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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