July's Myolastic Project workshop

The Myolastic project is a fascial research project to question our ideas of how movement and fascia are connected. I co-founded the project with Laurie Booth and we presented at the British Fascia symposium in May this year. The workshops and classes are continuously evolving our ideas.
This is a record of the workshop held over the last weekend.

Blog on Sunday Workshop 20^th July 2014

This weekend’s workshop was based around the theme of Ebb and Flow.

If you check the dictionary it means ‘a recurrent pattern of coming and going or decline and re-growth’.

We also looked at the phrase ‘negative plasticity’ again looking at the dictionary, plasticity in biology means ‘ the adaptability of an organism to changes in the environment or differences between it’s various habitats’ or ‘the ability to change and adapt’ so does that make the definition for negative plasticity ‘not changing’ or does it mean that nothing changes without a trace of what went before.

All movement involves a simple Ebb and Flow, an up and down, forward and backward, an in and out (spiral?), some movements are simple, some complex. All body systems work to this simple pattern, some involve pumps such as our circulatory system where the heart pumps blood, the cranial sacral system which involves simple valves, our digestive system using peristalsis, a simple constriction and relaxation of muscles to create wave like movements which push the contents through the system. Our breath relies on a gaseous exchange and our cells exchange nutrients on a daily basis. Other systems rely upon movement to flow. Our body loves rhythm and it when this ebb and flow is disrupted we get dis-ease.

It is believed that our fascial body wide network is a system built upon the principles of biotensegrity. It is constantly under pressure, and made up of compressive and tensional elements, balancing to create shape and space, simultaneously separating and connecting our body’s tissues. These examples of oppositions occurring in the body, in a rhythm, is in itself recurrent and worth more exploration. Could it be that we operate on a simple on-off binary system or where movement is involved and requires direction, a polarity system.

At the workshop we explored movement using the short sticks, which closed the movement by joining our right and left hand. This closure made our normal patterns of movement: up and down, back and forth, in and out, different and so we needed more concentration, by slowing the movements we created time to listen and pay attention to our body responses. On the shooting sticks we tuned into the internal fascial dance in order to maintain balance and we felt our body responding to increased loading and explored the adaptations being made on a temporary basis by exploring the lock, load, release, flow sequence.

In discovering our body’s responses we discussed the responses fascia has to increased or changes in load. We all know that our body continually renews itself. The speed of renewal slows with age and it has been shown that even the brain has plasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change as a result of experience or neuroplasticity.

Our fascia is continuously responding to our environment and movement patterns and can therefore be said to be plastic in nature, however does it really completely change or is there always a memory or shadow of the past? Is it like an old building which is refurbished, the original structure still exists behind and under the shiny new fittings.

Is our body the same, under all the new fascial network do we find an original or older framework which will sometimes resurface in some form or other. Or are we all constantly bulldozed and totally rebuilt as if new? If, as I suspect, it is a mixture of the two, what form may that resurfacing take? Could it be that the memory left is on an emotional level rather than a physical one?

Can we have  a form of fascial self-remembering.

Take a moment to think about that statement.------

We looked at the possibility that fascia holds memory in a past workshop and this notion is just a continuation of the conversation we have been having with our movement practice in subsequent workshops and weekly classes.

To my knowledge this question has not been part of any published research so the only basis we have to go on is our own experiential data flowing from these classes.

So what becomes of our shadows of memory? Where is movement memory stored and on what level.

 Recent research has identified that when describing fascial pain as opposed to muscular pain we tend to use emotional words. We noticed when working in a slow focused or conscious way we seem to access the body’s interconnectiveness, perhaps through our fascial network. We have defined two ways of moving as musculated or fascialated movement. We have noticed that when moving in a fascialated way our emotions are very close to the surface and we noticed that our language changes to reflect this.

The workshops always reveal more than we could ever plan for. This is only made possible by the engagement in the subject by the participants, so our thanks goes to this months group. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

“Between the idea

and the reality.

Between the motion

and the act.

Falls the shadow”

T.S. Elliot

Tracey Mellor

July 2014 

Little Things

Little Things

Isn't it funny that it's the simple things that can make you happy.
This week happiness for me has been watching the wheel on my electricity meter ( I have an old meter) going backwards thanks to our new solar panels. Waiting patiently for that little black line to appear in the window of the meter is very hypnotic, the 'wrongness' of the direction, the fact we are producing our own electricity and being environmentally friendly helps to cheer me up, looking at a digital display is not nearly as exciting.
My teenage children have found happiness during the installation. The scaffolding which surrounds our house is a huge climbing frame. I'll find them sitting up at roof level which gives them a different perspective on a familiar view, they have been listening to music, chatting to friends, sun bathing and contemplating life, watching sun sets and stargazing up on our temporary balcony.
It reminds me of the christmas' when they were small, when the box the present came in was more interesting than the present itself.
In this world of gadgetry, constant mental stimulation and  technology (we have lots of extra tech. with the solar power), it's the simple things which are cherished. The boys loved climbing and hanging of the scaffolding, getting back to the playground and our evolutionary roots. All of our simple observations can produce a state close to a mediative state, restful and calming.
I bet the solar panel marketing department don't advertise these benefits.

In the same way when advertising the benefits of Pilates, Yoga or Myolastic movement we concentrate on the physical benefits, however its all the small details of these practices which make the real difference, and produce real moments of happiness.
The rhythm of the breath when effortless movement is discovered, the pleasure of co-ordinated movement, the quiet pauses, doing what the body was designed to do, time away from technology and the stresses of modern life.

The whole process of observing yourself doing the simple things is hugely interesting- try it and find out for yourself.

The Fascia Timeline

Fascia time line

A subject that we keep returning to when investigating the properties of Fascia and it's relationship with movement is 'at what point in our evolution did fascia appear?' Earlier blogs refer to the jellyfish as being an early form of a Fascial organism, certainly the jelly substance in the jelly fish is a similar to fascia, but not exactly the same as the substance we find in our own body.

Recently I have been reading Phillip Bench's book 'Muscles and Meridians' in it he has answered this question of when fascia evolved.

He also refers to the. 'baupläne' or body plan which represents the rootstock or lineage of animals. The baupläne of our own species and the evolution of fascia is closely linked.

Let's look at the baupläne first.
Another way of explaining the concept of baupläne is to consider it as an operating system around which animal life is constructed. The baupläne sets parameters for all subsequent evolutionary development, to which that animal must refer.
All contemporary animal life on Earth coalesces down to 35-38 fundamental body plans or baupläne. Roughly these body plans correspond to phyla levels of classification used by zoologists. To delineate one body plan from another, crucial constructional features are looked for. Each body plan has a suite of characteristics, which interlock to form a biological operating system. Examples of constructional features looked for are, type of skeleton, symmetry, no of appendages (limbs), cleavage patterns (how our cells divide after fertilisation), segmentation and body cavity (Arthur, 1997).
By studying an animals constructional patterning you can gain insight into it's relationship with other members of the animal kingdom.

About 7 billion years ago multicellular animals emerged, these were primitive animals with no blood, gut tube or nervous system - slimes. Between 542 and 489 million years ago, in what we now refer to as the Cambrian age, the environmental conditions and the challenges for life that they presented, led to an explosion of larger multicellular animals and a bewildering array of baupläne evolved (McMenamin and McMenamin, 1990). The most amazing evolutionary change in animal life was the change from slime to animals, which could move at will, and with movement the concept of choice developed.
What happened to our baupläne to enable this most fundamental evolution in animal life? To understand this we have to consider the miracle of conception and the complex and still not fully understood development of life, embryology. It is at the very earliest point of an animals life, just weeks after fertilisation that the evolutionary change occurred. The baupläne's constructional feature of cleavage, the process, which follows fertilisation, creating mulicelluarity, underwent a significant evolution, which allowed movement to develop.
Around 500 million years ago a new animal baupläne emerged from the slime which had an extra embryonic cell layer, this 3rd layer is called the mesoderm and is sandwiched between the 2 older layers called the endoderm and ectoderm (Raff, 1996).
It is the mesoderm, which produces the tissues that facilitate movement. In Tom Myer's book Anatomy Trains, 3rd edition, 2013, he identifies the emergence of fascia fibres from out of the mesoderm at the 14th day after fertilisation, before both the nervous system and our brain and before the digestive and the enteric (emotions??) system form. The instinctive movement system acting upon signals from the environment predates both the systems we place a higher importance upon.
This evolutionary milestone, the formation of the mesoderm and the subsequent formation of fascia in the growing embryo, provides us with an answer we have been searching for.
The reason fascia formed was to facilitate movement in response to the environment. So to properly understand fascia, it's properties and it's possibilities we have to refer back to it's origins in our baupläne.
Movement creates choice, and the point of movement involves an appraisal of the environment. The animal can move towards food and move away from danger. From this beginning our bodies evolved.


Tracey Mellor
©March 2014


Ref' muscles and meridians , Phillip Bench 2010

The Magic of fascia and it's reactive nature

I have called this my happy blog, read on to find out why.

Happy Blog or The magic of Fascia and it’s reactive nature

I often wonder how much less complicated my life might be if I stopped asking questions.

At the end of last year, together with Laurie Booth, we created a concept called The Myolastic Project whose whole ‘raison d’etre’ is to ask questions.

We set up classes and workshops in Brighton to look in particular at the research and information coming out of the Fascia (connective tissue) research labs using movement to create an experiential way to interpret the science. After each class or workshop we evaluate what has emerged from this form of questioning and come up with a new question for the next class. The project evolves and has led us up along some very interesting paths. For my own part I have learnt about the thought processes developed by dancers to perceive their world, opened up lines of research into human and fascia evolution and experienced the body’s magnetism and it’s facility to store energy.

The one thing I do know for sure is that after 6 months of this project instead of getting answers to our questions we just keep thinking of new questions to ask!

The last couple of months I have turned my attention to spirals, The lock, load, Release and Flow ‘Myolastic’ concept and the new Anatomy Trains book. Anyone in my Pilates classes and all those attending the Myolastic classes will know we have been spinning round and locking energy in and reaching out along those lines of myofascial tension.

Has it made a difference?

An interesting self observation is that over the last 6 months of personally doing the lock, load, concept I have experienced a marked increase in reaction to these movements.

The question, which I keep coming back to is; why is the reaction getting more powerful?

Is it familiarity, is it muscle strength, is it an increase in fascial storage capacity, are we training a reaction rather than an action (a muscle contraction is an example of an action), will it continue to get stronger until the amount of effort is very small compared with the output response. Will we forget the response as easily as we learnt it.????

What do we know about the Fascial system, which will help to answer some of these questions?

Fascia is a body wide tensional energy storage and transmission system, it responds to load and reforms over time in response to that load.

It is a reactive system.

What do I mean by reactive? I ‘Googled’ the word ‘reaction’ and got some interesting results:

1.    Something done, felt, or thought in response to a situation or event.

2.    A force exerted in opposition to an applied force:

the law of action and reaction

3.    A person’s ability to respond physically and mentally to external stimuli.

4.    A reverse or opposing action.

Word origin:mid 17th century: from react + -ion, originally suggested by medieval Latin reactio(n-), from react- 'done again'.

So when we say Fascia is a reactive system do we mean that:

1.    It can feel something in response to a movement event.

2.    If a force is directed into it, an equal force in the opposite direction will happen.

3.    External stimuli cause the Fascial system to respond

4.    and finally that it reverses or opposes an action.

I think that experientially we can say that all of the above is true.

So can we train our fascia to become more reactive? The Fascial Fitness catapult principle as set out by Divo Müller and Robert Schleip in 2011 would suggest that it may be trainable,  (see earlier blog for more information on the catapult principle).

It’s very exciting to think that we have found a way to demonstrate to ourselves that the reaction can be increased but to what end? How will this experiential exercise help us maintain a healthy body and youthful fascia or is that exactly what it is doing but we have no way of measuring it.  Has the reaction always been there and we have only just awakened our senses to it or has the storage capacity of our Fascial net actually improved. More questions to which I do not have answers.

However at last a question I can answer:

What does this reaction feel like to me?

It could be described as ‘magical’, my body reacts without any conscious instruction to reverse the action or lock I have imposed upon it. Each week the reaction gets stronger, faster and lasts for longer. There is no effort or energy required to evoke the reaction and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. It’s fun and pleasurable.

It makes me happy.

Tracey Mellor

March 2014

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