How tightness might be causing problems
A huge chunk of people who suffer from some type of issue with their body’s physical functions do so because of tightness. Unfortunately, tightness is one hell of a complex topic. I was recently asked about this by some clients, and this entry is my attempt to shine some light onto this issue.
What is it that’s tight?
While it’s not impossible for muscles to be tight, the issue is actually more complex. Mainly, tightness is manifested through a class of tissues called “fascia”. Fascia has been the target of explosive research efforts worldwide and has found to be the missing link for many mysteries about our body’s functions. Why they get tight is and the underlying mechanisms that produce such tightness is a massively complex separate topic that deserves its own entry (or three), but for now, let’s just say that the why and how of bodily tightness is often invisible, but nevertheless crucially important.
Today, I’d like to focus on the implications of such tightness, and how such a nagging problem can be sustained. But before we get to that…
Speaking on links
The tricky thing to understand about fascia as it relates to our daily lives is that it’s something akin to our skin – it is continuous throughout its entire reach, and it’s everywhere. Except, with fascia, this continuous net covers every cell, organ (to include nerves, muscles, and bones), and body region. Among other things, it acts as handle bars through which muscles yank on bones and other tissues.
Said more simply, without fascia, we would literally stop functioning.
But wait, it gets better!
The issue with tightness of the fascia as experienced in the body is that when our fasciae is tight, our brains lose contact with the implicated parts of the body. You see, vast majority of our body’s sensors that report on its own states (as opposed to eyes and ears that report about the outside world) are housed within fascia. Combined with the fact that these sensors are activated by deformation (stretch, compression, twisting), stiffness and tightness prevents the activation of these sensors.
As you can probably imagine, this creates a vicious cycle. Body tightness diminishes the brain’s incoming signals about the body, which makes it more difficult for the relevant brain regions to organize the functioning of our joints. This would then cause more stiffness, which only diminishes the signals even more, and so on.
To bring it home a little bit
So, whenever we do some kind of movement intervention and things feel like they’re operating smoother and more spaciously, it’s mostly due to your successful restoration of your fascia’s capacity to convey quality information to the brain. Though we often do a lot more than stretching during our sessions, in my opinion, keeping our bodies loose is only a minor benefit of stretching. The real game is keeping our body sensors healthy so they can keep on feeding the brain regions that regulate our body’s health!
If you want to learn more about this…
This work serves as a great dictionary of sorts for all things fascia, and it’s a great point of entry. To learn more about the way sensors work in the body, however, a neuroscience text like this is my go-to.
While I’m not against online articles and Wikipedia, I certainly prefer the consistency of established authors in the field.