Rocking Reformer Revelation

Rocking Reformer Revelation

I know that Pilates teachers can get very excited about the smallest piece of Pilates equipment, and I am no exception. Remembering just how excited I got about my yellow reformer spring is frankly quite embarrassing. However I am unashamedly over the moon about the newest addition to the studio- my rocking reformer.

The Pilates reformer is a great machine, easy to use for the beginner and super challenging for the expert. It allows for creativity and flare, fits all the Fascial Fitness principals. You can use it as part of a regular workout, it soothes the mind and creates calm, with the addition of the bounce board it can reduce the fittest client to a sweaty pulp. It requires concentration and focus, it highlights imbalance in the body and magically creates the perfect conditions for self awareness and correction; in fact it has everything a pilates teacher and practitioner would want from a machine. So how to improve upon perfection? Add rockers.

I first saw the rocker kit on-line a couple of years ago, but was beyond my pocket at the time. It sat in the back of my mind until I attended the balanced body convention in London and there it was, already boxed up just waiting for my name to be scribbled on the lid. I resisted for 3 days and then gave in about 30 mins from the end of the last day. The rest is history! It is quite a wonderful addition to my studio and a firm favorite with my clients. One declared-

              “ it’s like working in 3D”

Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.

So what is it?

The rockers transform the static base of a standard reformer into a giant balance board. There is a clever way to bring stability back to the reformer so it can still be used as normal. It stands higher off the floor, which is popular with my less mobile clients.

At first I used it in the conventional way, footwork, legs in loops, quadruped etc with the additional challenge of keeping central, balancing left and right, equalising weight on each side etc, everyone did really well, it encouraged greater focus and a certain amount of sub-conscious work as well as increased conscious self stabilization. It was fun and lots of laughter, especially when I briefly forgot it was on a rocker and I inadvertently leant on the foot bar and tipped the reformer to one side.

No one was seasick, everyone had a go and everyone reported back that they could feel the extra work required to stabilize in their bodies.

I was making the repertoire up as I went in those early days, mixing known exercises with this new addition.

Then I found a great on-line course by Elizabeth Larkin, who I had spoken to prior to buying the rockers and who was very excited by them. She used them in the rehabilitation of service men who had lost limbs in combat and who suffered with problems with their vestibular system (balance).

I took the course and the rocking repertoire she taught is just amazing.

In my studio we adapted this information, matched it with my clients needs and the results have been astounding. Increased balance and ease of gait; along with hours of laughter and focused mind/body work.

So far the best result has been from a client who has a mild cerebral palsy. Doing the simple rocking movements appeared to release so much tension in the hips that standing in parallel was possible. If this can be repeated, then it is the most wonderful of outcomes and we will be sharing the results with a wider community.

The rocking reformer repertoire is here to stay, it joins the other exercises and movements only possible on the Pilates machines. 

Tracey Mellor

September2015

Rehydrating Fascia using fascial release techniques.

Fascial Release

Over the last couple of years strange pieces of equipment have been appearing in Gyms and exercise studios around the country.

Rollers, spiky balls and other equipment used to inflict pain and sweet agony upon our-selves. In movement classes, Pilates Classes and Fascial Fitness classes, the instructors encourage you to roll and massage, lie on or over these balls and rollers.

Have you ever wondered what it is actually doing? It hurts so it must be doing us good- right?

Apart from being a way of challenging balance, ‘core’ and proprioceptive skills, all good reasons for using them, they are a way of releasing tension in areas of overuse, if that place is along a myofascial line then the release of tension may go beyond the immediate area of pressure. However their use to rehydrate the connective tissue or fascia is the less obvious but most important reason for use, to promote long-term fascial health and reduced injury, and perhaps to whole body health.

Why is rehydration of Fascia so important?

Lets remind our-selves of what Fascia is. Here is the definition adopted after the first International Fascia research congress:

Fascia is ‘all collagenous fibrous connective tissues that can be seen as elements of a body-wide tensional force transmission network.’ (Fascia in Sport and Movement, 2015).

Fascia is ubiquitous, it surrounds and separates muscles, bones, organs, nerves, indeed everything in our body, and until very recently it has been treated as a rather dull packing organ. But new research techniques and ways of measuring and seeing this colourless fibrous tissue has catapulted it into the limelight and it is now attracting worldwide attention and excitement amongst some of our most talented scientists.

Fascia, as defined above, (the medical profession has a more refined definition) is made up of cells and an extracellular matrix. The cells make up a very small part- about 5% and are mostly Fibroblasts, which act as builders and repairers of the extracellular matrix.

The matrix is made up of ground substance and fibres.

The fibres are mostly made of collagen and some elastin, the exact proportions varying according to location, load and use. These form what we think of as the body wide net.

The Ground substance is mostly water bound by proteoglycans (a form of protein).

All we need to know is that 2/3rds of fascial tissues, in volume, is made up of water, and our body is full of fascial tissues.  Healthy fascial tissue has a high proportion of a special form of water, known as bound water.

The first time I heard about bound water I was sitting in the underground International Fascial Research Congress hall in Vancouver in 2012. Gerald Pollack, PhD gave a ground breaking lecture on the magical world of water and the properties of Bound Water in our body. It was a little late in the day, we had been sitting all day in an airless room and yet no one left the hall, we all knew what he was saying was important and just a little controversial. Pollack produced slide after slide of why bound water was so important to health. His findings are still ‘new’ to science but the possibilities of his findings are opening up many new fields of research in every area of health.

Since the congress Pollack has gone on to publish his findings (The fourth phase of water. Beyond solid, liquid and vapor, 2013).

Pollack suggests that bound water has the characteristics of a liquid crystal and a higher elastic storage ability. The rest of the water found in fascial tissue is known as bulk water. Pathologies such as inflammatory conditions, oedema, accumulation of free radicals and waste products are linked with a shift to a higher proportion of bulk water in the ground substance of our extracellular matrix. So it makes sense to find ways to encourage and maintain a higher percentage of bound water in our fascia

When we roll on rollers or balls, spiky or smooth we are mechanically loading and stretching our fascial tissue, which acts like a sponge when squeezed. Particularly in more stressed zones when fascial release is performed the ‘polluted’ bulk water, full of inflammatory cytokines, free radicals and other by-products of stress and aging are squeezed out and refreshed with water from blood plasma which forms bound water, improving the ratio of bound to bulk water, and hopefully leading to a healthier ground substance and fascia.  I think that this is a good reason to incorporate fascial release techniques into your exercise routine.

However beware, rolling is not for everyone, there has been recent research, which questions the speed and depth and frequency of the release. Hours of painful rolling is not recommended.

So all these funny bits of equipment are here to stay and may be a way to healthier fascia and all the benefits that brings to us.

Tracey Mellor

March 2015 ©

All references are from Fascia in sport and movement 2015, DVD's of Fascia Research Congress 2012.

The magic of Jacobs ladder

Question: What do books on Fascia and buses have in common?

Answer: You wait for ages then two come along at once.

I have been waiting for the books: Fascia in sport and movement and Yoga Fascia anatomy and movement to be published for years and then they both arrived in the same box, on the same day, an abundance of information and ideas, too much to digest in one go, and consequently I have the equivalent of information indigestion. The rich diet served up by the wonderful authors was just too much for me, so I have had to slow down and read in smaller portions.

I have the great pleasure to include many of the authors and editors amongst my friends and acquaintances and I know how long they have strived to bring this information into the public domain. I recognise and remember the birth pangs of some of the ideas from Summer schools and gatherings of Fascia devotees. 

If you are interested in Fascia and movement then please log onto the Handspring publications website (http://www.handspringpublishing.com/publications/) and secure your copies now, you will not regret your purchase.

As some of my clients know, I have had fun playing with some of the content, indeed the editors of the Fascia in sport and movement, encourage the reader to open a conversation with the content of the book, to discover and make up their own minds about the ideas suggested by the authors; and so I thought I would share one of my observations with you in this blog.

I was flicking trough the Yoga book by Joanne Avison, and came across a picture of the children’s toy –the Jacobs Ladder.

Immediately I was transported back to a lecture theatre in Brussels watching Stephen Levin holding up this everyday toy as be gave a lecture on biphasic movement, it was fascinating to watch the movement of the toy, to remember back to childhood when I played with my own Jacobs Ladder and to realise that this simple toy could demonstrate and symbolize so many principles of movement. Later Joanne bought a couple of the Jacob ladder toys and we spent a frustrating couple of hours getting to grips with the concept Stephen lectured about and finally in the wee small hours there was a light bulb moment, in fact it was several light bulbs which continue to flash over the intervening years. How could such a small event make such a big ripple through my Pilates and movement teaching?.

I am playing with that Jacobs ladder toy now as I am sitting at my desk, continuously fascinated by this simple wooden and ribbon toy. I have even made a chocolate bar version (which didn’t last very long) to understand the way it worked and now want to share one small but significant aspect with you.

If you want to know all about the bio-tensegrity and how it relates to yoga teaching and movement then please read the beautifully written chapter 7 in Joanne’s book.

However the bite sized aspect I am interested in here is finding the silent stillness at the point of perfect balance just before the biphasic movement of the toy, i.e. just before the wooden blocks tumble down. It is in that pregnant pause, the point just before ‘no return’ that the effortful becomes effortless, the tension between the ribbons is equalised and the blocks are held in a seemingly magic suspension. It is in this moment that we can play, we can suspend time and we can discover the hidden tension, which is always there in a bio-tensentric body. The tissues of the body are never in a state of ‘no tone’, we may say we are relaxed but that is never truly the case unless we are anaesthetized or dead. In the space between, as can be shown so perfectly by the Jacobs ladder toy, we have a choice, possibilities exist, balance and movement flow from that point.

In the Pilates studio we can place the body into shapes, which mimic this space between, where it is relatively effortless and where we can play with the possibilities. In the studio we played with recognizing these points of balance, tone but minimal effort, points of choice. The clients experienced the calm silence of the space, a time of self-perception.

All movement moves from and too, between these points, from a simple breath, to a complicated exercise. It is the magic of that point that I would love everyone to find in his or her own movement practice.

Over the last year we have been involved in a project where we took scientific concepts relating to our connective tissue (fascia) and using movement, we tested them. From out of this project has evolved a creative movement system Connective IQ movement and Self -perception is key to the way we teach.

Just like Christmas chocolate eaten quickly, the glut of detail and information quickly read in these two books is soon regretted as it formed a log-jam in my brain, instead, I realised that a little exquisite taste can be fully appreciated, digested and savored every once in a while and that is how I will now proceed. As invited by the editors, I will contemplate on the content and make up my own mind. There is so much that it may take some time, however, I look forward to opening that conversation with my own body and with my clients, I foresee lots of fun ahead.

Tracey Mellor

© 2015

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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