A System of Biomechanical Regulation – Tom Myers on the Significance and Functions of Fascia

Fascia is the biological fabric that holds us together. You are about 70 trillion cells, all humming in relative harmony; fascia is the 3-D spider web of fibrous, gluey, and wet proteins that hold them all together in their proper placement. How fascia works as a whole – our biomechanical regulatory system – is highly complex and understudied. Understanding the functions of fascia is essential to the dance between stability and movement – crucial in high performance, central in recovery from injury and disability, and ever-present in our daily life from our embryological beginnings to the last breath we take.

There are many designations for different areas, topologies, and histologies within the biological fabric. Traditionally, ‘fascia’ as a medical term applies only to certain sheets of fabric within the body – what we call the plantar fascia, for instance, is actually the plantar aponeurosis.  Thoracolumbar fascia, the fascia lata, the pannicular fascia, the fascia profundis – these are recognized by science as fascial sheets.

Here, though, and increasingly in scientific and research circles and professionals worldwide, ‘fascia’ has a wider definition: all the collagenous-based soft tissues in the body, including the cells that create and maintain that network of extracellular matrix (ECM). That definition includes all the tissues traditionally designated as ‘fascia’ in classical anatomy, plus all the other very similar tissues arrayed in different ways around the body: tendons, ligaments, bursae, and all the fascia in and around the muscles – endomysium, perimysium, epimysium.

Also included would be the fascia around the organs: the coelomic bags that hold the organs in the peritoneum and mesentery in your abdominal cavity, the mediastinum, pericardium, and pleura that hold the organs in the chest cavity, and the membranes – dura and pia and perineuria – that surround the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves.

That expanded definition usually does not include the harder tissues – cartilage and bone – but there is an argument that both these tissues lie within the spectrum of ‘fascial’ tissues.  These structural elements form from the same mesodermal primordium, develop similarly, have a core leather-like matrix of collagen, and are as responsive – subject to Wolff’s Law of remodeling – to sustained forces going through the body as is the rest of the fascia.

Most researchers would draw the line at soft tissues, putting bone and cartilage into the hard tissue category, but we prefer the wider view: From the fibrin in blood to the coral structure of bone, we have a remarkable variety of building materials available to us based on alterations of the fibers, gels, and water content of the ECM.

You would need a large shopping cart to purchase all the materials you would need to make a body, but connective tissue manages to build all of them – strings, wires, elastics, sheets, sacs, insulating material, bushings, struts, and springs – your connective tissue cells wrestle all of these from three simple elements: water, gels, and fibers. The cornea of your eye, the enamel covering your teeth, and the valves of your heart are just three of an extraordinary array of connective tissues on display and at work in your body.

Where Science Went Wrong: Fascia as Our System of Biomechanical Regulation

However you define it, fascia is everywhere – top to toe, birth to death, micro to macro. The expanded definition emphasizes two elements:

1) Fascia is one network, embryologically and anatomically.  All these different names we give elements within it – this tendon or that ligament – can tend to hide the fact that it is all one connected system.  When we injure the median nerve, we name it, but we treat it within the nervous system.

If there is a blockage in the saphenous vein, we understand that lack within the whole circulatory system. But when we injure the Achilles tendon, we tend to treat just that part instead of seeing the part that failed within the context of the whole system. Our fascial fabric constitutes one single biomechanical regulatory system – we benefit from seeing it, training it, and treating it that way.

2) It is our dissection method – analyzing the body by means of a blade – that separates and creates individual structures that we (not God) name. Therefore our Western science way of understanding the body – cutting it into smaller and smaller parts – has led to great discoveries, but it tends to destroy important connections and otherwise ignore the whole system responses of the collagenous net. Fascia is, in fact, our system of Biomechanical Regulation – just as our circulatory system is a chemical regulator and the nervous system is a timing regulator – and needs to be studied and treated as a system, not only as a series of parts.

Anatomy atlases and kinesiology texts tend to reduce us to Newtonian biomechanics of forces, vectors, and levers as if we are manufactured from parts like a car or a computer. This is a very limited viewpoint that explains some behaviors of our system but obscures others.  It rapidly falls before Einstein’s Relativity (only 100 years later), fractal mathematics, synergetic systems theory, and tensegrity geometry as applied to biological systems.

Our single fascial system starts about two weeks into development as a fibrous gel that pervades and surrounds all the cells in the developing embryo. It is progressively folded by gastrulation and the rest of the motions of development into the complex layers of fascia we see in the adult.

In fact, there is no discontinuity in the layers of fascia, so ‘layers’ is a useful but deceptive concept (like ‘muscles’). Names such as ‘hamstrings’ or ‘sacrospinous ligament’ are convenient and even essential to discourse, and it is a leap for most of us to give up the idea that there is a reality attached to our terminology.  But we do better to keep in mind that all such separations, including the distinctions we call ‘muscles’, are best thought of not as separate structures but simply as zip codes (postcodes) for contractile centers within the unitary and responsive fascial net.