Myofascial Release

'Myo’ means muscle and ‘fascia’ means band. Myofascia (pronounced "my o faasha") is the fascia that surrounds and covers all our muscles. Myofascia surrounds our muscle bellies, holding them together and separating them into functional groups. Portions of fascia penetrate into the muscle belly and encase each tiny muscle fibre. Did you know that the muscle fibres without the fascia have the consistency of jelly? Fascia also fills the spaces between muscles. 

An example of myofascia would be when you remove the skin from a chicken breast, that white filmy tissue underneath the skin is myofascia and in a living state is very strong.

Most of our houses and other human-made structures are designed around compression, their integrity lies with the continuity of compression from the roof to the foundation of a building, it runs in an unbroken line from element to element all the way to the ground. We used to think that our bodies worked in the same way: the skeleton as a stack of bones – a continuous compression structure – with the individual muscles hanging off each bone to move it. But that is not how we work, we would literally fall apart.

Our bones float in a sea of soft-tissue. Our fascia acts like a continuous inwards pulling tensional network, with the bones acting like the "sticks" in the model, pushing out against the restricting "rubber bands". (My children had a teething toy like the model.) This means that force will be distributed all over the structure, in our case, our body.

This is called tensegrity, combination of "tension + integrity".

Buckminster Fuller, inspired by the sculptures of Kenneth Snelson, coined this term to indicate that the integrity of a structure is derived from the balance of tension between elements, rather than from compression. Think teething toy, not house. This concept was applied to the human body by Tom and Steven Levin. Of course it has lots of practical implications in terms of massage and bodywork.

Under a microscope myofascia resembles a spider web or fish net. In a healthy state it is organized and flexible, relaxed and waxy in configuration. It can best be described as a complete body suit which runs from the top of your head down to the bottom of your toes. It is continuous and has no beginning or end and can be found almost everywhere in our bodies.

Like yarn in a sweater our entire body is connected to every other part of our body by the fascia. It is a continuous weave of material. And like a pull in a sweater, damage to an area of myofascia can effect other distant areas in our body even years later. It has recently (2019) been discovered that fascia actively contracts, for example after a trauma, and can do so for long time afterwards. This is a slow process (unlike a cramp) with low forces, but over time this adds up, as anyone who had a frozen shoulder can tell you.

When we experience trauma, scarring, or inflammation, the fascia loses its pliability. It becomes tight, restricted, and a source of tension (apparently tensile pressures of approximately 2,000 pounds per square inch on pain sensitive structures) to the rest of the body, a bit like a sweater that sticks to our skin in some areas and is matted with blobs of dried paint in other places (not a nice thought).

The good news is that MFR can un-stick our fascia, stretching and gently easing, encouraging us to move more freely.