Are you in pain?” Cadence Dubus, a Brooklyn-based fitness instructor who has developed a program for “fascia release,” asks, sending me spiraling before our session begins. There’s that twinge in my shoulder and the carpal tunnel at night—but aren’t such annoyances simply the conditions of modern life, of getting older? “Some,” I answer, shy to cop to any of it. Dubus then has me walk back and forth, squinting at my gait.
Despite her interest in my aches and anatomy, we’re not meeting to tend to my muscles or joints but rather the fascia, or connective tissue, that surrounds them and is spread, weblike, throughout the body. Wrapping your head around its dimensions can be a little confounding, not least because we’ve been conditioned by centuries of anatomical tradition to think less about interconnected systems and more about the parts that make up our bodies. Helene Langevin, the director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, tells me a story to illustrate the point: When she was in medical school in the 1980s, they would discard fascia tissue in their anatomy labs; it was obscuring the organs that were their focus.
A useful analogy underlines how integral fascia is to our bodily structure: If your body were an orange, fascia would be the layer of pith beneath the peel, each segment’s thin casing, and the tiny sacs containing juice. What such an analogy leaves out, however, is the role fascia plays in strength, mobility, and aging. “The fascial system is now being recognized with roles in pathology, fluid movement, and proprioception”—or awareness of the body in space—wrote Rebecca Pratt, a professor of anatomy at Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, in a 2019 paper. “It can be the reason why we feel chronic pain or why we feel tightness after physical activity.” The current research, Pratt tells me, “is taking muscle out of the limelight.” Fascia not only “holds your body together,” says Langevin; it also creates the lubricating layers that allow all your muscles and joints to move. The more you move, the more supple your fascia becomes, and the better your range and mobility. It’s basically one long chain reaction that can flow in a detrimental direction if neglected. Many people are familiar with the concept of myofascial pain; recent research has begun to outline just how dense with nerves our fascia is.
Most fascinating to researchers are the biomechanical implications. In her own work, Langevin has looked at what happens when you subject a tumor to the kind of friction it would experience from stretching the layers of tissue surrounding it. She and the scientists she worked with found that this movement significantly slowed the growth of the tumor. Stretching of some sort (on a molecular level, but perhaps also on a larger scale) could potentially impede cancerous growth: “For the last hundred years our approach to understanding disease and health has been predominantly biochemical,” says Langevin. “We focus on molecules, on pathways. But biophysics parallels all this. Mechanical properties of tissue—whether it’s stiff or viscous—influence the biochemistry.”
But back to my own stiff and achy body. As far as I know, I am not harboring any tumors. I do, however, have one shoulder wedged about five millimeters above the other, thanks to regularly traversing the city with a heavy bag, and I’m nagged by a tightness in the hips due to my desk-bound profession. Dubus has me roll a massage ball underfoot, along the outer edge of my sole. “We have a band of fascial tissue that loops under the arch and back up the other side like a stirrup,” she tells me. “It functions like a pulley system to stabilize our knee and our hip.” The slow movement feels more like meditation than exercise, but I do sense a slight loosening. She then has me lie down and roll back to front with a foam roller under my armpit; there the sensation is more intense. As I press into my pecs and then back to my shoulder blades, I feel little sparks of tension release in my shoulders.
