The Role of Fascia in Yoga and Movement – Free Webinar Series with Tom Myers
![](https://media.yogauonline.com/app/uploads/2021/04/06034846/yoga_fascia_in_movement_1-1.webp)
Could it be that most of what we’ve learned about muscle anatomy and the biomechanics of movement is wrong—or at the very least, not the full picture?
For more than 400 years, the field of anatomy has been dominated by Newtonian biomechanics, which views muscle action in terms of levers and pulleys. However, the dynamics of movement are far more complex, says Tom Myers, author of Anatomy Trains.
“You are about 70 trillion cells,” Myers explains. “Fascia is the web that holds them all together in their proper placement. Understanding fascia is essential to understanding the dance between stability and movement.”
Groundbreaking Course Charts the Role of Fascia in Yoga
What does this all mean for your yoga practice? A lot, as it turns out. In a groundbreaking online course, Fascia and the New Anatomy of the Body, Tom Myers and yoga therapist Robin Rothenberg, founder of Essential Yoga Therapy, come together to offer a revolutionary perspective on fascia as it pertains to movement in general and the practice of yoga specifically.
CLICK HERE to register for the free webinar series with Tom Myers.
Fascia as a Body-Wide Regulatory System
“What we now know about fascia puts a whole new light on the importance of movement in regulating not just long-term health, but our mental-emotional well-being,” Myers explains. And yoga has a large part to play in putting the new understanding of the anatomy of the body into practical applications. This is what we will explore in the new, online course.
Fascia is increasingly viewed as an independent, regulatory body system whose malfunction is a major cause of pain and disability. Understanding the fascia and how it affects and is affected by movement is essential to facilitate pain free living and healthy aging, says Myers. But even beyond this, the fascia impacts a wide range of body functions, as well as our mental-emotional well-being.
“It is ever more clear that “the muscle” is an outdated and un-physiological concept,” says Myers. “The understanding of the fascia as a body-wide regulatory system will yield the next generation of effective therapeutic and/or movement-based interventions.”
The new explanation of how life moves will take awhile to show up in textbooks, Myers notes. But that doesn’t make it less important. In fact, some researchers now believe that fascia may be an independent, body-wide regulatory system. This in turn would have huge implications for our understanding of the role of movement in health.
“The more we know, the more fascia emerges as the third big auto-regulatory system,” Myers notes. “The nervous system is one amazing auto-regulatory system, as is the circulatory system. But once we begin to view fascia as a third auto-regulatory system, the implications are that correct tissue tone and tissue health helps regulate the body—even down to the level of gene expression!”