Hi! My name is Gregory Gorey. I'm the massage coordinator here at the Hills Fitness and
Wellness Center in Austin, Texas. And this is our
newest therapist Julie. Today we are going to be talking about
different myofascial techniques
Myofascial working...
What is fascia?
Fascia is the connective tissue
that everything in your body runs through. It's the web
that every muscle fiber gets surrounded by ...
every muscle, every muscle group.
We have superficial fascia. We have deep fascia.
I think the easiest example to show, is most people know
that there's a big band right here. It's called your illiotibial band
and what that is is a huge thick band of fascia.
It's a common injury for people
that do a lot of bicycling or running. The muscles
become adhered to that fascia and
can create some
knee pain, some hip pain
and
what we're going to do is show various forms of myofascial therapy and
I'll try to give
credit where credit is due to some of the masters of the work. The benefit
of doing myofascial work as opposed to
a swedish massage or a deep tissue massage
is that swedish massage is great to get the lymphatics going and to
do some relaxation, but
if you've got stuck areas in your body
what happens is this web, this myofascial web that's stronger than the
muscles, ges stuck in certain positions. So imagine if you're sitting over all day
and your shoulders are round. After years and years, that myofascial system starts to
get compressed and just doing a light massage is not going to
change the structure. And if you
are looking to
see longlasting results and have pain or want to increase performance
I would highly recommend getting some therapeutic myofascial release.
The most common form of myofascial therapy is probably
advanced by John Barnes and what that involves is latching into the fascia
and then coming with a counter pressure and latching into here
and we're just gonna hang out
and melt this tissue.
When I say melt, fascia is quite a bit stronger than muscles. To give you
an image of what it looks like, if you've ever made boneless, skinless
chicken thighs it's the silver stuff. It's stronger than the muscles,
stronger than fat,
and this form of myofascial work is just kind of being patient, feeling where
that fascia wants to move
and hanging out with it.
And there I'm starting to get a release as that's opening up.
We're going to come
readjust.
I have my
base anchor
and
opening up that tissue.
So there are a number of different styles of myofascial work.
The lightest would probably be cranial sacral therapy.
And that's myofascial work that involves just a couple of ounces
of pressure. Like enough to
hold up a quarter in your finger.
This
particular form
is about 4 or 5 pounds of pressure maybe.
And I'm going
and pulling away from
each other. My hands are pulling away from each other.
The form of myofascial work that I most commonly employ is based
off of
Erik Dalton's work. Erik Dalton was a rolfer.
Rolfing is a very deep form of myofascial work and we are going to
work that deep but we are going to
engage the muscles before we release
to stimulate the muscle spindles and then it's going to be more like we're
ironing rather than pulling apart.
So for this what we're gonna do is, I'm gonna
do some myofascial release along these spinal erectors
but before we do that we want to engage those muscles. So
Julie, what I would like you do is with a straight leg lift your left leg about
three inches off of the table
and one two three four five and drop
and that it gets the muscle
activated and engaged. Now
notice
that i'm not using any oil. You can use a little lotion
but basically i want to be able to hook into the tissue. If I'm putting a bunch of oil
I'm just going to glide over it and not get into the myofascial system. So she
just engaged those muscle spindles and now
I'm going to come and
just scoop that out.
Now you can also use this structurally. As i'm looking down i don't
think the camera angle can show it
but she's a little rounded right here in this part of her
thoracic curve.
This side is a little higher than this side.
So we want to start to bring
that tissue over the hump because we want to even this out. So this tissue
bringing laterally and notice i'm not just pushing down, I'm
latching into the tissue and scooping
up and over.
Same thing with this side. This side is the
downside. I'm going to pull that out.
And one more time down the back,
both hands.
When it's really slow it can be difficult getting used to
working with a little or no lotion.
But you just have to feel that tissue release.
Dive down into it
and
let it unwind.
And that's fascia 101! Well thanks for watching. Again my name is
Gregory Gorey. If you have any questions you can visit us at
TheHillsFitness.com
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