. Nobody, you could feel it, but nowhere nobody could measure it. So classical medicine lost interest in something that you can only subjectively measure with your hand from the inside but not objectively measure.

And that has changed in the last few years only. And that is basically the reason why you read more and more about Fascia, not because the tissue is new, but because of Western medicine who loves to have objective or so-called objective measurements has now been able to measure Fascia. And that carbonated or it started at the 2007 Fascia Research Congress held at the grounds of Harvard Medical School, which was very successful. And there was also a two page article in the high ranking science journal about this congress very positively, but also about the creation of a new interdisciplinary field, which is now called Fascia research. And there has been an avalanche of many new studies as you see here in the last few years and that has influenced many different fields.

And I have the privilege to have been there early on in this fashion movement if you want to call them college. And I see my role as a translator, as a mediator. I know most of the laboratories in fashion research, they are not that many yet, so it's maybe two dozen of them and, but I come basically myself from a complimentary medicine background. So I will emphasize in the following minutes on translating laboratories that old culture studies animal studies even into how they may apply to our p Lardis practice yoga practice, morning stretch practice. So that, so that is actually quite some fun for me. What I like about the fashion research field today is that it is organized like almost multidirectional horizontal network.

It doesn't have yet an established hierarchy. There is no clear lineage who determines what is correct and whom you should ask for permission before you start teaching. So it's not organized layer Lygo religious cold or like the military or like a martial art risk three stipes and forced vibes and you have to re or work your way up. It is very inspiring network that has not always been that way in the last centuries. There are clinical pioneers. They knew a lot about fashion. For example, one of my emotion teachers as a manual therapist, a doctor, Ida Ralf, she knew a lot about Fascia. However, she hardly gave us her references and that was not so common at that time.

But when she died, Tom Findlay, a good friend of mine and me and several others, we looked at her library and they have resolved which book she had read and how far she had read them and she had been reading everything she could give you be getting our hands on. And a lot had been coming from Andrew Taylor, still the founder of osteopathy, but he never gave his references. So we cannot blame them because that was not the style in the last century. However, what I really like and that's also my invitation to you. You'll become a very good, if you want to advance in this field, it works very well to focus on becoming a good network. So you were form horizontal relationships.

I just learned this in a workshop. Are you interested in my material? Can you tell me what you learned in the next workshop or the book that you're reading or whatever inspirations we have, and this is the current field. I only mentioned some examples here. People say I'm standing on the shoulders of the of them, but that is actually more like a ballgame. Helen large around one of the leading researchers now at Harvard Medical School, the school she is exchanging information risk color Stecco in part of our university risk, Tom Findlay with chocolate [inaudible] and many other names. And so this is an inspiring field and every year new information is coming out of that field, which will also influence this session on how we look at stretching.

There have been some very new information, not from one guru, but from the interaction among the different Fascia oriented researchers that you have. They're doing the Harvard Congress in 2007 one of their most influential figures there was don Ingber and he is a famous cell biologist and he managed to convince most of his colleagues, which is very difficult to do in science because they like to contradict each other that a single cell can only be understood as a 10 Segretti structure and a tens equity structure in architecture is made out of two different materials, some compression resistant struts, which are never in direct contact with each other. So that is one of the divination that the compression members are totally isolated and they do not pass a compression directly to each other. And the other material are the tension members and they are all interconnected. So if you pull on one string, all the other strings will be affected by two different degrees.

And it's not only rubber bands that you have here, you also can have, and that looks much more likely human body elastic membranes, for example, the lumber doors and Fascia or the Latissimus tendon sheet where your arms are connected with the sacrum, Misha Iliac crest, et cetera. And that he managed to convince his colleague that a single cell can only be understood in terms of biomechanical properties based on the 10 Tegrity model. Of course he suggested and many of our us are now using that as a vision that a healthy, useful risk, th useful. So, so not an old body but a young healthy body whereas lots of Bouncy I city has tens equity like properties and that has been a very inspiring model in the India old thing. And then of course the question is what could be the body wide system of tension, tension nodal loaded members that you have there. And then of course you come to Fascia and you look at Fascia as a body wide tension distributing network rather than one band here and another band here.

So that was very important and it's important for us now when we now look at the modern suggestions for the terminology of Fascia, which tissues you want to include. When you look at the fashion net in classical anatomy, the term Fascia has been used only for garage. She'd like dense fibrous collagenous connective tissues and not for loose connective tissue. At least there has been a big un-clarity whether the subcutaneous connective tissue that has a lot of fat is proper Fascia or whether it is just connective tissue and in classical anatomy you have several pieces of Fascia. You have an it band, you have a fresh air crews and you'll have for example a lumber dorsal fascia and the anatomy books are trying to say where one starts and the other one continues. However, based on their integrity system we are looking more for terminology that allows us to see the bone suspended in a body wide attention distributing network and based on that terminology renounced suggested a second term.

If you want to talk with medical anatomists, it works better in terms of conversation to use their fascia terminology and say, okay, then I talk about collection as connective tissues. However, when you want to describe with patients and with colleagues how are the forced transmission is going from the right elbow to the left hip. If you want to look at Fascia as a sensory organ and then we recommend that you include the subcutaneous connective tissue, you include the Latissimus aponeurosis. Although it is not multidirectional, it is unidirectional. It is like a tendon and you will do the same thing Risley, a killers aponeurosis halfway up here and you would not be in problems. Then you'll need to decide where does the Achilleas tendon start and where is isn't a killer's upper neurosis and Raya, is it the Epimysium, the fashional envelope around the calf because it's all one continuous, fibrous collagenous tension distributing system that we now call their fashional net.

So for this course and for communication with the patients and with most of your colleagues, I recommend to include tendons to include joint capsules to include you include the visceral connective tissue are not only the minium muscular connective tissue because they are intimately linked and also the interim muscular connective tissue. Every little muscle fiber has a various in professional envelope that is paper thin. So you wouldn't be able to cut it with a scalpel because it's too close. And in classical anatomy, the very tiny pockets, you cannot cut it as you open eyes so they are not proper fresher. They are intramuscular connective tissue. But if you want to understand Fascia as a sensory organ, if you want to be inspired by where you could feel a stretch, then I recommend that you include all the tissues that are normal person, not a medical doctor.

A means when they talk about connective tissue. So the Plantar Fascia is of course part of the fashion net. No matter whether you call it plan to up or no roses, a tendon sheet missing muscles inserting or plantar ligament or Plantar Fascia. They are all part ligaments. Tendons, torn capsules are all part of a body wide fashion network. So this is the latest recommendation from the nomenclature committee and I was very much relieved. I was part of this nomenclature committee.

You will see some familiar faces here to my ours on the ride and re flaming color stucco in the in the Middle [inaudible] Navarro and we had very different opinions. Rich tissue is should be included in the term Fascia. But we came to this all phase two, all orientation recommendation and anatomical definition with proper fresher and a wider more functional definition about the fessionals system or the fashion net. And for stretching, I highly recommend to use the second one. But if you want to do debate with a medical doctor, just say, okay, proper Fascia is the very, how you call it. And I talk about the festival net and that includes other fibrous collagenous connective tissues. So having said that,

Chapter 2

How the Fascial Net Responds to Mechanical Loading

now we can look how the fashion net responds to mechanical loading. This is what we are doing in stretching.

We are not stimulating the Fascia with temperature lamps, all this chemical injections, we are doing it with mechanical stimulation, mostly with elongating stretch there. And this is now a famous picture where you see how the architecture on the left in a healthy connective tissue around the joint has a clear one directional line of the major collagen fibers from the upper left to the lower right. And it has a secondary orientation from the upper right. The lower left. If you immobilize the joint, that means you don't move it very much over several weeks. So if you have not been changing your right hip joint in the last three minutes, that is not killing you and the architecture will not respond.

However, if you leave your right hip joint for several weeks in a cast, actually here it was made on a cast underneath, you'll see that the connective tissue gets into our prolific, into a, um, growing irregular, chaotic growing care geometry by non usage. And so this is what happens when you don't use the body in it's nature made angular directions that you use the proper geometry and therefore you also get stiff. So that would be one reason to do stretching regularly that you don't change a regular reb like architecture into an architecture where it's a chaotic and where there is no more regular geometry included in it. This is one of the best researchers that have been done in classical, uh, in invest on an atomy research, looking at the lumber Fascia as a possible generator of low back pain. And I'm very glad that I got the uh, video slides here.

This is how ultrasound may actually become important in a few years for some of us, Pilatos teachers, physiotherapists, et Cetera. I know you work with your hands with your own eyes and with your own art and you don't like to join the medical doctors in having high tech and low touch qualities. But ultrasound may become interesting for us because it becomes very handy also. And here on the left picture, let me go back here. You'll see when the client lies on their belly.

As you see here on the table and their legs and the pelvis are slowly dropping into a 15 degrees position from the Hinch joined in the middle. It induces a lumber flection of 15 degrees and during that time you'll read your Cape with ultrasound. What happens versus the Lumbar Artel Fascia. Here in white you see two layers that is very interesting and underneath you have the erector speed air muscle and you'll see they don't move completely together. There is a sheer motion mobility in between them.

That would be like me going forward and my shirt sliding over my muscles and our knees. However, in chronic low back pain patient, let's see, doing the same movement it is as if my hand, as a facial membrane is glued is stuck to the muscles underneath. So what you can conclude from that some if you're treating a patient, including yourself. Sometimes if you have chronic lower back pain, uh, you can pretty much assume that the Fascia is glued more at healing. Lee together this, the muscles are Nani's and that could have many different uh, um, developmental concepts. It could be that you had injured the Lumbar Fascia and due to the scarring it glues together with wrist and neighboring tissues. Underneath is of course then you need to act with that.

It could be also that the low back pain comes from another tone for set Choi and little ligament or something like that or from the disc sometimes, but that's only 15 or 20% of the cases of low back pain. We know that the discs are the costs and that then due to the lack of movement, the lumber Fascia glues together just like we saw before in in the photographs I showed you. However, for us it is important. If you have chronic low back pain, you are Fascia is more at heel and lead together. It's glued together, it's stuck. It sounds better to say you have an increased adherence here and you can measure that. Now ultrasound, if you have these, this increased adherence, I think you need to work with it even if that is not the cause of the pain, even if it is only the consequence of their pain and have the fear of movement and the lack of movement because then proprioception will be diminished. If you have a Ruffini ending between the lumbar Dorsal Fascia and the muscle or between the first layer and the second layer of the lumber doors and fashion and they always moved together, you will never feel a movement, no matter how much you bend forward and you pull the teacher will art will ask you, do you notice that you are making a lot dozers and you're say, no, I'm not doing a low doses. And they have to give you a mirror to convince you because you're not able to feel it from the inside.

And it may be not your to critical stupidness. It may be that the cortex is highly sensitive but that the mechanical receptors are not getting any relative movement there. So that would be a good reason to adore stretching as a shearing motion in which the Fascia morphs in relationship to the muscles underneath. But also you can see it here in which the first layer of the lumber door for Fascia, which is linked to the Latissimus Dorsi and to the Gluteus maximus in which they are moving in relationship to their second layer, which is more linked to the hamstrings and towards the Fascia and all. Hey, so if your separate these different movements, you are expecting to get two more from here to there because you're starting to move there in relationship to each other. So that is of course our very inspiring concept now so that we are not only looking for muscles but for fashion membranes and what happens to them.

And then of course you do the stretching very different. You are not stretching like many people have been doing it here you see on the left one here in a jogging for example, you have specific stretches, a stretch for, let me show it. It would be with a straight knee. That would be a stretch for their gastrocnemius because it attaches above the knee and then you do it with a bent knee and then you'll have the, so Leo's and then you go through the whole body and then you'll say, I have stretched everything. However that is an illusion because you will have ignored the multi joint myofacial chains that you only get into end range if your stretch the leg end the head at the same time. Cell phone muscles stretching of course isolate the to stretches are often perfect if you want to stretch the Fattal membranes that we just looked at, those that tend to be adherently connected, glued together in chronic low back pain for example.

It makes more sense to a dual malty joined angular stretches and that's what you will see in Yoga for example. So the yoga stretch show in a year is more a fashion oriented stretch. Then the Chaga stretch or is only doing the quadriceps but not the connection of the quadriceps into the trunk and into other directions. Also, if you do stretches from a fashion perspective, you're not looking for the exact angle where you see rail. Should the arm be at this stretch.

You are varying a little bit more super in Asian pro nation because the Fascia are usually not narrow stripes. They are broad, she'd like membranes and if your shirt is glued together, you'll want to do one stretch where you get the right side of the shirt and the next stretch you'll get the middle or the other left side of the shirt and then you have a higher chance of having your shirt free there. So that of course makes a lot of sense and I need to all bow down. I think everybody in the Pilatos in the yoga, in the exercise community, also in manual therapy for the huge contribution from my Rafa colleague Kamaz Myers because he has been very influential in getting everything I said so far into their society and he has been over a very, very big mission knows I had the big luck to be around when he developed his system of what he calls anatomy trains, which is one of several systems of myo federal chains and he was inspired for example, by the double spiral concept from there, Australian anthropologist, Raymond doubt, who already described that in Homosapians, not in chimpanzees, not in gorillas. It's your two homosapians. We have a lot of diagonal slings, probably four hour walking and running and then we have now in in our closest monkey relatives, it's not very common to see fibers crossing the midline in the back or in the front, but we have a lot of them. So Raymond are focused on them. And he developed this spiral concept that he called the double spiral concept.

And Thomas liked it very much in Raymond Dart, the spiral went from the right earlier crust all the way up to the left chest oblique was internals or bleak goes externals. So raters, and here you are here very convincing. How are they interdigitate and then the two Raiders, and here you're stops at the medial edge of the scapula. And that is very impressive that you go from here to the medial edge of the capita scapula. However Tamayo set, maybe we can go from, we can take the train even further. And that was a game he developed in robbing anatomy classes and I enjoyed it very much. So he said, can anybody take the train further? And yes, if you think about it, if you tie the medial edge of the Scapula, you can continue over rhomboids in the same direction.

And why stop where the Rhomboids are stopping. You can continue with the splenius capitis and then you end up at the right ear and you started here. And that is of course a very regular Stifel and this aesthetical appeal there has been very, very convincing to us. However, he never was able to do quantitative assessment. He was able to show the continuity by a skilled cadaver dissection. But anybody who has been doing cadaver anatomy classes, which are highly recommend, you know, if you are able to cut something out, it doesn't mean that it isn't important. Fost transmission, it only tells you how skilled the dissector is. So similar, like a good sculptor can sculpt a beautiful woman out of a tree and another person can sculptor dirty animal out of it.

And it doesn't mean it's been in the tree more convincingly than the other. It says something more about the sculptor. So it was a very nice indication that these fost transmission lines could exist, but not that they do exist in terms of passive forced transmission. And he waited for many years for people who have the assessment skills. And that happened now in the last few years and a, this is a very nice and I think important contribution that we can now include in our stretching applications.

A young Volcker from the University of Frankfurt. He has done cadaver studies and also done a systematic review of existing Hidalgo studies in terms of passive force transmission. So if you're poor on a federal sheet in this corner, in this direction with that much force and you put a hundred needles into the sheet, how much deviation do you have on the left shoulder? How much do you have on the right shoulder? Your girl says it's goes to IREG or no, and he is very famous and very convincing and bases his knowledge on 2000 years of Chinese medicine. However, your female guru is a dancer and she's much more at home in our body and she's also a much more convincing person and you therefore have every reason to follow her. But she says it goes to the other shoulder and, and welcome tool, contemporary physical movements. Happy.

So you, and then everybody does an exercise and if you are skilled as a teacher, you will invent an exercise where everybody feels it goes to the left shoulder and then they say, my guru is right. Yeah. And he is more right than the other guru. However, that is not satisfying in the long term. So we have all been looking forward for the day in which we have the tools to examine it with our guru, believe et cetera. And this is now happening and Tom Myers is very excited about it. Come Findlay.

Many other people are saying now you have waited 2030 years for that. The good news is that from the six myofascially or anatomy trains from two miles, um, uh, six have been evaluated so far, the others will follow in the next one or two years. As far as I heard from Dr. Young Wilker and three of them have a very high convincing evidence. And for us the superficial back line up here has the highest clinical relevance and the highest evidence. So when you are on the Plantar Fascia, it has a direct force transmission over the heel pad. If the heel pad is mobile in relationship to the cocaine years rears the gastrocnemius and the Loping Fascia, it interdigitates with the hamstrings and one of the hamstrings.

So long. Head of the bias biceps does not attach where you learned it. The issue old tuberosity on the, my doesn't want to do it, but 30% of the fibers continue into the sacred tuberose ligament, which is the second layer of the lumber doth and Fascia and there you go all the way up to the fashion new her and to the Garley up or no Radhika. So you should not be surprised that people who have a tension headache, not migraine, but tension headache, particularly if it comes from the bag and it's not on one side only in some cases, not in all cases. They can get a relief by hamstring stretching all by Plantar Fascia treatment.

So this is really nice and there is a lot of evidence regarding the superficial back line. Also, the other tool lines shown here, the functional bag line and the functional front line. There is lots of evidence on it. Interesting enough, the superficial frond line that plays a big role in yoga doesn't have sufficient anatomical evidence in terms of passive foster and submission. It may still play a role in terms of cottage [inaudible] association of neuromuscular toners. And that's sometimes useful to know. For example, if you'll turn your eyes to the right and to the left, there will be a tonus change in the short neck muscles here. And that is not because they are fascially glued together.

There is no direct fashion connection from inside of the eyeball to all the way half, half way around the skull to the back. But because their cottage call ordination in the somato model called eggs is in a positive way glued together with us. So if you know that of course you've worked grade different with these and so this is also something if you want to use stretching in order to unglue tissues that are glued together, it makes sense to focus on the myofascial trains or anatomy trains that do have a lot of new anatomical evidence. And then the superficial back line is a must. I have to include that. One of my many personal heroes is a rolfer colleague, Dr Ferlando Bertolucci and he spent several years in his life.

I love it. I would have liked to do that too. Who to to observe any models, how are they stretch in their natural environment, but also to study all the literature, what is known about instinctive stretching in animals who live in nature and not in a human cage. And He published that in the Journal of body Rog and movement therapy. It's called Penny culation. The way how animals stretch and what he showed is there are many different animals who stretch. For example, a cow stretches regularly but not very often. So it stretches maybe two dozen times during the day, not very much often and average dark stretches much more often then a cow does and you'll get it. Katz and cared like animals stretch much, much more than all other animals.

And the question is why do cats need, if you want to interpret it that it's there, the stretching more than a cow does. Probably. It is meant for better movement orchestration. It needs a very elegant movement and it needs to be very fast. And if he jumps down a table, you don't hear a sound. If a dog jumps down from the same table with the same body weight, it's less elegant. You can hear that.

So maybe if you want to be an elegant mover and now you're listening, you may want to learn how our animals stretch. Now you can look at the neighbor on your right. How often did they move in the last 20 minutes? As often as the cowl or as often as the doc. Don't let them know and look at the neighbor on the left.

Are they more like a dog like a and then look at the person in between. How often have you been stretching in the last 15 or 20 minutes? Are you a cat stretcher? Are you a dog stretcher? Are you cow stretcher? So that is very interesting. So we can learn something from them.

What he figured out in reported in that article is that the way how animals stretch is very, very interesting. They do it usually at the transition between rest and expected activity. Much rare on the opposite before going to sleep. It is much more rare. But when they wake up after long sleep and they get hungry before hunting, they are stretching and they very often combine it with yawning.

So yawning particularly in predators seems to be also a mio fashional hygiene. So that was his interpretation. Pendulation instinctive pendulation in animals is a myofacial hygiene. You prevent the Fascia from starting to glue. Uh, you connect the director in your motor coordination with all the instruments similar like an orchestra before you play your tune, every little player you are there a little bit more, more, more. Are you already okay, now we can go hunting. So that is his, his interpretation behind the pentacle lading and the way how animals stretch.

When you observe them, you get a sense they do it not with the textbook in mind, but they do it with searching sense for hate, only pleasure. And when they find an angle that excites and opens and expands a bigger source, so body surface. So they rarely do this, but they are doing like this here. That seems to give them more fun. We cannot ask them, but looking out of how often they repeat a movement that had a bigger area of expansion, that seems to be a an appealing interpretation of the way how, how, how they are stretching.

Chapter 3

Un-Use Arc Theory

Another animal study has been looking at the way how chimpanzees move and that was a important discovery of New Zealand and apologists who observed that chimpanzees but also our other relatives, orangutans and gorillas, they are not so much prone to try and degeneration to osteoblasts, roses and Rheumatory Oz riders when they get old. As we do most of us, we hope to get over 90 years old.

We have fairly good, but if we have a high likelihood of then having one or maybe two artificial hips there, I may say that's due to aging. However, if you look at our closers [inaudible] in nature, they are seem to be immunized. They are less prone for these joint degenerations then we are, except when they live in a non natural environment. When they live in a jungle now in a suit, in a developmental country that doesn't give them what they're, the descriptions or requirements are. How many toys they need, how many square meters say need. So when they are in a non suitable environment for their movement requirements, then they develop human like joint you generations when they get old and you know every animal has certain breeding conditions. If you have chicken, you need to give them as many, not toys but food and square meters. The same thing for dolphins or for whatever.

And we don't have required, we have requirements for the monkeys and if they get these requirements, these conditions, they are not prone for joint degeneration when they get old. And, but we don't have these conditions for our children. How many square meters should we have? How many toys should we have? So his suspicion suspicion was maybe we develop these Chindia generations because we live in a non species appropriate environment. And if we would live in a species appropriate environment in reddish, we can swing and balance, et cetera.

We would be as healthy when we age as our monkey brothers and sisters are they advice are wild hypothesis. So he examined atlas tool camera teams. They followed the chimpanzees, how they move in their natural habitat in the jungle and they videotaped then do they loaded the shoulder joint at this angle of when do they loaded at this angle it was how much body raid and they cut a cuddle graph that for every joint. So what is the range of motion in a three dimensional fear of the hip joint. And for a normal monkey you'll have the full range of motion. They often use it in this position, however, they also use it in many, many different positions and they found out in those childs in which we, when you have in here also analyzed us.

How does a normal sedentary person from homosapiens move their hip joint? How do they move their elbow joint? Those shines that we load as much as a monkey does in terms of range of motion. We stay like Helsey for example in the elbow joint it is very rare to develop osteoarthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis, ask osteoarthrosis in the elbow Choi and however, in those times in which we only use a small fraction of the available nature given range of motion, we are very, very pro and so the more monkey likely move, the more monkey healthy we stay. And the more a fraction of the available motion views, the more prone we are for Homeo sapiens specific degeneration.

So it means a big percentage, probably not all of it of these with age increasing the you're trying to generation are not rare in care. It's not using it in many available angles set you have there. So sitting, I'm, I think this is terrific, I'm thinking we should do that also in our classrooms here because you are using your hip shines in a very different angle. You'll use your right hip, joint, innovative and Ray, then you're left and probably in a few minutes you will be changing over and you are using the hamstrings in the long position and you may find yourself squatting during a normal day and that's not what you have in a modern sedentary car monitor, chair driven environment. So that is of course a big stimulation. It's not ultimately proving proven, but there are many indications in that direction. For example, the hip ass roses does not start at the loaded middle.

It starts at the unused borders of the hip joint. There are the biochemistry changes and then it creeps into the yield sones tool. So that is the unused arc to Uri. And then you have to ask yourself, you know, how can I move more monkey? Like how can I introduce monkey gymnastics into my everyday life and yoga and politesse. I called him monkey gymnastics, but, but I do the hypers all the envy I have because in my academic life I have restricted movement in my hip China and I need to do something to balance it because hitting on the desk, my shoulders are not getting used in the hanging there, in scrolling there, et cetera. So stretching could be a very good monkey gymnastics and throw in stretching.

You look, there is an angle that I haven't used since four or five days and led me untangle the Fascia that has started to blow during the last few days or the last few weeks. So that is of course a very nice concept. So then your stretch, you look for corners or there is a corner that I have are normally are all us move around it, but here I can get into this corner. So you become a discoverer in this body wide network for hidden corners that have been surviving without being included in daily stretches. And now I have the pleasure to report you some very new research coming from color. STUCCO's laboratory are part of our university and shoe. She is looking which cells in which connective tissue cells could be related to their production and their concentration of high, your low role.

Now that is a noon versatile repeated again. So I have it better high your low roll noun because it used to be called hyaluronic acid. Every cosmetician knows what that is. It's supposed to get the wrinkles out, but it is not an acid. So we should use the proper name Hyaluronan since a few years and that is a very important element in the ground substance. It is the most water binding element in the ground substance and in many situations it is a lubricant.

So how stuck your Fattal membranes are when they lie next to each other is influenced by how much lubrication you have there. And she discovered we have particular cells and she called them flush our sides and you'll see them here they are round connective tissue cells. Normal fibroblasts. Connective tissue cells are spindle shaped and they are primarily but not exclusively specialized far collagen production for four fiber production. However, these round cells seem to be specialized on lubricant production and they are situated in dense connective tissue on the borders.

You'll see them there, the upper three on the bottle, tall, loose connective tissue. So the Pinkley are here and they seem to be able to put yours within a few seconds or minutes. Lubrication when you do a shearing stretching motion that is causing friction. So whenever you have friction, the body pod users are lubricant for that if you will. Never cause friction. They're there, they will not cause lubrication there.

So that of course is now an intriguing question. So when I do stretching also as a manual therapist, maybe I squeeze, it's not that you squeeze, but you stimulate these round cells to actively express, not past flea express the lubricant into their connective tissue and then your client can move like a cat because they have gotten that lubrication in there. So that has not been proven. But they are increasing indications that rears a rolfing like manual therapies, rogue vis a foam roller treatment with an active stretch that these cells may be stimulated to port use within a few seconds more of their hyaluronic acid lubrication that you're in there and afterwards you feel more, more elegant in your body and you have less restrictions in there. And now she wanted to know how is the Hyla Ronan concentration in different Fascia of the body. Would you have had any guests on that?

Whether they are Fascia or they'd have more hyaluronic acid, Hyla la noun. Then as eh, I wouldn't have had their guests and I would have guessed it's probably the same everywhere. The body tries to maintain homeostasis. Maybe there are variations so that some Fascia have 10% more, others have 20% less, but hold your breath. What she found out is there are differences in the order of magnitude of one to 10 times more. So for example, the Epi Muzzio Fascia, meaning the fatal envelope around a muscle of the trapezius and the deltoid has very little higher Ronan. And if you compare it with the retin now column of the wrist, unfortunately she only did the wrist not yet at the ankle, but everybody thinks they are probably similar.

It has 10 times more here at the right inoculum in the same collage as connective tissue as opposed to this tissue here 10 times more, not just 10% more. So that is very dramatic question is what could be the driving factor and what is the purpose of having more [inaudible] and you'll get an indication by also looking at these two tissues that are almost halfway in between and that is the Fascia Lata at the iliotibial tract and the rectus sheet here in the belly and they are somewhere in between. And if you ask yourself what is the difference between these three different Fascia, most likely, and that is their suggestion, it is how much sheer motion do they have during a normal week? Add direct inoculum. This is probably the fashionable architecture in the body where you have the biggest sheer motion of neighboring tissues.

So the attendance and you do that several times during the day. If you would put your wrist in a cast, maybe you would not have so much Hyler rowing on, but in a normal movement, if your ci are somebody you are probably producing Hyaluronan so that you can maintain a one inch forward and backwards sliding shearing motion in that area and you have the least sliding off the epimysium fashion envelopes. If you ever trying to peel the meat in a chicken and you have the milky white fashional membrane, the epimysium that is very difficult to separate from the right muscles underneath. So it means they are very adherently connected. So their interpretation, their suggestion is those tissues that are exposed to a lot of shearing motion sliding, you can say they develop more hyaluronan music. So if that's the case, then when we are doing stretching, we are creating lubrication.

So you may develop in a frozen shoulder, you should ask yourself, how can I get some lubrication into the shoulder joint during a normal day if you will hug somebody this way and then you type this way. That is not much range of motion. However, if you're throwing your arm all the way up, you will have almost as much hearing motion as you have in the red knuckles. So it's not clinically proven, but this is a very intriguing concept. When we put in shearing, stretching motions, we may be stimulating these fascia sites that the new term not Stecco sites. I would have suggested that, but she didn't want that.

The fascia sites are particularly newly discovered. You don't find them to standard textbooks yet except for color stay cause history, making a new atlas of the functional federal system there. She has that in. I highly recommend that adipose, it's really a contribution to this story. Your fashion and anatomy and there you can get a read. Actually some of the information I'm sharing you, she is definitely one of my many heroes in this field so this will be continued to be an intriguing field. You know, how do we stimulate higher Ronan because you also know Hyaluronan makes the skin more young looking and also it has an antiinflammatory and a pain killing effected last much longer than anybody expected when you inject it after surgery or in rheumatory arthritis and nobody really understands it because after five, six weeks they're foreign injected.

Hyaluronan should be broken down by the body and there should be no more effect, but the effect lasts twice as long. So apparently the body gets stimulated to say I make my own rolling on if I don't get it anymore from the outside. And that is contradictory to my expectations. Usually if you give the body to something that a healthy body should produce themself, it doesn't get better. But in this case it seems to have a positive effect.

So stretching maybe the production of lubrication, there is a newer field, I don't go too much into that, but stay tuned to it. Colorstay course brother Antonio Stecco, he is focusing on different binding states of Hyaluronan and Ronan in an acidic condition. And when it's old it can form super large molecules that are the opposite of a lubrication, right, becomes a sticky glue. And now they are finding out what kind of pressure, what kind of shearing motion is best to break down their gluey Hyaluronan into the lubricant one. And that seems to be quite easy and quite possible. So, but that's a new field that I have a little watch out in the future. So as so far I looked at stretching from more biomechanical properties, but there is now new information coming.

It may be related to inflammation and that you may be recommending for yourself or for your clients to explore stretching, not only in order to get mechanically more flexible or maybe mentally more flexible, so for flexibility, but in order to help you to complete, to heal a chronic inflammation that you may have after surgery in your body, et cetera. And advice done by Helen law shiver at the OSHA Institute. She created an inflammation in the superficial connective tissue by injection of an inflammatory substance. And then some of the rads, she trained them to perform 10 minutes of you in your Gar, like static stretching and you need to train them to condition them to do that. And when you lift them by the tail, and I know I can guarantee you the tail is not painful for them when you're pulling them because it's very adherently connected to the spinus processes. So you lift them by the tail and when they get something to reach at the same time, there's our fraud feed there for our, for our front limps. They go spontaneously in a stretch first for a couple of minutes or seconds.

And the next day you can do it half a minute and after a few weeks you can do 10 minutes of stretching and they seem to like it. And then you can do yoga studies system and that's what she has been doing. So she compared how the rats that got the same injections, how the injection is healing when they do 10 minutes of Yoga icology in yoga probably in yoga is more than what she's doing. Yeah, sure. But, but very long duration stretching that they are having there. And she compounded with other rats who chest got petting for the same amount of 10 minutes because you could see it had a sedating influence, the stretching.

So maybe you, it's just a sedation and not the stretch. So that's why she needed to do this control group. And as you can see here, that static stretching had an antiinflammatory effect. They had less macro Farkes, they got out of pain much more easy. They are precious. Sensitivity was recovered much, much faster. So if I had a chronic swollen knee that inflames whenever I go jogging one minute too long. And you know many people who have that.

So since many months the inflammation has never really cooled down. I would try to survive 10 minutes of stretching per day for me, that's awkwardly long. But if you have a chronic inflammation that may be a reason to do it. So this is new, this is new so that it can have a this to a medic effect on the biochemistry and she now took it further to look at cancer development and I'm getting itchy when I hear that. I was hoping if I'm interested in Fascia, which I've been focusing in the last 10 years, uh, I have to deal and I'm happy to deal with this dancing children and the sports people and chaplains, rowers and dancers, but that I wouldn't have to deal with this oncology with as people being close to dying. But that may be the major application of fashionable manual and movement therapy in the future. Based on these new findings that I'm now sharing, they found out that of course cancer depends on what kind of cancer you have.

They are some breast cancer types that have a genetic code, which is very aggressive and your survival chances much lower. And there are other types. So there is the genetics place, one role. It's not the only role that it plays. However, they found that the stiffness of the connective tissue around it, the so-called Straumur plays a major effect on how rapidly the tumor grows and they've found out more, more and more about that. We knew that when the tumor grows, there is a hardened connective tissue capsule rounded. And I learned it and I told her too, my robbing students get your hands off because that is a protective covering.

It protects us from the cancer spreading and breaking out. So don't rock on a breast tumor, don't work on a tumor in, in the belly, et Cetera, because it protects us from the cancer. Now the interpretation is shifting and it seems that it protects the cancer against our immune system. It's protection in the other way around. And there is more and more understanding at a certain stage of tumor development. The tumor cells enslave the fibroblasts and say, I'm gonna pay you. You work for me now. Don't tell anybody.

You'll build me a strong costal around it so that the stem three resells who are cutting me down every day that they cannot reach me there. And these T3 cells, they have special types of many different types. They use the sin Collagen type three fibers. Their old name was reticulin fibers, but now they're called college and they use them as a road map. However, when the connective tissue becomes very dense and you only have college and type one fiber capsules, these cells cannot get there. So that role has been known. But the question was, can we do anything about it? Is Mechanical, can yoga stretch helpless to her?

I would be very careful to make that claim. I would probably say you study something else, you will be more safe because people will call you. If you are, say stretching, stretching, Hughes cancer, you don't need surgery, you don't need chemotherapy, come to my classes at cancer will be healed. You should be careful when you do that for obvious reasons because there's so many lives and so much involved around it. So Helen [inaudible], that same woman at Harvard medical school who had been doing the stretching study with chronic inflammation, she injected it or our team injected a very aggressive breast tumor into rads and she got one of the Rad groups to do the 10 minute per days stretching protocol as I described it and then she looked at the tumor progression there. It was published last year and she couldn't believe what she found because she found that the normal tumor progressions or how the size of the tumor gets larger from week to week. This is the black line in the non stretching rads.

Now the dotted line here and the stretching rads, it's reduced around Matika Lee. It's reduced by 52% and anybody who has experience in cancer research say that must be bogus because the best therapy, you said we have chemotherapy and radiation and a more naughty Keroppi, et cetera. They are happy if they have 18% improvement or 22% improvement and new you are very proud of, you have something like that because you'll save thousands of people's life and families, et cetera. Now if somebody comes in and says, I do yoga stretching and I get 50% improvement, you'll get off. It cannot be Celia. So she had the same thing. She said it must be an artifact. Maybe my assistant was cheating to make me happy or whatever.

So she repeated it many times and it was a robust effect. So she published it a few months ago in a high ranking journal. That's part of the nature group there and you've got a lot of attention now. And the big thing now is she got voted just a few months ago to become the director of from the National Institute of Health, the Department for complementary and integrative medicine, which is the world's largest institution in terms of complimentary alternative research. She has a yearly budget, not she herself, but the department that she can now give priorities for of of more than $140 million. I hundred $40 million, what can you do with that?

And she's the best person to take that sum of money and say where do we put it that it really makes a difference. And she used to be number one in terms of acupuncture research in North America, but she is now a fibroblasts connective tissue stretch researcher and you can understand why. So if you're interested in stretching and you think nobody will be asking for your services in the next few years, stay tuned. There may be a big demand and it will be not about being able to do the split. It will be in oncology, it will be in many other fields.

And in which we find out that this mechanical stimulation is having a big chemical effect in the whole connective tissue before we come to a practical exercise, let's look at their duration. Now we had 10 minutes being there, but she didn't compare it to this five minutes of his 20 minutes. There would be years of study in order to separate that and also add the magnitude of stretching and that has been done not with animals. I'm very happy about that because there's animals you should always ask is it really necessary and how can we diminish the number et cetera and how we can be learn from the experiments that are already done before. We repeat something unnecessarily but there is now a field rears, bio engineered tendons and I love it but it's very expensive.

So you'd take dead Collagen fibers from meat and there's a computer, you align them in parallels or it looks like an Achilles tendon but there are no living cells in it and you put this tendon or ligament in a cell culture or in a, in a petri dish, Russo, physiological liquid or containing glucose and many other nutrients. And then you take several fibroblasts out of the skin, nose somewhere and you say, please multiply and make this new your new home. And when the tendon has the right stiffness, so not too stiff but not too wobbly. They love to recite within their tendon and then they multiply and then you come on day 28 or something like that vison knife and you're injured the debt tendon you and there is no animal squeaking because there is no nervous system attached to it. So, so it's not animal torture. However, these cells, they are trained, they are made by nature to heal whenever in their environment there is something broken and then you can see how quickly do they close the wound. So after 48 hours, you can see the wound is already much smaller and then you'll can immediately after the injury you can do one controlled stretch and see does said influence the healing time, the wound healing time.

And you can vary between one minute of stretching, two minutes of stretching of five minutes. That's what they did. And this is very interesting here. So let me see there. So on the upper one, the gray one is how the wound was closing without stretch. So it's already almost half as much closed. However, then you stretch for one minute. It is already better in terms of wound closure.

But five minutes is much better than two or three minutes. So unfortunately they only did it up to five minutes. But within that range you can say the longer you stretch, the more potent they're healthy wound regulation activity of your own repair cells is that is important. Yeah, and then they looked at the magnitude of stretching, how strong should you stretch and you'll see that in the lower one here and there they did a 92nd stretch only you'll have to keep one constant and burned or alternate. The other one, if you want to separate the two different effects, and you'll see if you stretch this 12% you'll break the wound even larger than it is. I could have told them because collagen usually tales around 10% and then you will see that the smaller the stretch was the more potent the effect on the wound healing. So the smallest effect they had that they measured was 3% allegation and that was significantly more powerful then 5% percent or 9% delegation.

Now question, what? How much is 3% if you have a wound? I had a snowboard injury 20 years ago and I couldn't do roughing sessions, so I wanted to speed it up. Yeah, but I hadn't known about that research. So if I ever break something again, heaven forbid I go, not do so, but it may happen to a friend of mine or of our Chi accidental or whatever. Then I will do all five to 10 minutes of stretching and I will look for a 3% stretch. Now if you take your index finger and you let it hang and you lifted one or two centimeters, you only have the weight of the finger and whether you lifted one centimeter or one inch or two inch, the weight doesn't change very much. However, then you continue to lift it more.

There comes a point in which the resistance increases and that transitioned to the linear increase zone is at 3% so that is almost nothing. So if you had a broken index finger joint here and you want to speed up the healing, I would do this for five to 10 minutes per day and pray that it has an effect on it. Of course we cannot translate without a question mark from cell culture and from animals to humans, but it is quite likely. It's not certain that it will. There will be a similar dynamic in the human body and further research of causes needed. We'll go further there.

Chapter 4

Stretch Loading Fascial Elements

Now the question is which college and fibers, which festival elements are we reaching with different stretches that we have? Do we want to stretch the tendon? Do we want to stretch the fatal envelope around it? Do we want to stretch into our muscular connective tissue bags? We want to stretch everything. Sure.

Cause everything can become too adhered and too stiff. So we made a model to officially break it down. So this one would be the act in Myocin in the sarcomere, the contractile muscle fibers, that's the normal symbol and parallel toyed. You would have those elements of the Perry Museum and Endomysium Museum, the intramuscular connective tissue. They'd run parallel to them. Of course, many of them run in different angles, but they would respond at different times. Then you have perpendicular fibers that run perpendicular to the main origin insertion connection line and they would be stretched at different moments and then you will have the tendon at origin and the insertion of the muscle.

And finally you'll have their extra muscular connective tissue connecting one muscle belly versus a neighboring muscle belly of a neighboring muscle. And now we can look at what is happening at different activities. For example, you are doing your yoga stretching and next to you somebody is lifting barbells and maybe they are doing concentric contractions with right arm, left arm, takes it down, right arm. So they are all the shortening the biceps here. So the muscle will be shortening there. Would you call that stretching?

Is any of these four or five federal elements that I'm describing being stretched? Wait a second. So if you look at the muscle is contracting in, it's total lynx. Therefore the fibers who are parallel to the contracting fibers are not stretching. Of course, however, the circumferential fibers are being stretched definitely and very interesting. Also the attendance because the muscle is pulling on the tendon and the tendon has to yield by getting into a stretch. So somebody who is lifting weights is doing stretching. Oh holy cow.

Everything is more complicated than I thought. However, they are not reaching all the elements, particularly this one here, the intra muscular connective tissue on the right side of the red one here is not being reached. So you say, I need to do Hata Yoga stretching or what we call the melting stretch in which you see it here. The Sao Kamiya is relaxed. So when I do my calf stretch, I mentally try to relax the stretched muscle. So I project the heel getting long or not the toes pushing into the ground. That would be your contraction, but the heel getting longer so it means that their contract, our muscle fibers are soft. They are not hard.

So that's a melting stretch and therefore you get a lot of elevation here. You don't get any allegation here. You definitely get a very nice sliding motion and therefore stretch on the extra muscular connective tissue. However, a big surprise is the tendon does get often zero stretch because it's arranged in theories one after the other in a linear arrangement with the soft sarcomeres of the muscle. So this is what we filmed this morning here. The lower part would be a soft linear element that would be the softer relax muscle and the upper part here is a non yielding tendon. And if you put them not in parallel but into one linear arrangement and you pull both of them, all the pool will be swallowed, taken up in the softer element and the stiffer element will stay stiff.

S You, oh, so you can repeat this kind of melting stretch a thousand times your Achilles tendon will be unaffected. It will be as inelastic as a piece of biscuit after 20 years of melting yoga. And of course this is not what you want, but that would be the danger if you're only dual melting stretches. It's wonderful for the intramuscular connective tissue. It's wonderful for the lubrication between one muscle and the other.

However, you do not reach the tenderness portions of it in order to reach their tenderness portions. You are need tool or one way to do it is to stiffen to activate the muscle fibers in the long position against some momentary or external resistance. And that is often called active resistance stretching. And many people have been doing that and now we have an an orientation why when you may be using that to compliment you are melting stretches, et cetera. So all these different stretch types including weightlifting, are stretching different use and I would recommend use different movement styles in order to be more complete, which pockets you spare out and which pockets you are reaching within that.

So this is now a new question that the melting stretches that we have been doing for many years may possibly be not sufficient and may possibly be not the most efficient way for increasing range of motion. And there has been a new study now in Brazil where they compared passive hamstrings stretching this relaxed muscles as opposed to people doing strength straining in a rate resistance machine in the long position only. So you get in a maximal hip flection for our couch potato and your ask them to do muscle resistance, muscle resistance training only the last 20 or 30 degrees of the available range of motion. So your exhaust the muscle in the long position, but you let the muscle actively work and then they compared the two styles in terms of range of motion, the range of motion was comparable. You are slightly more in their active resistance group. However, when they wanted to see is their range of motion only a critical process of having more stretched tolerance. That is often an effect you learn in stretching to relax into our sensation.

That one week ago you would have said, I'm not killing myself. Yeah, but there you say it's not killing me. I can relax, I can breathe and I can go one millimeter further. But that would be critical resistance training or stretch resistance. And so what they found out is in the conventional stretch group, it was basically a cottage cold process and the stiffness of the hamstring had not changed within the 11 weeks or whatever they had here. Maybe if you're doing more long it, it may change. However, in the strength training group, it was not only a cortical process, their TCO had gotten softer. So if you are doing stretching in order to get the tissue softer, maybe strengths oriented were assistance elements in the long position.

You don't need to go in the gym, don't be afraid. You don't need to go into the, to these Viking people, they are in drop your wonderful yoga classes. But in a yoga position, in a Pilatos position, you may want to do resistance in the long position that you have there. And the explanation is actually probably not only linked to Fascia but to the sour Cormier's. And there is, it's not ultimately proven, but there have been more and more studies pointing in that direction. If you load the muscle in a long position and that's where I'd get the biggest challenge doing an average week and you do that for several months, it will increase the amount of change like sarcomeres. So these are the individual chain members in the muscle fibers.

So and you have the apparently the opposite effect. If you load the muscle always in a short position here, then it takes off some chain elements so that this becomes your new working area. So uh, that is another explanation why we now recommend not only melting stretches but also active resistance stretches because then you may get an architectural change, not just a relaxation training that you can live with a stretch pain in, in your body.

Chapter 5

Viscoelasticity

There has been a very influential book in the Yoga community, not yet in the politeness community. We are somebody who wanted to find out the history of the different yoga poses and this is through our many of the yoga people take their pride and say yoga is has more substance than [inaudible] because it's tools hours and years old and some day it's 3000 years old and they use sad. Their older it is there more vista must be incorporated and the less you are allowed to have questions about it. However, this Guy Mark Singleton, when he studied how yoga develop, he found out a lot of the yoga poses are coming from Swedish gymnastics.

That got to India with colonial, British driven civilization of the Indian culture. So in the YMC a moment in not only did cricket but they broad, which was a counter movement to the industrial age in Scandinavia, in Sweden, et cetera. People did bouncing whole body exercises as a, as a very powerful movement there. And they brought it also to India and they thought we would like to have that, we would like our children to do that, but we need to link it with Indian. So similar like your parents say, let's give it a German name, not only an American name in our, you know, if you don't want to imitate another culture.

So they linked it with the yoga culture of that time. But that was actually a culture of some beggars doing distortions. It was not only beggars, but it was people sitting on the ground and getting their tongue out and rotating their leg in order to get financial support and that. So they were our distortional sitting exercises and they can be linked with the Swedish gymnastics that they did. And then the hippies came to India and they learned meditation.

And everything. And they thought this is 2000 years old and they brought it to the rest. And that was very nice, this misconception because it allowed us to do a Swedish gymnastics risk, Amar spiritual attitude and with a mindful listening to the insight. Yeah. And uh, and now our yoga culture has a lot of quieting down, of getting slower and slower, but also it's very diversified. You have yoga styles, which are like Swedish gymnastics.

And I think that is not a contradiction. So if yoga is not 2000 years old, there's almost no standing posts, which is nod from Swedish gymnastics. The sitting poses have existed before, but the maturity or the all the standing poses, they are modern West on the inventions there that made it there. It doesn't mean that they are less beneficial. It is actually a very healthy movement. The more we got in the industrial age, they'd be look for healthy monkey leg movement.

How can we use our body in the way it was designed in, not in the way how the machines restrict us in the restaurant environment. And that was the driving factor behind it. So, uh, that should give us permission to actually do active for assistance training again and to do bounces in long position because of that was why to watch Swedish gymnastics, uh, have been bringing to India and we can ever get it back from India. But also from our own culture that we had there. Now I talked about many properties of, for example, they are less degree coil and force resistance that you have there. But before we do it into practice, I want to let me distribute these gelatin snakes to you.

So if you pass them around, and I'll explain that because the Achilles Standard and Fascia are risk or elastic tissues, they are not just sturdy ropes but they are Risco elastic meaning that if you push or pull on them for a few seconds, they will change their stiffness in a temporary manner. So I invite your, to put the tool challenged in snakes. Shelton is cooked Collagen by the way. So it has a lot of similarity with your Achilles tendon and with your lumbar Fascia. And if you put the right snake that you'll see here as your control tissue and you pull on the left case, you, for example, you can pull 10 times were surveyed of your lower arm and it will elongate maybe half an inch or something like that, and then you'll close your eyes and continue to pull this the same rate another 10 times.

And whenever you have done that 10 more times, you open the eyes and you see it has elevated, you use the same rate. However, the yielding of this ligament has gotten much longer and this is called creep. So that was oscillatory loading. If you go jogging and you load your killers tendon at the beginning, it doesn't lengths and very much, but the more off new does, the more it loses its elastic resistance at hair and at the end your bones are hitting each other because the tensegrity network only has two loose rubber bands in it. However, the looseness, as you'll see here, is only temporary after 30 seconds already, 90% of the creep, meaning passive prolongation has recovered and you can go jogging and bouncing again. So creep is there increase of lengths as you see here, so you see here the person is pulling here with the same rate and the longer your Poland time, the more the resistance force drops and the more lengths you'll get there, but that is a time dependent and a temporary that you have in the TCO.

There is a second process here. If you elongate it, let's say one inch and you hold it and measure with your sunburn index finger, how strong do you need to pull in order to keep that lengths. If you would do that with a elastic tissue, it's always the same for us if it's her ideal or that extreme, but with a risk or elastic TCO you will find out already after half a minute you only need a pole this half the force, so it's not an increase in lengths over time but it is a decrease in the resistance false that you have in the tissue. Of course these two phenomena are related to it and they are temporary and that now should be your question when either yoga teacher does a wonderful pose and afterwards you are much, much longer. You should ask yourself, is this the Chelton snake effect? Is this a snake charmer? Meaning that the temporary effect and by the time you get to the car and you reach down at home, you are as stiff as before and they salad as a long lasting effect.

However, it may be just the hurry bore gelatin effect in which you temporarily lower the stiffness in the tissue. And that is important to know. Yeah, it's as important to know if you go jogging, if you go on the Camino hike and you haven't exercised much, but your husband wants to do it for spiritual reasons and says, we need to go for one more hour and then we have a break and you say, I want to break before, get out the Chelton snake. I think the tissue needs a break now. Otherwise my bones will be hitting each other and then they will be grinding each other. And then you may pause for 30 seconds for 60 seconds, not because of muscle fatigue, not because of cardiovascular fatigue, but because of Risko, LSD, creep and relaxation, which is a temporary fatigue, you could call it in, in these collagenous connective tissues. So this is a wonderful example. Take it home and do some temperature studies. They're there, which I will cover in a minute there. The best thing you can also do, and I'll cover that in a minute, actually, let's do that here, is to look at the water content. So if you take one of these snakes and you put them somewhere at home where you don't clean every week, that should somewhere maybe up here on the beam for me, on top of the fridge for you on the upper most shelf of your library or in a basement and where you forget it for several weeks.

And then one day you will discover it again for me, my cleaning lady comes and she says, Dr Slipe can ice Rose's survey this dusty oil? Is it another one of your experiments? And then you have to come screaming in the hallway. Stop. Mrs Yossi, you're destroying my career. I have waited six months for the resolution of this scientific experiment and she will give it to yours. Some discussed here you have your scientific experiment because what you have is the effect of aging and aging goes along with the decrease of the water content and then you'll take you a catalyst tendon and try to do a Bretzel or yoga or split with it and you will feel it is as hard as a Bisquick.

And then you should say, this is what will happen with my spunky connective tissue if I don't move. Drinking is not getting the water into the Achilles tendon. You can drink as much as you want. It doesn't get in the Achilles tendon that has been shown, but stretching and squeezing it pushes the old water out and sucks in your order. And that's what you can do. So you have this really stiff Achilles tendon there.

After your cleaning lady gives it to you, you your make your finger wet and you stretch it and squeeze it into it. And then you will have an old Birtle Fastenal TCO and you can make it again elegant and smooth that you can show up in the yoga class again and do your legs all the way around here. So that would be an effect of 18 and you know the older we get the less water content we have. And this is what we have done at Omi University in our laboratory we looked at the effect of stretching in terms of water content and unfortunately we cannot do without here. So it's a very nice analogy for creep, for relaxation or the for the effect of water loss in aging but doing stretch, you are not squeezing any water out but that is happening in the body. We showed that if we take fresh fashional tcs like a ligament from an animal that has been used for other studies and we stretch it immediately after the stretch, there is less water in it. You would expect that any spongy tissue, your compression or your stretch it, there will be less water afterwards.

The pockets don't have as much space then and then it takes time for the water to come back. All of us more than two, three seconds. It's a matter of minutes sometimes. So four hours for all the water to come back and we showed very surprising if you squeeze the tissue strong enough and you'll wait long enough, sometimes you have more water afterwards in the tissue sponge then you had before the whole procedure and that has been called strain hardening. So the fluid content is something very important on how you are elastic resistance is and when you stretch you are squeezing water out of the tendon. Some of the water comes back to where it has been before.

So if there is stagnant water it will come back to the same place. However, a lot of the water goes away. Also 10% wire, the lymph, 90% via the small venues into Maldi directions and then you get fresh water out of the blood glass mat and that is very clean water that you have have in there. And so this is very important that we realize that the ground substance is a very water rich environment. So even the Achilles Tendon in an adult is 60% water. We measured that it doesn't behave, it doesn't look like it. It doesn't look like a jellyfish.

You can strain it with somebody who is attendance, but if you measure it as we did it, it is two thirds or more than half of it is in the water and now their new research is the water in the body is in two different liquid conditions in a chaotic liquid condition that is regular water and inbound water bound water. You have on the surface tension in a glass of water where a spider can dance because the molecules are all of us in the same neighborhood relationships. So they are vibrating but they are stable in terms of their axes and a physicist cause to that a liquid crystal condition. It's not an esoteric term, it's a very hardcore condition and that has been known from surface tension. But what now we're off a colleague and another colleague from Oma University showed you will have that within a distance of one micro meter tool, a water loving surface like to crystal essay showed, but also to a highly Ronan Hyaluronan is a ground substance element. So here in the middle that could be highly [inaudible]. And as you see here, this is my favorite picture.

And talking about the water content and stretching good connective tissue is like a rich piece of moss. The more bifurcations you have, the more dewdrops you can contain. And so that is now their suggestion. That healthy condition is like healthy moss, where millions of little water molecules are in a dewdrop condition in which they don't fall down with gravity in which they are in a liquid crystal condition in there. So, uh, this is now what they are suggesting. When you are stretching, when you're doing a foam roller, when you're doing or offering manipulation, you're squeezing old, stagnant water that was not in a bound condition because it was dirty, not dirty, but it had free radicals and inflammatory cytokines included in them. You've pressed them away and freshwater, which is willing to bind is coming and that stays at dewdrops at, at this moss and that this will give the connective tissue a very different condition. For example, when you have edema, when you have a torn ankle, you can see no matter how much you have been drinking, it will swell within 10 15 minutes independent of where other you, I've been drinking six liters of water before half a liter of water because you broke some of the pockets there, but this will be regular water.

This is not dude rob lidar and that doesn't give you the same elastic condition that you have in there. Now the other snake, you'll do some temperature experiments. I invite you to take it home, don't eat it or try not to eat it and put it in the fridge and see how mobile it is. How elastic is your connective tissue, so the stiffness of connective tissue add low temperature is very high. That's what you will find out. That is not surprising. You would have, and if you'll put it on the warm shelf where the sun is shining, it it, it will be much softer. However, for muscle fibers you get the opposite. And my closest research colleague, now Professor Rana Klingler, he has been doing that for many months to look at the stiffness change in college and fibers. And they go, as I described, low temperature, stiff, warm temperature stuff. But in muscle fibers, in the sarcomeres, in a contract, our muscle fibers, it goes exactly in the opposite direction. So if you have an organ boss and you have a muscle fiber and you're stimulated with electrical stimulation or this biomechanical stimulation of this, a nerf that's going in there, and then you change the temperature, it will contract less strongly in cold temperature with the same stimulation and will contract much more strongly in alarm temperature, of course, only within physiological conditions. So that means if you have a stiff myofascial tissue on your left upper trapezius and you use some warm fungal and it gets softer, probably the stiffness was not in the contract. Our muscle fibers, but in the intra and our extra muscular collagenous fashion in their drug element. Yeah, the the that have been included there.

So that also answers the question when and why you may want to use warms or nod warms in become your Gar or in Yin Yoga. If you want more resistance like in, in, in Yoga, sometimes they want more resistance without going further. It is good to do it in a cold condition because you get the resistance fall for us earlier and you can start a stretch with it. However, if you want to get more range of motion very rapidly, I would say do it like in Bikram Yoga they are there. You can go further in the split without injuring yourself because it's in a warm condition and at the same time if you need your muscles to protect you, if you lose the headstand position, your muscles are much more active to protect you in alarm condition. So you need to, so you know now what the effect is so you can choose when to use warm temperature and when to use cold temperature in the whole thing.

Chapter 6

Auxetic Behavior

I am getting to the finals of prizes in their, in their stretching research. This is new and that has been intriguing me for the last couple of days and weeks they found out if your stretch, the Achilles tendon, it gets wider in the right to left direction and that's called an oxalic behavior. I would have expected if you take any irregular ligament and you stretch it, that it gets more narrow because it has a constant volume and that seems to be the case with the it band, but not with the Achilles tendon. So in the Achilles tendon, if you're stretching it brat out and that is an effect that we know from the 10 secretary structures. If I have the six stick, I cause her head one. Some of you know it as a children toy and I pull it in this direction.

It will also spread in the other direction and that is now an intriguing question. I want to give it to you. I don't have a ready answer. When do you want to do a unit directional stretch in which you sacrifice the rich in order to have more lengths and when do you want to do an ox hetic stretch? The Oxitec stretches now a hot subject in biomed here, so normal elastic material even stretch it, it gets more narrow. That is obvious. Yeah, so you would expect that however then rare you have the more narrow place it you will be injury prone and oxalic material. They are now creating them for biomaterials, for bulletproof rests for many other things, for stents inside the body for artificial tendons. If you stretch them, they spread and then you are more protected.

You have a better resilience in there and that would be more 10 Segal, so it's more multidirectional that you have there. And this is now an interesting question. When do we want to have a unidirectional stretch like this one? And when do we want to have a multidirectional stretch? And, and this is an interesting question, it's not that one is more natural than the other.

They seem to be on different places. So let me play you here a short segment from a lecturer from [inaudible] at their very first Fascia congress where he looks at the unidirectional stretch and how important that can be for trunk stability search. Gregor Gretzky, a one and a half minute video, etc. Keep of the transverse processes closer together. Now plus-one is a French engineers 150 years ago.

Ditch your mind what he called the ratio of how much travel you have here versus how much travel you have here. And the best tissue have a plus on a ratio of one, which is one inch here will generate one inches. Then the Fascia has a person on a ratio of one. This is the ultimate efficiency. And this is an example which I did to show you how contraction of Trans Vinces extends the spine.

Because what Bose would me was when you have a weight lifter, he fire, he's up Domino's. Don't tell me files the abdominals to go down. It will make sense if far as abdominals because there is a gear box cause a fascia that bring him in reverse. So that is a wonderful example that muscle training as some of you know as the power for house exercises in Pilatos where we think we need a smart brain, we need the transverse abdominis and we don't need to go care about the Fascia. The fascia will follow the muscles that can sometimes work. But here's a good example.

If the Fascia to which the transverse abdominis does not have these bi-directional architecture, then you can pull to the right and to the left and l one and l three will not be pulled closer to each other. So if your then lift a barbell or a child or a box of water off the ground, your transverse abdominis can only give you more intro abdominal pressure, which is negligible. They found out it doesn't help you very much, but you cannot assist the erector spinner as a sooner Joost. Which is a sort of activity. If you have the right geometry in the lumber dolls and Fascia, then the highest onto contraction of the transverse abdominis helps you to shorten in the opposite direction. You Langston here and you shorten in the other direction, so that would be a very beneficial model where you want that unidirectional and he was talking about Paul Sa Ratio that is in mathematics to the best you can have is a pasar ratio of one four one inch horizontal stretch.

You get one inch upright shortening of the spine, you cannot have more. You get that at an angle of 90 degrees and that's what he found in the lumber dolls refresher. So they are in this web like architecture. You have this multidirectional stretches where you sacrifice the transverse direction in order to get more links that you have there. However, if you look at here in swimmers for example, that makes a lot of sense. Also as swimmer when he reaches forward, he is not interested in eagle expansion of his lower ribs as you are doing sometimes in Pilatos for very good reasons.

Now because of moral resilience and stability and perceptual reasons. He wants to make the water assistance slimmers so he wants to swim and practice stretches in which you get one millimeter more even if you'll make yourself more narrow like it like a toothpaste. So that is now for me. Any interesting thing to do, different stretches, one in which you do a multidirectional expansion and in another one in which you have a focus uni directional intention to get further and further probably that also associates very, very this different perceptual attitudes on the other side of [inaudible] of Esky and of the swimmer which are cultivating the unidirectional stretch and you sacrifice the other dimension. You have the tens equal our multidirectional stretch from the people in the biotech Segretti community and I highly recommend the teaching and the book by Daniela Claude Motto About Living Bio Trans Equity and she teaches tendency girl moments. Okay, let's do a practical application based on Dr Danielle cloud martyr to compare tens equal movements where they go into multidirectional warehouses, non tens eagle movements. If you come to standing together with me and if I do a stretch of the front line and I only think about the front and about reaching up and that's all that I'm interested.

I may come to a point in which I am breaking down here. So I have a moment of buckling here and this is what you can see here where suddenly some of the attentional fibers are collapsing, they are not expanding. So you expand here, but at some moment for me it's here for you. It may be in the back of the neck where there is a shortening, a passive buckling together, and then you say, I'm the tallest person on this planet, but it's not very resilient. So if you do some elastic balances here with the buckling here and all the buggling here, it's not the same elastic quality that you could have here. However, for swimmer, you may need that here.

So what she recommends is called 10 Zieger all movements. So even though you want to go up, you can also connect down and you watch your lower rips and you watch your bag at the same time. And you only go so far that no place in your body goes into shortening boggling. So of course your frond length is more than the bag, but your bag also lengthens a tiny bit. And if you come up to a vertical position, you have grown half a millimeter because your front has length and more.

Of course you wouldn't be able to bend otherwise, but your back has other set. How can I [inaudible] supported? And that is very different when you do the stretch here. So you can also do it by reaching upwards here, here, here, but your back says I want to accompanied and if I go too far it will go in a buckling tilty and it's a change in the game. Their elastic resistance will be very, very different that you have here.

Also, if you go in a side bending, and I'm only into interested in reaching further, I'm in a unit directional stretch. I may tilt and collapse on the left site and that feels very, very different. Now if you go down and you get perceptually not in a multidirectional expansion, but in a inner, so not in a unidirectional but in a multidirectional expansion. Then of course the right side length is more than the left, but everything lengths at the same time and see how far you can go. And if you do some end pounces, they have a more resonant elastic quality and you come back and you will have grown and you, you may have that in Pilatos in the powerhouse that you want to avoid that the people when they do certain stretches are not narrowing their lower rips.

At the same time. If you had a swimmer, you may want that, that they get more into this. But often in many movements, what you want is a multidirectional expansion that you have now. So you can explain the, so you can play with many movements. For example, I can do a spiral movement and I can do it only with a uni directional. Oh and I sacrifice everything else. And then you would have called it a more holistic, or do it with your soul or do it with a whole body, but she calls that now do it in a 10 Siegel's stretch.

So all the elements say I want to support it. If you want a stretch here in the spiral, like even on the left, they want to expand a tiny bit too and it goes even your toes at the same time as saying, I want to expand at the same time. And that is a Vonda. So she calls that a 10 sequel movement vows as a non tense, eager up movement and for the dancers, that is a wonderful language that you have in there. So maybe take a half a minute to find any kind of movement reaching, getting the dishes and you can do it with a nontender ego moment and you may be able to do it in which all the joints are saying, how can I expand in order to support it by two different degrees? But you don't have any place going into buckling and saying, I take a vacation. And that is a very nice model that she shows here.

So you're welcome to continue. But I will also continue here. So if you are stretching here, do it with a 10 Segal, the perceptually, it's also more interesting and more rich to do a multidirectional stretch in which you're not only interested here but you expand into space in different opposite direction and that is what you have in a tense equity structure. You could take any of these two sticks and separate them. The others will also separate but to a lesser degree, but they will know not go into narrowing in order to sacrifice everything to support the lengthening that you have there in the body. So that is a very nice thing. I like it.

I will continue to play and I will also watch the research. Rich tissues have that oxy hetic or tense equal expansion that you have there and which tissues are more made for the narrowing legs running like you, like you having a swim or like you have in the it band, et Cetera. And, and, and in which life situations do you want this multidirectional lengthening and where do you want the unidirectional lengthening? And they may have different properties depending on what you need under, under a given situation. So I will also follow a to find out under what life situations, uh, the multidirectional is more necessary for stability, their resilience.

If you are interested that your body is more resistant to turbulences, then the 10 segro spread is, is of course much better. And if you do a headstand was a 10 Igor body, uh, it, uh, where your lower ribs are expanding here, nod narrowing, you will be more stable. So foster ability for resilience, for interaction with different perturbations that tend golden movement seems to be better. But if primarily reaching forward is my upon than anything else, you may want to make yourself more narrow in order to get there. So this is going to be interesting.

Chapter 7

Fascia as a Sensory Organ

This now leads to the last subject which I liked the most.

Fascia is not only a geometrical, multidirectional, mechanical, ecollege and tissue, it is one of our richest sensory organs. And that is a big surprise. For example, for me as a longterm Rafer because stock dyed her off. She had a long debate, a very respectful debate with mostly Feldon cries rather posture and postural pathologies, more cost by Fascia as a mechanical property or whether you should work more with a nervous system there and they had long fights about that but neither of them knew if you want to work with the nervous system, that Fascia is one of the richest tools to get there and that was a surprise for them. Somebody who knew it was Andrew Taylor still who lived before them. He said there are nerves and Fascia and when you ark with Fascia you are dealing with the branch offices of the brain. So it is densely innervated. Now, two years ago, maybe in one of my old lectures, I lectured very conservatively that the nerve endings in Fascia are definitely more than 100,000 and I was very impressed by that number.

But now professor Martin Grunewald has done a more accurate calculation. They took the density in a square millimeter in the research by fork of Professor Mente and by Color Stecco Calco later. Dad on a millimeter and then looked how many cubic millimeters of Fascia do we have in an average body and he comes to this incredible number of more than 100 million sensory nerve endings in your body wide fashional net and I hope your jaw is dropping to the flow hub and you have that because that's an order of magnitude higher at least. Then the so called first sentence in the homosapiens, the sense of seeing most people, including me, I used to believe that we are primarily a vision oriented animal in a dark, it's more the smelling and that goes along with our visual sense, having more than 2 million receptors and occupying a big area and often our vision is enslaving the other sensors. If you have vision, if you're blind, it's of course different. But now we realize that Fascia is at least one order of magnitude is richer in terms of nerve endings and a, so if you work with Fascia, you work with one of the richest, definitely one of the largest and definitely one of the most important a sense organ for perceiving our own body. And that makes it very, very interesting. So we look at the different nerve endings in Fascia and what functions they have.

Some of them are related to propioception to knowing where your body is in space and in movement. Others are associated with nausea, reception and this is now a new concept. Why mechanical stimulation if it is associated with stimulating a nerve endings in Fascia. And if they are accompanied by our perceptual, uh, quality from the uh receiver that they may have an analgesic and pain killing, pain inhibiting effect. And this is a new explanatory model that at the order of the spinal cord there are some nerves I'll show them to you here they are called wide dynamic range neurons and they are at the Dorsal Horn of the spinal cord where most of the sensory information comes in. And if you have a free nerve ending containing c fiber, the right fiber here that is often associated with nausea, deception with pain, it gives an impulse to that. However, the same, why don't immigration neuron can also be stimulated by property or perception by the blue fibers here. And the new insight is that these wd, our neurons are hungry, foster emulation and if they don't get stimulation from a certain area in your body because there is no movement, they will get crazy and they fight for survival because the central nervous system may say, I kill you.

I will no longer listen to you or I break the connection. You don't get payment anymore from me. You don't get grows factors, et cetera. You are not important. So what the wd our neurons are doing is similar like to achieve journalists working for the national enquirer or the Sun Herald or something like that. You need a scandal or something every couple of weeks from the village that you are covering. If not, you make something up and that is a new discovery that they now found out it, it sounds funny but it's actually not funny.

This is the story of your clients. So they don't have propioception anymore from between the first layer of the lumber for a Dorsal Fascia and the second layer between both of them. And then these WOD, our neurons are creating a magnifying glass that they put on the, on the potential c fibers, nociceptors. And then they make an elephant out of a minute, a spider that you have our and that you have there. And a, so that has been known. Uh, if in diverse case they are not only amplifying something, they create uproar, inflammatory condition and then they say there is fire in Afghanistan.

So you have something to report and years later you find out this journalist officer's reporting about fire. He's creating it himself in order to get a promotion in the central nervous system. So coming back to that model, it means that local myofascial pain and local propioception relating to the same innovation area of the spinal cord are like oil and water to each other. And that has been shown in many different directions. For example, if you'll give somebody chronic low back pain, that's an Australian experiment where they inject uh, a hypotonic, uh, salt containing solution into their erector spina. Then they have low back pain for one and a one and a half hours. And then you set them through to sit them on appropriate reception chair in which their pelvis is passively rotated by a rotating disc one degree per seconds, either to the right or to the left, but their trunk is strapped with risk.

Two straps towards the back of the chair, which is stable and they have a blindfold. So in the experiment starts they tell them, Dr [inaudible] are you already tell us yes. When you know, when you are clear which direction your pelvis is turning this one degree nobody will be able to see. But hopefully at 60 degrees I will say it's going to the right. Yes, I right, right. Yeah. So how many degrees do you need in terms of Lumbar dorsal distortion before you can feel it from the insight rather than seeing it through your eyes.

And that's called proprioception. And you know very well that you cannot believe it. Your client is in a strong Chi. Folgers, they are in a low doses and you tell them there's not a neutral spine and they say it is a neutral spine and you say, can I show you a mirror? You seem not to be at home in your body. What do you mean not at home? My Body. So that could be their relationship.

Ireland water one pushes the other way. So if you increase the scale on the right side, on the myofascial pain site, their appropriate receptive refinement goes down into the basement. And that has also been shown if you're pushed to the propioception down in the basement, professor of dementia did that with rats and their pain sensitivity gets a magnifying glass. They are suddenly responsive to ridiculous touches. You are torturing me on your knee, touched them not because of inflammatory cytokines but because the appropriate reception was inhibited on the same area. So this is now a very influential concept.

So what we are doing with stretching, and that's now a very nice completion also of this lecture. We want to bring in propioceptive stimulation so that these journalists wd our neurons, they get bluer information again and they can stop doing their naughty fire instigation. They can drop down, there are magnifying glasses and they can tell you there is a new bridge being built. There is a demonstration for ps the thumb, the something positive has been happening in the body rather than inventing a possible trouble that you have there. So stretching as a form of sensory stimulation of new afferent input toward a spinal cord. And that's a very profound concept. You may be doing that more powerful than our offer. Then somebody who was Tibetan bowls or their own, uh, foam rolling or many other treatments they may have in common to give Proprius haptic blue stimulation tool.

These wd are neurons in the spinal cord and that is a very potent concept that we have. So if you aren't all yours Fascia as an input tool, the wd, our neurons wide dynamic range neurons, that means they have a wide range of possible stimulants that they want. It's, it's helpful to know where is Fascia rich in terms of proprioception. As a rover, I have been getting my ego and my pride that I work deeper than massage therapists that are treating with oil because you treat the client like an onion. You start in the first session on the peripheral Fascia and then you go deeper and deeper and deep. Far German means more long lasting, more structural and this cosmetic stuff here on the outside is not so long lasting.

You get all this a European philosophy depths meaning long lasting. However, I have some doubts on that now because he is an Australian research in which they looked at the innovation density in the Epi museum here with a dark background and in the intro muscular connective tissue and you see that they are, that the superficial Fascia are much richer so they are like three times more densely innovated. Then working in the deep fascia. So if you want to yours Fascia as appropriate receptive stimulation organ, your stretches in which you are not only getting the solars and the layer costs, but you may be getting the abdominal Fascia, you maybe getting the superficial Fascia directly under the skin and that may have a more profound meaning, ritual effect in terms of feeding these WDR neurons. So that is far, far for me, a challenging new direction they'd be out there. The question is how important is the client's attention in this?

And there has been a history making a clinical study by ally Mosley and he treated what's called complex regional pain syndrome. These are usually people who have a cost or some surgery on an arm or leg and they don't like it or it causes irritations and then not, not only the area where the irritation was, but the whole leg four months is in a painful condition and you changed this color, et cetera. So it's called, it used to be called reflex sympathetic dystrophy, but they changed the name because he realized it's not the autonomic nervous system. Primarily it's a body representation of that arm. In this normal somato sensory nervous system that the arm is no longer so clearly represented. The low arm, the upper arm, normally the lie next to each other, but they are innovation control propioceptive or reflection in the body. Schema is washed over each other. So he developed appropriate receptive stimulation therapy where he put five dots on the hand of the affected arm at a distance where they could just feel it's two points and not just one, which is a little larger in these people.

So he knew that they have a less accurate proprioception on the whole arm in which they have that. And then you stimulate one of these thoughts, but you put a blindfold between their eyes and their hand and they have to guess which dot are you touching. Dot number five. Dot Number One. And they have to guess also, is it with a sharp end of the pencil or is it with the broader rubber and they don't see it, but they have a photograph of their hands. So they know number one is at the Sunbird Cetera. And that's all you do for 10 minutes a day only. And they say number one, and it's a sharp end, and you say, correct. And then you the next one, and you will say, not correct. It was number two, but it was to sharp. And at the end you tell them 73% correct.

Let's see you tomorrow for another 10 minutes session. So it's a very cheap therapy because you can train, visit certificate, any uneducated, uh, uh, Mexican German in the country, et cetera. They don't need to be able to speak English, but they need to be able to count to five and they don't need to know about meditation or the Iliopsoas. They only need to follow the protocol. And what they found out, it is highly efficient, much faster than an average roughing treatment within a few weeks, I forgot, maybe five weeks or something like that. And their proprioception is better, but also the pain is gone.

And that is ray or anybody treating complex regional pain syndrome, you will know it. You don't fix, you do not fix it with this risk, two or three sessions. It never gets quickly your way. So such a cheap treatment, uh, healing that, uh, in a long lasting men are apparently is a challenge for us. So that already is a huge contribution. How powerful probably perception can be. However, the question remains, how important is to client's attention. And that used to be a debate among Phelan Christ practitioners in Rolfers most EFL and cries or um, was very much a disciple or personal admirer of Milton Erickson.

One of the biggest hypnotherapist in psychology at his time said it's often beneficial if the client does not pay specific attention because his subconsciousness learns better. And then you distract the client and talk about the rather and the dolphins outside, et Cetera, in order for the subconsciousness to be able to be there. And either off said, no, I want to have the mindful attention in the here and now. I don't want the client to daydream. And everybody has hundreds of stories and wonderful examples, but nobody does a controlled experiment.

So now mostly did the experiment. He did a second group of patients where your stimulate exactly the same number of points. There's the same pencil. However they are. Cottage skull or nervous system or mindful attention is not invited to pay attention to the touch. They are asked, they can read a book. They don't need to give verbal feedback. So the peripheral stimulation is exactly the same. The catia called position.

Patient is other. And now as a big question, if the real group where they have critical attention or mindful attention or local attention takes five weeks, how long does it take for the same improvement? If they are mindful, attention is not at the place of interaction. Would you think it's three weeks? Double as fast? Would you think it's 10 weeks? You don't know. Okay. I wouldn't know either.

So what he found out no improvement at all. So you would need to treat them a billion years and it would not get better after five it's not a slower improvement. There is no improvement. So that means for this condition and with this therapy, you need the here and now attention maybe not a hundred percent attention, but more than 50% of your rocking memory should be here. And so if their client is daydreaming and thinking, what time do I have to take the bus, you are your maybe touching them, but you can also forget to touch them. So this applies to condition sly, complex regional pain syndrome in which you have a diminished propioception and that's complex regional pain syndrome. It's chronic back pain and whiplash and phantom pain in these.

But chronic back pain is very common. So there are, I would say, if your client is doing stretches and talks at the same time, that's a waste of time. It may be good for the bonding, it may be good for their digestion. You know that the autonomic nervous system feels safe and they can sleep better. However, if they have a condition in which they have myofascial pain that goes along with diminished propioception, chronic back pain, whiplash, um, complex regional pain syndrome, arm leg usually and find a pain. So these are the ones that I know from the literature. Then I would say you need to get their mindful attention into the local area in which you have the stretch that you have there.

So this comes to the conclusion for me where I bow down to the people from the Contino movement field in which they do minute movements with a summer narcotic orientation. Gil Hedley, I bow down to him too. He uses that term. Maybe he invented it and Emily Conrad, one of the two main founders or the main founder of continuum movement. She used it either from girl Hadley or the other way around, but it's the same club. Anyway, so these are the embodiment people and this is what you are doing in the container movement. Let me share this with you. So you go in this waterfall stretch, you get your sit bones back and then you play with minute movements of one rep at a time.

And ideally you could come and touch one rep and say, I want you to do half a millimeter of undulation, not five centimeters away, but right there where I am. So this is for me, very inspiring and I want to invite you, when you are doing stretches or yoga poses tomorrow to memorize this, how would it be if I am a healthy cat and I get this pleasure seeking edit, huge in which I explore my sense oil body that I have, they're on the inside. So let me share this [inaudible] so you can see this is not possible by talking at the same time. That's impossible. You need to become a soma, not so like an astronaut goes further into space and spends more free time and money in this and then aquanaut goes deeper into the ocean and summer not goes into the felt body from the inside. How can I find more refinement between my shoulder blade and this interesting spot that I have here? And you do it not with a performance oriented attitude, more movements per minute but with an explorer attitude. And that of course now we have learned you need sensory stimulation in order to cope.

Whereas the tendency for mild facial pain but needs to be accompanied by curious, mindful, locally specific attention that you have there. And I love this approach very much and you can also see it goes way beyond biomechanics. It means that you are more at home in your body and I highly recommend to get this so much on narcotic sensory exploratory body friendly cat like exploit too. I edit you into your stretches there and also if you touch another person and they are doing that in their bag, you realize, oh somebody who said, oh, and I give that to my clients as an exercise. So when they are sitting in the car and it's boring and nothing is happening, you can do different rips touching the chair there.

I do that with my stepmother. If she wants me, Robert, I need to tell you and I want you to pay attention to me and don't run away after half a minute as you usually do. I sit there and I do this movement there and she says, oh, for the first time you are listening to me this yes, it's way tell me more. But, but more than 50% don't tell her. More than 50% of my attention is not resell story or need 30% because I know the story but it is in the refined. So my Nordic explorations rich part of my body, I can interact with the environment that you have there or Kiddo.

So if you'll do that with our body friendly attitude, how rapidly can your body change? And we used to say college and has a half life of one year but that has changed now because we have new measurement systems and this is the good news. So if your dual fash are friendly movements, their metabolism of renewal is overall much faster than we have been believing. They marked certain radioactive particles that have been in the atmosphere since channel Bill. So they are getting lower and lower in all the food that we have every year.

And if you look at the concentration in the body, you know how much it has renewed since channel bill or sensor 40 wade. So this is new now and based on that and average intramuscular connective tissue renews all the Collagen fibers almost over them rears in little less than a half a year. So within seven months. So internal bicycle or connective tissue is pretty rapidly remodeling, still slower than muscle fibers or the inner lining of the abdomen or the stomach or something like that. However, tendons take two or three times more, two times more for remodeling. So if your insure a tendon it takes, or probably because they are less blood vessels in it, so you need to have a more sustaining approach to work with them. But a good one, and this is a take home manage if you have a torn tendon or torn into a muscular connective tissue. If you do exercise at the same time, hopefully not at the insured area, but somewhere else in the body in order to have your metabolism more active, your healing time will be two to three times faster.

So if you injure your leg and you want the injury to heal two to three times faster, find an active movement where you are not loading the lag too much, but you still get cardiovascular activity in an active lifestyle that you'll get there. So overall, this is very positive that the body is changing at different conditions, but it is faster than we thought, but still much, much slower compared to us. This muscle said, we you have, so if you are interested in muscle training, you can go to any fitness person and say, I want to have a beach body, uh, in August and it's now at the middle of February. How do I get a six pack? And he says, how much money do you have? I'm the right person. I can give you the perfect beach body. They are, because you can change our muscle itech in, in a few weeks. It will start. Of course, the more time you have, the more you have. But if you do muscle strength training for three weeks, three, four weeks and you don't see a difference, you have to reconsider whether you're doing the right thing because you should. You should see an architectural change beginning. However, if you do fascia training versus stretching but also responsing and many other things and you decide after three weeks I don't see anything, I stop watering my plants. You are stupid because this appeals more to the Asian martial art.

All GFI laws, a few that you are doing a long pass and similar like a bumble gardener, you are. No, you need to water the little gland and in the first weeks you don't see anything the navel and rests into his muscle trees. They grow rapidly but after a few years they stagnate and somebody who does muscle training after a few years they need to take anabolic car or something like else because it will be very difficult to add something on top. However, if you're doing fascia training, Russ stretching for example, you will have very little impressive grows at the beginning, but it continues. And then after one year, after two year, your whole bamboo. Now the whole body, why is tall, resilient silky tissue that you have grown in, in which you have be uh, unbreakable. So that would be the goal. The goal that you have, last slide is my favorite one. They looked with MRI pictures at the changes you have in exercise and also in aging in intramuscular connective tissue.

And that's a cross section through the side. On the left you have a young adult who is a couch potato and on the right you have a young adult who is active, who is regularly jogging. And you see there is less intramuscular, fibrotic green connective tissue in the quadriceps here where they looked at it. So that, so if you don't move you will become fibrotic. There is more filthy, chaotic, dirty five cotton fibers in your connective tissue.

And the bad thing is as you age, so this is your 18 year old son and that's your at the age of eight of 60 the same sedentary lifestyle. And look how Felsey everything is. There are a lot of extra clumsy connective tissue. Then the question is if you start doing stretching, if you do a started or mechanical stimulation to the facial tissues, if you stimulate the fibroblasts to produce more Hyaluronan to model late a different fiber network, could you slow down aging? Could you go half way back between the picture on the lower left end, how little fibers you had, where we were when you were 18 what do you think?

Can you reverse aging? How much? Maybe half as much, maybe a quarter. So this is why I liked it so much. This is me. It could be me at the age of over 60 with regular fashional training here. It was endurance running that they had there and you'll see he is younger than he. Then his 18 year old couch potato son, don't, I love that. So who is more elastic?

Who is more Benny [inaudible] who is more a young person. The couch potato, his son in front of the computer are the father who runs barefoot on the beach. You will have the answer here. Of course it relates only to this aspect. I'm not saying Fascia training will reverse aging in every aspect, but this is almost too good to be true. So I love it.

And this is the last video here. This is my new guru. Some of you know I try to be com enlightened. 20 years ago I followed an Indian Guru. I tried everything in order to get into a enlightenment. I don't regret most of it, but I failed. I never got enlightened, but I was very much a gurus eco person.

But I will forget now all my gurus, because I found my new group. It's not Emily Conrad, it's not idle evolve. It's a Russian cat that you find on a public youtube video. And this cat is for me showing us what it means to be alive in a physical body for the years that we live on this planet. She seems to be at home or he the cat died. Don't know.

She lives in every fiber of her body. So let us enjoy and use her to show us how stretching can be when you do stretching in a sensuous body that you have there. So you see she is doing yawning at the same time. She is stretching the left front in order to open the chest, she's adding the right one to get a bigger area there. You can see that.

Ooh, now we have a melting stretch in which she pushes the claws of the left forward and now you see she pulls the clause backwards. Active resistance stretching, but she hasn't got that from the book probably she loves it from the inside. Now she has opened half of the body at the chest. But what about the hip joint in the front? There we go. There is an area that we need to open there.

So a look at that. She is rotating now the ballet to the left in order to reach areas that she didn't reach before. And you see there is a long line from the right ear all the way down to the tip of the leg that she asked there. And she didn't plan that apparently. So you see, she's looking where can more lights light up in the body? Where can I spread bigger area?

And now look how she makes her smooth transition into a hunting. You don't hear a sound. And that's how I want you to start your day. I bet she will catch more than three miles today and I hope you'll will catch Marlin three miles today. And thank you very much and also very much thank you to all the people who inspired me, to my colleagues from all university and all the people that we collaborate.

And let me finish this hour slogan Fascia is a connecting network and we come further the more we connect with each other. So thank you very much. And I'm looking forward to questions.