Fascial Fitness

Chapter 1

Introduction to Fascial Fitness

So it is my pleasure to introduce you to the theoretical foundation for a Fascia oriented movement training and sports training and as you know in sports and in movements, the emphasis has so far been on what's been called the classical twine eight meaning either on cardiovascular fitness with all the beautiful advantages that that brings you or on muscle training, fast twitch or slow twitch or on sensor motor refinement coordination. Some people have the emphasis more on the cardiovascular fitness. Some people more on different types of muscle training and some people are more on the sensor motor coordination and if you focus on all three of them, you used to think that you have the most holistic, the most comprehensive approach. Interestingly enough, the maturity of sports related pathologies are usually collagenous connective tissues like Tennant hair, joint capsules, sprained ankles, plantar fasciitis. It's very rare that you have a bone broken due to overloading. Yes, it does happen, but very, very rare.

It's very rare that the muscles themselves, the red fibers are torn. It's usually the white connective tissue surrounding the muscle and connecting the muscle with the rest of the body, which you are then loading more than it has been properly prepared for by your training. So yes, we have, um, focusing, we have been focusing on neuromuscular and cardiovascular elements, but we haven't been properly looking at the collagenous connective tissues. So that's why now there is a rethinking what do we know how connective tissues respond to stretch to sports loading, et Cetera, because they do respond different than muscles to or then your cardiovascular, uh, arteries, lung capacity, et Cetera. And that's why we have been looking at what's also been happening at the field of neuro of musculoskeletal medicine in musculoskeletal medicine. Also, the connective tissues, the fashion net shown here has been treated like a Cinderella.

It's been cut out the first thing in medical dissections, only recently it has been brought back into the attention of the orthopedic field. There are many reasons for that. One reason is that we couldn't quantify [inaudible] connective tissues. We were able to quantify bones with x-rays. We were able to quantify muscles with EMG electromyography. But for fashional properties, for connective tissue, you would feel it's tight or you would feel it stands, but you couldn't quantify that.

And that has changed in the last couple of years. So the fashional net as you see it here has been overlooked in the past and now it's coming back into a major academic attention focus. And that is quite exciting for many of us who have been looking at the body as a whole and not as a aggregation of of uh, fragmented pieces. And that was also one of the reasons why Fascia has been overlooked. That uh, in medical, in male medical anatomy, uh, you will love something if you can cut it into pieces and with professional net is very difficult. So here you have what's called the fashion persona, which is what evil calls the tiger body suit. So it's like an overall or cat body stretch, a suit that encompassing basically your whole body, but it's thicker at certain areas here.

And that is part of the connective tissue and it's very hard to say that it consists of seven pieces or nine pieces. So you can only look at it as one piece. And that piece then falls hundreds of little pockets in which to then the muscles I embedded, the organs I embedded, et cetera. And that's why the federal approach appeals to us because it's basically a tissue of connections and it loves to be looked at in a way where you look at the whole body as one piece rather than 500 muscles, uh, put together. So this has been looked at as the Cinderella TCO in orthopedic medicine, but it has reasonably, uh, received a major increase in attention.

And that started with the 2007. There was a very successful congress, the first Fascia Research Congress at Harvard Medical School, and that also received very positive, uh, coverage in the journal Science, which has a very high reputation in the academic field. So they wrote a two page article about this congress, but also about the creation of a new field, which is now called, uh, Fascia research. This congress was inspired by the 10 Zachary t model that I have here in our 10 secretaries structure, which was first created by artists. And then put into architecture and now some people put it into biology.

In a tensegrity model, you have struts as weight structures or as compressional resistant structures and you have elastic bands here and they are put together in a very unique way in which the struts, you could think of the bones in the human body, they are never touching each other. So they are fragmented pieces. Whereas all elastic elements are all connected with each other. And the vision that we have is that in a healthy body you have a lot of trans equity like features. So the spinal column is not a weight bearing column. It's a suspended aggregation of bones who are not directly passing raid onto each other wire compression, but that you have the myofascial tissues as tension only loaded members who are all interconnected with each others and the bones are embedded as spaces into that. So that was the vision that we have been following with that first Harvard Medical School Conference on factual research.

So we have to be basically looking at the fashion net as the black ribbons here as a body wide continuous tensional loaded system. Of course you also need bones, but bones are connective tissue but they are not. Fascia Fascia then includes joint capsules. It includes your Achilles tendon. It includes the lumber fashion that I showed here because they all form this body wide continuous fashion network.

And then how properly that is loaded determines your posture, determines the lst city of your movement more than the shape then the shapes of your bones to buy themselves. Uh, one of the pioneers was my Rafa League, uh, come Meyers versus book anatomy trains. And we realized that many of the scientists had read this book book there. And in that book I highly recommended he has been talking about these and anatomy trains, which are myofascially connections to that possum more than one joint. So in healthy movements, the Latissimus Dorsi on the right side and the gluteus maximum was on the opposite side. We work together almost like one muscle sling and you can only see that if you include the wonderful lumbered also Fascia here.

And then the question is what movements would you do if you don't want to exercise only abilities in most Dorsey and the Gluteus Maximus, but that the central piece of that connection also gets trained in a way in which it's elastic in which he doesn't tear in which it has the right fiber direction and it's not stuck to the tissues. Our knees,

Chapter 2

About Elastic Recoil

interesting enough, in the last years, flashy has been also recognized to be the source of delayed onset muscle soreness, delayed onset muscle soreness is you people know because you have mountains here is when you're hike or run down hill. Then you have more of this muscle soreness that has a peak one or two days after the main activity and in the past it was unclear. There was a theory that it's lactic acid. Now we know it's not true because when you have the apex of the pain, lactic acid is already down better back to basic level so it can be the exclusive source of the pain. And in a recent study they found out that the pain that you have does not come from muscles.

It comes from the muscle envelope called the Epi Museum. And they found out they found that out by injecting a hypertonic saline solution that has a little bit of a higher salt concentration that you have in your body into the leg that has the delayed onset muscle soreness. But uh, in some people only in the muscle and in some people in the Fattal envelope and they realize with that injection there they're sensitive. P a kiss you is the muscle envelope is not the muscle flesh and unease. What's happening there? We don't know.

Maybe that's where you have inflammatory cytokines. There are indications for that. But next time you say you have saw muscles change the sentence and say you have sore muscle envelopes or you have Saul Fascia that you have that. So that was one of the first indications that fracture can also be a source of pain. It can also be a source of pleasure, can be mostly assaults of proprioception, but it can also be a source of pain. So that has been paving the ground. Why fashion now is being included. Basically, if you come back from this lecture and talk to your friends who are also into sports, into movement, et Cetera.

At this time everybody's invested in Fascia because it has been overlooked. People know about muscles a lot. They know about many aspects of, of sports, but the detailed understanding, how do fat, how does Fascia relate to stretch to loading to sport activity is, is it's fairly new. So what we are adding here is a missing piece into the conclusive, uh, comprehensive puzzle. Now the main thing why there is so much attention on Fascia is that due to new ultrasound imaging, they found out that when you do a movement, for example here, somebody was going up on their toes and down. And so your carbs are contracting and here they are lengthening and the old model, let me show it if I can show it here.

So when you get up on your toes, then the red muscle fibers acting Miacin, they would be contracting. So this would be the red or pink color, uh, myofibrils in the cough. So they would be contracting, this would be your heel bone, your achilles tendon. And what's linked or what changing the lengths is not the Achilles tendon here or it will only change a 10th of a millimeter. But basically you're got your, your calf muscles are contracting and the Achilles tendon more or less stays the same. So that's the conventional way how we have been looking at sports movement and they found that if you do a single movement that actually then you can see that the muscle fibers shorten and lengthen. But the Fastenal connective tissues, the Achilles tendon, but also the continuation of the Achilles tendon inside of the calf muscles, which is much longer than your a kilo standard. Your Kittleson is very short. But the so called Achilles aponeurosis goes almost all the way up. So together they form the Fascia of the calf and that's the classical model, which is still true. And they found that with ultrasound, if you do one movement only or if you do very slow movements, but to their surprise when they ask people to do a movement like that in which they, in this movement it's not.

But if I find a rhythm in which I get a sense of flow of effortlessness, of even some fun and joy associated with it, that then to their surprise, let me show that they found out that the festival connective tissues, so this is the a killer standard and they are killers, neurosis that they lengths and very clearly red romantically and they're muscular fibers. My finger here is only contracting a millimeter. So this is shown here. So the activity of the muscles is not to change lengths. It is to resist lengthening and to do an isometric, almost perfectly isometric contraction to adjust to be a rhythm maker, a pace maker for the elastic recoil.

And that's a new term that's now being used a lot in movement and analysis for all of the connective tissues. So, uh, I have some Fattal swingers here so you can play with that. So each of you are, you can help me if you play with [inaudible], you will be very well prepared for their practical session that Devo Miller will be doing after my theoretical lecture here. But this is also getting you into practice. So my invitation to you is find a rhythm in which you get a harmonious swing. So not the Cherokee one where it's not chomping. So here this is not harmonious where it's jumping and hitting my finger where it goes like one foot up and down and find a movement where your finger moves only one centimeter and you maybe even able to do it with closed eyes if you have good.

If you are an advanced politesse teacher, your propioception, that means you are body sensation is so refined that you can find the right rhythm. And my question to you is at what split second, at what moment is your finger active? Is it before the turning point? Is it after the turning point? Is it Bose? Both. Okay. Of course you can lift it at any time.

But what is the most smooth? The most effortless movement? Interesting. Yeah, so it's just before at the time point you can already stop. So if you would put a nail here in a computer, lifting the nail and you play with it, you get the most smooth movement. If you only lift the nail, half a millimeter is the computer before the turning point and then it will be the most elegant movement and don't do it. But I can show it to you here. I can swing my leg and break the window if I want. No I won't.

And I'm say I'm not doing anything. This just my Fascia and I'm, and I'm almost not not moving my finger here. If you have the right frequency and if your fascia behaves like an elastic, a metal spring here, so it has a high storage capacity. If I do that, whereas fashion like that, it will be very clumsy. So guess what? Many of us we have fashion like that and then you need a lot of muscle activity to do so. And that has been known since ages as the secret of elegance that elegant people have a lot of speed, a lot of power, but they do it with rhythm behind it and they use less muscle effort and more of the elastic recoil of that Fascia. So if you have, so if I break the window, it's not the power of my muscles at that moment.

It's the power of the elastic recoil in the Fascia here. So it's a Fascia power that is very, very strong. But of course it's been collecting the power that comes from my finger over many oscillations and also of gravity into it. So it's been called the catapult effect. You can now play with Eh, changing the lengths of the pendulum and you will see that you need to find a shorter resume. So if you change different lengths, one half of it and you do it with closed eyes, computer would take a lot of time to calculate what the right moment is to live.

But most of you, you are experts in that because we use a lot of our childhood to play with elastic pendulums because they are associated with a sense of effortlessness and, and with elegance and endless fun. So if I lift the finger here with lots of real power, I can do it now. Yes, yes, Eh, I'm exercising. I will have big muscles at the end of the day. But it doesn't have the same elegance as if you're doing this here. So that is only reasonably that that has been discovered.

You can play with these and we collect them afterwards, uh, when diva will be doing our lesson or when you go out dancing, maybe later you're doing the same depending on the rhythm. You look for your lengths of the Achilles Tendon, the length of your lumbar Fascia, what resin fits for you in such a way that you have an elegance ring and not and swing like that. So if the music goes like that, you won't have much fun or all you need to shorten the leverage in such a way where you use your muscles just like I'm doing a year to the pre tighten or to shorten the length of your lumbar Dorsal Fascia that you may hear of your new kill Fascia or of the Fascia in your cuffs here. So that basically was a new finding there that that still a big Rayer revolution due to a high resolution ultrasound that they have been showing there.

Chapter 3

Elastic Storage Function of Fascial Tissues

There is a type of Kangaroos that can jump nine meters. So that's almost to the end of this room here and they used to think that they have very, very strong leg muscles, but if you look at them, their muscles are not very strong in terms of volume, so they thought they have very highly explosive muscle fiber types in them, so looked when they have a problem always in the muscles for the solution, but no matter how long they look, they couldn't find any explosive or more rapidly contracting muscle fibers in Kangaroos. Then in Koala bears then out of these payers, they look not in the muscles, but they looked in the tenants in the federal connective tissues and they are, they found that they do have the same storage capacity as stainless steel has stainless steel, has more than 95% storage capacity for kinetic energy and only few percent is is turned into into heat. If you do that with this here, you, you, you there there is not much kinetic energy stored in it and they found that Kangaroos as opposed to Koala bales or to other animals that they are, Fascia has a very high storage capacity, same capacity as stainless steel that you have there and you can measure that.

So if you put energy into it or movement interchange to it, how much movement comes back from it. They also found it in antelopes. Antelopes also have a very high storage capacity and they, that's why they can Trump so rapidly, but they don't have big muscles in it and it's been called the catapult effect because in a catapult the speed and the power of the real movement does not come from the muscles of the man who have been working on it before. It comes from the recoil of the stored kinetic energy that there, the elastic tissues have been storing and then are returning. So that's been called the catapult effect. And then after they found it in Kangaroos, after they found it in antelopes, they found it in another animal.

In us in homosapiens we have the same high storage capacity as stainless steel has as antelopes have and as Kangaroos have and that unique chimpanzees don't have that gorilla don't have that. Homosapiens is is an antelope, it's, it's made as an endurance runner and we can out run most of the other animals there if they are trained and if we are trained so we can run so we can outdo on them in a way where we run more efficiently and after two hours the latest we have our dinner for the evening because we can conserve energy much, much better there. So that was a new discovery that has now led to the basis of what we now call federal fitness of Fascia oriented training approach. Also because in other studies it has been shown that the storage capacity of Human Fascia can be trained. So whether you are a Koala bear or whether you are a kangaroo, depends on how many hours you have been jumping and how many hours you have been sitting in front of your computer gets set, which activity you end up like a Koala bear and at which activity you will end up as as a enter lowboy as a kangaroo.

So in this study here, they compared the falls and the allegation cough in untrained people. So here is how if you stretch the equal the standard and then you let go in untrained people and you see that it bounces backwards with some kind of delay. So this is like me pushing into a mattress and it comes back with a reset delay. So we call that creep our VISCO LST CT, which is different than a highly elastic metal spring here. And that's very interesting. For those of you who are body workers, if you touch the tissue and people who are healthy, it feels like a metal spring on elastic spring.

If you touch a piece of the body that has been injured or that has an edema, has swelling in it or people who have some kind of pathology, it comes more back like your mattress comes back or foam mattress comes back. So there is a lack of energy into it so it doesn't have the same storage capacity. So this is you before as a quality Bayer, after several months of appropriate training and the question will come up, what is appropriate training, but here they used a high resistance rate machines in order to stretch the connective tissues and you can see that they actually achieved that. The tissue gets more kangaroo like so that it has a higher storage capacity. And that may be the difference between you going downstairs and your daughter going downstairs, not only in the way how it sounds, but also in the way how it looks. So young people move more like Kangaroos in the very, how they do that.

That of course can be related to a lot of things, but it could be among other things be related to a higher storage capacity or more LSD. CT, you would call it in their factual connectivity. Serious. Um, also the architecture changes a lot that has been shown in young people. The fascia often shows a crisscross lattice like orientation, which is shown very nicely here. So here you have two main fiber directions. And the uniqueness of that panty hose here is that you can elongate it very, very much without hearing it. And it still has LSD city in it.

And that's not necessarily a property of the material because if you pull in one direction here from upper left to lower right, it doesn't yield very much. So the material is not very elastic if you look at the material only. But if you put in the right architecture, you change everything in it. So whether you are Fascia in the lower leg is like this or whether it is like that, it has a huge difference. And that's what professor showers and already in the late nineties of the last centuries discovered that young women have more crisscross letters like fiber architecture and older women and women who have not so good Venice sufficiency. So they get thick legs when they go on the overseas flight, et Cetera.

They have more a multidirectional fiber orientation. Interesting enough when you use a microscope to look at the individual college and fibers, so I had one of those, you see that healthy and young people have a lot of what's called crimp ray for motion for formation and that most likely, so it's like a two dimensional metal spring is related to the recoil capacity because older rats and older humans have been shown under the microscope to have less [inaudible] formation. So as you get older, and that may be one of the reasons why you don't bounce so nicely when you go down the stairs or up the stairs as your young daughter is because you don't have that storage capacity. You have lost it here. The beautiful news based on read studies is if you start to do appropriate fascia oriented training, again more rapid bouncing movement, you can reintroduce, you can shape your Fascia that you do have more crimp after the training. So that has been shown in rats. Most likely there'll be true also for humans. But that is the research of its best.

We wanted this to happen but we didn't know. But now we know it from rat studies. If you do fashion oriented training, you can reintroduce LSD city and change the architecture in such a way that you have more Clint, more elastic curls in your fascia. You're doing the right thing by bouncing there. So also lack of exercise has been shown to lead to a multidirectional arrangement and what we believe, but that hasn't been shown yet, is that if you're then do appropriate scratch that you will shape also the fiber orientation. So at your next over now overseas flight, you don't need go to to ask for a fashion like stalking because your body has it already under the skin. So, so my,

Chapter 4

Fascial Release

so far to the scientific discoveries that have led now to what's been called fresher training, and I will introduce you the four principles that then devote Millerville take afterwards into practical application. So we belong to an international group that has been centered around core group, around [inaudible] university and also Tom Myers here in the United States.

This has been taking fashion research news into the field of movement experts, mostly movement experts that come from a somatic perspective. So in which their felt body is very important and not just how many reputations you can do. So this is the field that we have been introducing. We call our approach federal fitness, but many people call it something different. Basically it means adding a missing piece into an already existing knowledge base that yoga people, politesse people, some personal fitness people already have. So we are not trying to replace anything.

We are not saying we are better than Pilard is far away from that. But we can offer you a piece that you may have not had so far and most likely that will make your work better and more comprehensive. So this, I will go through the basic principles, federal release where we work with these foam rollers, for example, federal stretch, rebound, LSD city. Guess what? That's what we have been just a covering. And finally very important, the sensory refinement. So let's start with the federal release. The question is when you are working with these foam rollers, for example, or with some balls under your plantar Fascia, what are you doing there?

Why is it so efficient in many people and how much pressure should you use? How rapidly should you work with them? What we are offering is an approach to look at the water content and that's been based in a study that we did at own university for several years where we looked at the water content in Fascia Fascia, even the dense achilles tendon consists of two thirds of water. If you're a rapper, rate the water out it ways only a third less than half of what it is before even the Sturdy Achilles tendon if you then apply stretch to it. And that's what we did in Oregon bars.

So we took her out Fascia and we applied a considerable stretch, not enough to tear it, but a considerable stretch. And we measured the water content before and after the stretch and you see that in all the tissues there was a significant decrease of water. So when you are stretching, but also when you're hopping on the Achilles tendon and doing the loading, the killer sending get stretched, so whatever you call it, but basically it gets powerfully elongated, stretched. You're squeezing water out of the tendon and then it takes a time for new water to come back. Most likely the molecules that then that then come back to attach themselves on the same collagen fibers, elastin fibers, et cetera on the tissues are not exactly the same molecules. Again, you will have fresh water, some of the water will come out of the blood plasma, so it's clean water that has a higher affinity to attach themselves with the collagen fibers with the ground substance on the inside.

So it's like squeezing a sponge and we have been showing that. Interesting enough. New Research has shown that the speed at which you squeeze the water out of the tissue makes a big difference and that's been based on very new re insights that were just shared at the last most recent Fascia congress where they showed that the fibro blast, there should be a B in a year. That the connective tissue cells, they sense your stretch, they sense your jogging with their soft hair like Celia, Celia are these soft tentacles that their original cells in the ocean had two sense. They are liquid environment and then to respond from the cell and we used to think that the Cilia, which most cells still have are useless in most of them. Some use them of course to move along or to move particles in the nose, et cetera.

But from the fiber blast we were not aware that they have a bigger function. Now very new research has shown how they sense whether you are jumping or whether you are stretching is through their hair like Celia on the outside and they sense how rapidly the water flows around them. So when you are stretching, you are moving water around the cells and the cells measure how rapidly is the water shifted around themselves. If you move with very rapidly, it's been shown that that builds up stronger. Collagen can even lead to inflammatory cytokines. So if you want to build up more tonicity for example here or here you would want to do rapid movements so that a couple of months later you have more dense collagen.

But if you work on a scar tissue or on your frozen shoulder here you want to move one or two millimeters per breathing cycle, not one centimeter. And that's something you need to really slow down. So when you were here, most people they roll within one breathing cycle with within one inhalation exhalation, they are moving two centimeters. The research has shown that is too rapid. If you want a break down college and if you wait, I want to make something softer. So that has been shown in cell culture. Most likely it will be also true for humans, but we don't know for sure.

But it's the best that the people are out there who are doing the research can tell us today. So if you want to build up connective tissue stability, do more rapid movements on these rollers and single think not so much about creating pressure but of shifting water out of a sponge at a certain speed. And if you want to make something softer, you want to do it as slow as possible where it's still a continuous movement without stopping in between. So so far to the fatal release. So we work a lot. Eva will show you that we see is rollers.

For us it's a sponge squeezing activity and a very interesting enough also. So let's go back to that a, the research of Cherry Polak, one of their water scientists that spoke to us at the Fascia Research Congress has shown that the maturity of the water in healthy bodies is in a bound state where it behaves like a liquid crystal in which the water molecules arrange very much in parallel to each other. And when you squeeze the water out, you screen some of the dirty water out. That has not been like a liquid crystal dirty in parenthesis. It has a lot of, a lot of free radicals and race products in it, and then the new water that comes out of the blood plasma has a higher affinity to become like a liquid crystal. So that was a very new insight for our, for some of us. So we want to squeeze water out into all the different pockets.

Unfortunately, how much you drink per day doesn't make a damn difference from most of us unless you're very old, unless you have some pathological changes or unless you run for longer than one hour, how much you drink does make a difference. Whether you're doing half a liter or four leaders, it just goes down the tube, it doesn't go into your Achilles tendon. How you get it into your Achilles tendon is by stretching and squeezing the sponge into every little pocket that then it can get rejuvenated again with fresh water. Basically, as we get older, we get drier and the question is how can I get blood plasma back into all the little dry pockets that have been sitting there? So that's a festival release that we do a lot and you feel more rejuvenated afterwards. And I recommend you add that if you haven't done it yet into European artist practice. And that's one of the things that is happening there.

There are many other things happening. It's appropriate septic training, you are stimulating some pressure Receptos etc. But our suggestion would be think about the sponge squeezing, rejuvenation that you are inducing them. So fat and stretch,

Chapter 5

Fascial Stretch & Chimpanzee Gymnastics

we come to the main thing to the elastic recoil capacity and are now to the 30 I've been shoving here to the federalist stretch. And in sport science, if you look at stretching books, it's usually isolated muscles. So this is a typical Giagos stretch where you isolate stretching the quadriceps from stretching the hip extensors, etc. And you do for every muscle group you do your stretching and then you think you have stretched everything.

And of course it's not true because they all work in long chains. So if you look at the 10 tech of the model, then you would look for long stretches where you have the whole chain. So if you do a stretch, you always ask yourself how can it affect the body in a larger dimension? How would I need to hold my head? How would I need to hold my toes? That I can extend the stretch into associated myofascial connective tissues.

So this is muscle stretching. This is facial stretching that you see here. For most of you it's not new for the sports people, it is new because they have been including the whitest use in it. Also, if you do these stretches, we recommend you vary the angle. In sports stretching, you find the perfect angle and you repeat it because the muscles are often shaped like that. Fresh year usually is shaped like a membrane. So if you repeat the same stretch, it's stupid. If you go at a different angle, you reach different aspects of this membrane like shirt.

So we thought we recommend you always. So here you see the lever doing the stretch. Sometimes she goes a little bit with her tailbone over the right heel over the left heel. Sometimes she stretches with the right hand for which like a cat is doing. If you see the way how animals stretch, which is called [inaudible], they are all wearing the angle and looking for the lar long as possible stretch and also the most pleasurable stretch.

And this is Fattal stretch as opposed to muscle stretch here. So if you then go in in a gym, you look for equipment that allows you always also to vary the angle into different directions. So please change an alternate with the different directions that you are, uh, apply there. That is very much related to our new hypothesis, which is very hot. It's not yet ultimately proven, but more and more people supported that has been looking at the reason why homosapiens has so much more joined pathologies than chimpanzees have.

If you look at chimpanzees that you live in their natural environment, chimpanzees in bed, Su and environment also develop the same arthrosis. Rheumatory arthritis and other pathologies as humans have. If they don't have enough natural habitat hardware, they can swing and dance and jump, et cetera. And they have been looking at which joints do we tend to develop? All these joint degenerations and usually it's hip joints.

It's a neck, it's the ankles, but rarely at the elbow do you have arthrosis happening? And they made a correlation and there's videotapes. They looked at how do chimpanzees load their body when they are in their natural habitat as compared with humans. So videotaping your doing the whole week, I don't know about your life or you and then you compare. How often does she extend hype turned all the way.

How often is she hanging from a tree? How often is she reaching all the way backwards and you make a mathematical correlation compared with a chimpanzee and then they found a almost one to one correlation that those shines in which you move like a monkey. You will be healthy. Those joints in which you only move that fraction of what a monkey moves it, you'll start to age, not because of overloading but because of underloading. So we have been looking at activities that have that, that have a better loading, where if we had have less loading, that's stupid.

Most of us, we are designed for a very active lifestyle and the lifestyle in which the joints and the connective tissues around the joints are loaded Ed wide angle. And the hypothesis is if you move more like a monkey, you'll will stay as healthy in terms of your connective tissues, in terms of your joints as a monkey is. So we need to introduce monkey gymnastics and see so and so. It's not doing more but at different angles to load it in the stretch position to load it in the most close pack position. And because if you look at the way how arthrosis for example, develops a Dillon at the hip joint, it's not where you have the loading, it's at the corners, that's where they are throws. This develops.

So it's the unused arc that starts to develop garbage that starts to become inflammatory cycles that then even goes to the used arc dimensions. So this basically an invitation move like a monkey. And if you look at the way how our Pilatos is structured, how yoga is structured, you do, you get into all these monkey like positions that your normal desk life would not have. Have you have you do it. So now we look at how do the different Fattal connected features in the muscles behave with different types of loading. This is their classical, the illustration of a muscle where you have the contractile fibers acting Miocene fiber shown here on the left and here you have the tenderness fibers.

So that would be their killer standard for example, or the different tenderness attachments of a long muscle, but you're also half color, half collab collagenous fibers that go perpendicular. I call them the Schwartzenegger fibers. So if I would be on old Schwartzenegger, I could make my shirt tear here and you have stretch in the opposite direction there. So he has been exercising these fibers, but you also have fibers that go from one muscle to the muscle next to it and how slippery they are. How much can your biceps contract without being held at the triceps? So your range of motion, your elegance depends also how much adhesions or how much LSD city you have in these fibers. And finally you have fibers that run parallel to the muscle fibers.

Of course you have many of them that are a combination, but I'm doing that for simplification. How different types of movement stretch different fashional elements. So let's look at the first mode here. This is the classical shout [inaudible] where somebody is contracting the muscle by active muscle contraction. This actually stretches the tendon as you can see here.

So somebody who is doing classical raid lifting, we'll have a stronger tendon. Then somebody's always doing desk work. They are not just loading the muscle fibers who are getting stronger, but they also get a stronger achilles tendon. They will not get a stronger fasher that runs parallel in the epimysium or on the inside of the muscle because they are not stretching it. So they are just giving it leg. But they will stretch fibers here. So interesting enough, somebody who is doing weightlifting, they have a better Achilles' tendon than somebody.

And we'll look at that as the next thing. Who has been doing 10 hours of Hatha Yoga, stretching every day. Because if you do classical stretching, let's see this where the muscle is relaxed or it means the muscle that you are elongating is relaxed. So it is soft here, the contractile elements as opposed to that. Of course you get a stretch in these fibers who are Palo Alto it because you have an allegation, you do not get a stretch in these fibers, but you get a very nice stretch in these extra muscular fibers. So Yoga people, you would expect to have less adhesions and to have more mobility between one muscle group and the other Muslim group. But they are attendants. You would expect to be as brutal as dry as that of your grand mother who has been sitting at the desk all day because it's never been loaded.

And the reason is because the tenant, let's see if I can do that here is arranged in theories. So they are arranged in one direction with the muscle fibers. Yes, I heard. Okay, so here is a muscle fibers and they are relaxed per definition in a, in a Hatha Yoga stretch. So you're extending your heel rather than pushing it back. So this is soft. The collagen of course has more stiffness than a relaxed muscle and you stretch the whole thing and all the stretch is taking up by the soft element but not in the Achilla sten. And that what they're, what the research has shown, the tendon only gets stretched if the muscle is stiff. If the muscle is soft, the tendon will not lengths in one millimeter. That's different with the faculties use, which are on the inside.

So if these fibers are in parallel to the muscle and you pull on them and of course you get enough stretch. So it means the classical melting stretch, which is great, doesn't get everything. It gets a lot of the festival elements, but you lose out on the tenants as part of the federal Rep. Where as if you then once a while include what some people call an active stretch in which the long muscle, so you go into an extension a year for example, and you bring your weight here so that you will actually have your pectoral muscle. Not long, but actually resist. So it's actively contracting. Your cat is doing it very well. It goes far melting stretch as long as it can until it gets a leather couch that's very expensive and then it has a lot of fun to contract the muscle fibers in the long position and then it can jump on your cable without making any sound because it's a killer tendon.

Everything is just like highly elastic in it, so we recommend that once a while you become, you do the stretches like a cat is doing in which you actively contract the muscle fibers in the long position because then you get all the benefits of the, of the hotter yoga stretch, but you also reach the tenderness elements at the end of it.

Chapter 6

Rebound Elasticity

Finally, rebound our society. The main thing according to me in federal fitness, looking at the catapult effect, we invite you to carefully incorporate, again, elastic bouncing movements. You know they have been banned in the last three or four decades. Your mother used to do them in the fitness power cooler.

They used to stretch like that and then we run office came along and have been preaching to them that this is not healthy. You're injuring themselves and that educated people should not do bouncing movement that they should do melting moments. We have been doing that for three decades on a very sin scientific basis. The studies were very soon on that. Nobody really checked that we all, we all have been preaching that now we need to call our all our clients back if we could do and tell them, I'm sorry I told you the wrong thing. You know, sometimes it can be beneficial to do bouncing stretches for the reason that I chose showed, but also for the reason that you can call the rate that you can reintroduce cream into it. So a Divo will be taking your through exercises where you may feel like a like a child again where it's all about skipping, hopping with the sense of effortlessness movement in which your, the muscles are only doing minute work, but you get the maximum out of fun out of it symbol like you have been doing this uh, uh, subtle swing of which you have been getting here.

When you do that, it's very important that you are wide injury. And that is one of the reasons why this has been banned because if people start swinging in their fitness gym with their weights, their injury rate will be very, very high. And that's what we also learned, particularly young men, they get such a sense of fun out of it that they overdo it. So they like it and then they do a little bit too much. And every force man, every fifth man, after you show them these movements comes back and has done too much and you lose three weeks, you have to wait until the injury that's usually in the Fascia has been recovered and then you can continue. So it's very important that you associate that with the force element that we'll be covering with the sensory refinement.

So rather than doing a pushup with muscles, you're doing a Fastenal pull or push up, for example, bouncing at the wall and the principle is you make the least possible sound. The same thing in jumping, so that was too loud. So, so you try to get a quality in which if you're having an accelerant meter or something, measuring the speed of the movement, you don't have rapid jerky movements. You would have jerky movements if your pressure is like that. So there you have jerky movements, but if you utilize the elastic recoil, the movement will have a sinusoidal shape in which the dampening starts early on and where there is not a sudden change in the direction. Some of you have followed the whole baffled running discussion in the last few years. A lot of that is related to whether you want to train your muscles or you want to train your Fascia when running poses good.

But if you want to train model the federal properties in your Plantar Fascia, which is for the architecture of the foot, more important than the muscles for example. Uh, then to utilize the Sinusoidal, um, shape is much, much better. So they have been shown people who are using more thinner soles in their feet. So almost like minimal shoes or no shoes at all that they run in a way in which you have a less harsh landing of the heel in it. And that's of course the storage capacity that you have there. So when you're bouncing at the wall, when you're bound, when you're jumping, you wanna train your ear first and later you can train your body that you have as little jerks as possible and as much dampening in the movement as possible.

And then you can use your ear. So when you come back home tonight, see how much sound you make when you hop down and up the stairs. On some days you are like a kangaroo and some days you are more like an elephant independent of your body weight. And it depends whether you do it with muscles or you do it with Special Ellis density unit. So this is then very important if you want to become like a an antelope. If you want to become like a Ninja warrior who is doing a lot of jumps without making any sound, the secret is preparatory counter movement.

So in what eva will be doing here, the flying salt where you take away it and you and you swing down. If you would be cutting good, you would be initiating their downward movement with your hand and you would be stabilizing here, which is good if you need precision. But if you want to do oscillation movement where you want to do the movement swinging a hundred times during the day by working on the fields, et Cetera, then you go first backwards into the opposite direction. Then the intended power direction. So you swing backwards that way. You stretch all your Fascia here and the forward movement is an, is not initiated at the rate it's initiated at the chest bone or the pelvis.

And then the rest follows like an elastic pendulum in the movement. So you have the preparatory counter movement in the opposite direction and the real movement is initiated with a proximal part of the body. Proximal means more towards the center of the body and then you'll utilize the most elastic recall in the movement. And also it looks more elegant if you look at it afterwards. So then you realize that the rates said we have in the gym, they are usually associated with muscles and with masculine martial power, they are not associated with elegance that we have there. So for example, this company now has started, it's called new world where they use weights that are more sensors to have in your hands and you feel like you want to become a more elegant move.

Or when you, when you do the difference being in movements that you have there. And I recommend you that you play with incorporating that into your, uh, platas practice once a while in order to train the faculty connective tissues that you have there. Finally,

Chapter 7

Sensory Refinement

the last and maybe most important element to close this lecture is sensory refinement. Because fashion has been shown to be a sensory organ. It's most likely our largest and richest sensory organ for feeling our own bodies of what we call proprioception. 2030 years ago, probably a perception was understood to come mostly from the joint capsules from the so-called joint receptors, joint capsules and ligaments close to the joint from the muscle spindles and from the skin. Fascia was considered to be just a pecking organ, but now they realized that the joint receptors only fire at the end range of motion but not where you want to have your clients be able to feel. So here they fire and here, but you want your client to feel whether they have a neutral spine or slight flection, et Cetera, and they are, the stretch in the joint capsule is not big enough, but Fascia, which is much more closer under the skin has much more joint receptors that can detect small degrees of movement.

And that has been a really exciting field. You have different types of, most of them are stretch receptors. Only a minority are compression receptors in your fascia everywhere. And that's why we say you need to include Fascia as a sensory organ into these movements. Not only to avoid injury if you do these bouncing movements again, but because also Fascia is such a, a wonderful sensory organ. So if you feel your body don't tell, people do feel their muscles, but to feel the stretch when they are bending forward under the skin. So the layers of Fascia under the skin have their highest, uh, density of propioceptive, uh, receptors that are layers that are close to the joint don't have that much.

So that's a new insight that came there. Probably Assumption, which we now know is mostly based in the Fastenal net. The muscle spindles are also due to, uh, are also related to proprioception. But the amount of master spindle said you have is very minute compared to is the, you have about six times more receptors in the Fascia of a muscle than in the spindles of a muscle. So that's why we think the fatter proprioception is much, much more powerful. And we know that proprioception and myofascial pain, it's different for visceral pain and for headaches, but myofascial pain, like low back pain, etc.

They are like oil and water to each other. So if you increase proprioception in the Fascia, there is no chance for pain to be there. If for whatever reason you decrease propioception that has been done in experiments, there's central, the spinal cord has cells that always want input. They are called wide dynamic range receptors. If they get proprioception there is, they are happy if they don't get proprioception, they are fishing until they finally find a potential nociception that you are unaware is slightly as symmetric at this moment that you have been loading bar there.

And so they are lowering their threshold for potential irritation and then just you with 300 grams of pressure, she will scream at me, why are you torturing me? And it's only because we have been putting proprioception array. So what you are doing as a pilot, as PE teacher, as a yoga teacher is you get people to increase their efferent input to the spinal cord that comes from propioception and then they can have their underwear in different angles and it's not creating any pain to them. So that is very important. So it's like oil and water and you can push one up. You can push the other down, whatever direction you want to go.

Of course our direction is increase proprioception. Whereas proprioception based maturity is not in the muscles. It's in the Tesla envelope. Here we have all the four elements that we will go through with you and the last two or three slides. It's just to give you an a time expectation how long you would need to practice in this kind of festival. Uh, training elements. This is very mind blowing to me.

If you do exercise in the next 24 hours, there is an increase of Collagen synthesis. So the fibroblasts, they sent the rapid movement around their Celia and they put use more Collagen, which is what you want to have in most cases. So the thought that you can jump down like a cat from the table and your Achilles tendon will not tail and you will not make a sound hopefully. So, so that you have elastic collagen increase there. But also during the same 24 hours, the collagen degradation is also increased. So the cells also are like garbage man that eat array Collagen, usually the older collagen. But during the first 24 hours, their degradation is larger than the synthesis. And the net product is minors.

So it means if you exercise every day, it may be fine to build our muscles. It may be fined for your brain, it may be fine for the anti-aging hormones so that you create by exercise, but you may actually may college and weaker. So if you are doing bouncing exercises, our recommendation is to do them only every two times or three times a week at the most because then you are in this face in which you create more collision, then you eat a rate so then you can jump down from the table and your Achilles tendon is not herring by it. So it means if you do fashion oriented training, do it only once or twice a week because pressure response slowly to that. So this is basically our last slide here where we recommend you add fascia oriented training elements of these four disciplines. The release with the Rolos, with the balls, et Cetera, the stretch, the bounces and refinement, which are an essential element.

So you're going different directions, etc. That you add them into your practice once or twice a week to be on the safe side because fashion responds slower than muscles. If you invest into muscles, you have a rapid increase. So it's like a a financial investment where you get strong increases in the first couple of years, but then it stagnates. So if you go into muscle tomb, you have a rapid growth in muscle strengths but also muscle volume in the first couple of months.

And then you have to exercise like a mad man for tiny increases and then you have a flu and you all lose it. Again, if you invest into Fascia, it's more like a gardener or particularly a Bandol gardener where you water it every week just a little bit and it grows a tiny bit. Your neighbor who invest into muscles already has giant two trees there, but your bamboo grows very small. When histories are stopping to grow, your bamboo continues to grow months by months, by months, and at the end it will be stronger than the muscle man is. So at least to certain movements and it will continue to grow. So they're half life of college and is approximately one year.

So because it's an exponential curve it means in two years you use, you have about 75% of your collagen renewed. So in the way you live in a heart and the heart is made out of out of fibers. Some of the fibers are rotten and old and they feel like it. If you do fashion oriented exercises after one year, half of the fibers of your heart, half of the fibers of your killer sending our elastic ones, nice green color in my fantasy, not the brown dark dry fibers of the hut of of the old tissue. After half a year you have about a third of it already.

So we think if you actually our experience as a bag set up, if you do fresh year oriented bounces and stretches, you can expect to see a difference not in three weeks but in half a year and you are destined to see a difference in one or two years. So in, in a matter between six months and 24 months you would be able to run you your faster body. By having new collagen built into it. So it's slow investment and you think more like a gardener, then a trainer of a dog who is, who is saying I'm, I'm getting the most out of it. So it's more like a plan like approach. So this was my introduction into the theoretical basis of the Fastenal fitness approach. That diva mellow will be showing you after this break. And I need to say big thank you to everybody who has been supporting that whole field. If you want to study Fascia, you need to be a networker and because Fascia is a network, so our laboratory at own university, we have been stealing where ever we could and we invite you to also become a Eduardo take from our material. You go what you like, you can refer to us if you want to. We are happy if you do so, but combine it with your own work and we need to say thank you to many organizations that have been supporting us to Tom Myers and too many other individuals in association segway much.

Chapter 8

Questions from Audience

When you were talking about stretching with resistance, it made me think of East centric attraction. Yes. And is that the same thing?

And my other question is all about fibromyalgia because in which I've dealt with in my life and it feels like it's an overload of sensation, not appropriate reception, too much sensation. And so I wondered what you had to say about that whole package of, you know, that whole question. Miles is a big one. Yeah. Yeah. So, so do I need to repeat? I think it was pretty clear. Yeah. So the penny correlation that I've been describing in the cat, a lot of that is eccentric contraction. So the muscle is resisting, so it's not really moving the leather couch back to you, but it's kind of resisting a further stretch in the muscles in there.

And that's also where the delayed onset muscle soreness is created more by eccentric contraction. And that's creating Fattal injuries. So we think when you're doing eccentric movements, they, it may affect Fascia more then the muscles. So that's the speculation at this moment. And, uh, then the big question is, is delayed onset muscle soreness? Good or should you go wide it? Our grandparents said yes if you get delayed or Ya, if your muscle is sore, it mean it means you have exercise to the right cap, uh, magnitude. If you exercise without muscle Saunas, you haven't done enough.

So you need to suffer. And in last couple of years we used to think more, let's exercise enough but not go all the way into muscle Saunas and you may get more out of it at the moment. People tend to swing more back. That delayed muscle saw that the muscle soreness is actually a sign that the body is investing into building up Fascia so that you build up more culture than in the Fascia. Then you build up muscles and unease. So it would carefully mean if you have some muscles. It's not, Eh, it is not that. I wouldn't say if you don't have some muscles, you haven't done enough. But interestingly enough, the eccentric contractions, they, they, they create more sore muscles. They tend to be good for creating Fattal strengths. So particularly it would be good to build a, to find movements like enrolling machines, et Cetera, where you get a saw lumber fascia without injuring any disks for example.

And the question is, how can you build up La, La, the lst city and the thickness in the lumber fasher there your second question about fibromyalgea. Uh, nobody understands it really. FIBROMYALGEA I just had contact with the leading people in Germany. They had a big institute, lots of money and they have been focusing on fibromyalgia and no breakthrough still. Uh, there is uh, Fascia Nardo how she calls herself a Fascia oriented scientist. Uh, she never Lipton in Canada. She has been focusing on the federal component in Fargo Maltia and she wrote a beautiful book on it and she reports to studies that showed that the endo museum is seeker in people who have fibromyalgia that could be cause or effect, but there is a federal component associated with that.

It could be similar rate speculation to the increase in allergic immune cysts in the immune system. We have an increase in allergies reasonably. So people have allergic reactions to almost anything our grandmothers didn't have that. And studies have shown that people who grow up in, in a more dirty environment, so on farms that they are less prone for allergic overreactions of their immune system. So now it should the live moderate. He, I'm so, so, so, so it brings up [inaudible] it brings up all kinds of questions, but it means a lack of resilience training. And there is now a way to look at fibromyalgia. The biggest correlation of anything you have, she has shown is one psychological component.

It's not a mechanical component and they are not more intelligent. They are not more afraid, but their resilience is to a medically lower than other people. How do you cope with difficulties when, when you are having success? That's fine. When you have a low. So when you are down, that's also different. But when you lose [inaudible] so when somebody is rouse you on your nose, how do you recover?

And there are psychological questionnaires that are measuring resilience as a psychological dimension. How so? How do you cope with, uh, with, uh, changes into a negative direction in your environment? Do you say? I knew it, that will be the end of the world. Uh, do you say, uh, that's an invitation for me to recover. And fibromyalgia is highly associated with a lack of, of resilience and, and more than any OSA as a, than any other psychological dimension. So maybe, and that's the only speculative, speculative, Eh, you need to look at a healthy way for people. How can you train your resilience? So you need to have growth hormones.

So then the big question comes as far not only fibromyalgia, what kind of nutrition, what other lifestyle changes are good for connective tissues? Lack of sleep is not good. Your [inaudible] needs a h t h Tuba Sr gross home on there. So the fibromyalgia people, they often don't, they are not able to do sports because they, uh, everything hurts afterwards and they also have lack of sleep. So both of them is, is, is, uh, is not very good for them.

We know that there are changes in Seratonin function, but we don't know whether that's cause or effect there. So no clear solution but a psychological dimension. But maybe also the environmental dimension is how can you build up resilience and you don't do that overnight. Yeah. You were saying something about yoga and um, I was understanding you as it though you didn't load or there wasn't enough resistance. Ah, in the Hata Yoga.

Yeah. And that they got great old tendons but they were more liquidy elsewhere. Yeah. So how about when say like you grab an ankle and you kick and resist against your own hand. Is it the same as the cat pressing against the cow? If the long muscle is activated in the long position, that would be sufficient.

Whether it's four millisecond by doing mini bounces. So if you do like five little mini balances, we believe that is sufficient. They [inaudible] interesting. You need to have a high intensity loading in order to switch the fibroblasts to produce more collagen. If you do a hundred reputations at medium loading, they are not reacting. If you do maybe 10 reputations at high loading that then the switch is made and they produce more collagen during the next 48 hours.

So in p and f they have been doing a hold the position for 60 seconds with 70% and then they used to think, so here for example, or here if you actually, if you activate the muscle that it's so tired afterwards that you would have a lack of EMG muscle activation afterwards. Beautiful theory until you start to measure it. They started to measure it. And if you do a PNF stretch after the contraction, there is a to or contraction, which is higher than before everything. But you do have increased range of motion.

So the increased range of motion that you have is not muscle fibers relaxing actin myosin, it's Collagen going through a stretch and that's where we have the viscoelastic creep. I didn't get that into here. So the Collagen is like chill out in snake gelatin is cooked Collagen and this would be your killer standing on the side in which you're not stretching. Here you are stretching, stretching, stretching, and you're doing the PNF stretching and then you say, this is long haul and you do your range of motion tests and two minutes later it's still longer. By the time they get up to the bakery afterwards, it's as short as before. So you can do it every day and just a risk or elastic creep.

Defamation it has has little to do with the muscles and that it has more to do with Collagen. Basically, there is a sponge and you squeeze some water out of it, so your daughter loves it. Loves the trampoline. I love you too. Or you like it too because it's a great training for the sense of effortless movement that they have this choice. If you find the right rhythm, it doesn't feel like you're doing much, but the trampoline functions best if you stiffen your body at the moment of return, a softball trumps better on a hard ground. A hardball chumps better on a trampoline. So if you have two elastic elements and you couple them, usually they diminish each other. But if you have one trampoline and you have a stiff robot, you chump the best. So actually jumping on the robot, uh, jumping on a trampoline is good for the trampolines and, and it's good for your lymphatic system and many, many other things, but you're actually not doing much festival recoil in it because you're stiffening at the moment. So what we want is people that they jump on the trampoline because it's similar like you were doing with the swing.

What is the best racism related to the ion fragrance to the inherent frequency of that trampoline of your body, et Cetera. And you find the right rhythm and you feel like you can jump forever. Then you get off the trampoline and you find the tremble in your own body and then you try and then you jump on the floor like this and you find a different wisdom, but you get to see the same sense of lightness that you have in there. There was a brilliant study done in Africa with women carrying up to 40% of their body weight. You can calculate how much that is for you in terms of kilograms on their head by walking, without burning any more energy or oxygen compared with not carrying that much weight. And that's a contradiction to everything we know.

So they try to understand it. They had British soldiers also doing it and they would of course burn more oxygen in walking with weight and without weight. Finally, they changed the speed of walking and that's where the trampoline is school. When the woman had to walk slower or more rapidly than their comfort speed was, they also burned more oxygen. But when they walked at the speed that they had been learning is exactly the Eigen, the inherent frequency of the system.

They could do it forever. So if I would give you that swing and you would do 2000 bounces a day, you wouldn't have any sore muscles there. If you have the right frequency, even if it's a heavy swing and you do the bouncing in a horizontal direction. So it means we need to train our nervous system to find the right frequency and the trampoline is great for that. Okay. Thank you very much.

Fascial Fitness Class