Myofascial Release: What is it?

By

Ramsay Z. Falcove LMT

The information in the article is edited & condensed from the 3 articles on Myofascical Release in Massage Magazine by John F. Barnes PT. Some material added is my own. To read the complete articles please refer to Massage Magazine or http://www.massagemag.com

Myofascial Release as taught by John F. Barnes is a very effective hands on technique that provides sustained pressure into myofascial restrictions to eliminate pain and restore motion. The theory of Myofasical Release requires an understanding of the fascial system (or connective tissue). The fascia is a specialized system of the body that has an appearance similar to a spider’s web or a sweater.

Fascia is very densely woven. It covers and interpenetrates every muscle, bone, nerve, artery and vein as well as all of our internal organs including the heart, lungs, brain and spinal cord. Holistically it is actually one structure that exists from head to toe without interruption.

Our bones can be thought of tent poles, which cannot support the structure without the constant support of the guide wires (fascia). They keep an adequate amount of tension to allow the tent (body) to remain upright with the proper equilibrium.

There are many things that can affect the integrity of the fascia. Physical trauma by way of a care accident, a fall on skis, Repetitive Strain Injuries from Sports, Surgery: the slicing of the knife. Having a bone reset or your organs pulled out of your body. Poor Posture and the last one, chronic generalized anxiety. Everyone stores their stresses in some part of their body. Neck, shoulders, back, hip. Changes in fascial system influence the comfort and functioning of the body.

Fascia can exert excessive pressure producing pain or restricted motion. They affect our flexibility and stability and are a determining factor in our ability to withstand stress and strain.

Recent research shows that there is a micro-myofascial system (a tensegrity structure) within every cell of the body. Within the cytoskeleton of the cell lie microtubules of the fascia that have a hollow core within which fluid flows. Energy, information and consciousness flow within that fluid.

When a person undergoes trauma or an inflammatory process, the fluidity of the fascial system dehydrates and the tissue begins to solidify. This solidification of the fascial system tends to deepen and spread, creating and perpetuating the negative effects you experience.

Remember trauma and inflammatory processes dehydrate the fluid component of the fascial system. These fascial restrictions then exert enormous pressure on pain-sensitive structures and inhibit the vital communication that flows through the liquidity of the fascial system and every cell of our body that ultimately produces, symptoms and disease.

The fascial system is a communication system where energy and information and consciousness are carried by the fluid within and around the microtubules of the fasical system. This allows us to function as a coordinated balanced whole.

This brings us Traditional Chinese Medicine and the emotions. In psyche speak emotions are Energy in Motion. TCM has taken into account the emotions of the person as part of their holistic treatment for thousands of years.

Pop psychology, the 12 steps, and the self improvement programs over the last 25 years have provided for us the four basic emotions that we all posses. They are Mad, Sad, Glad and Fear. TCM gives us one more emotion, that is, pensiveness.

Mad is of course Anger. Sad can be equated to Grief. Glad is Joy and Fear is fear. Pensiveness as defined by the dictionary is “engaged in, involving, or reflecting deep or serious thought. “ In pensiveness you can be involved in deep or serious thought, which can be healthy. However “worry” can be a form of pensiveness, which leads to pathology. I am redefining these terms to fit the literature of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Each main vital organ that we have in our bodies is affected by our experience of these five emotions. The extent to which we experience these emotions can have a profound effect on our health and experience of life. They are categorized as follows:

Mad (Anger)  = Liver

Sad (Grief)= Lung

Glad (Joy)= Heart

Fear= Kidney

Pensiveness= Spleen

(Worry)

I will begin with the liver. If you have ever been to an acupuncturist you may have heard the term Liver Wind or Liver Stagnation. Wind is a Chinese term relating to the 5 elements. Stagnation is a term that we can more closely associate with our emotions. In the case of the Liver it is Anger. When the emotion (energy in motion) of Anger becomes too intense or is blocked, this causes the action and function of the liver to slow down or stagnate.

How does this happen? Let us take for example the process of Divorce. People usually don’t get divorced because they are happy with each other, they usually get divorced because they are angry with each other and that anger cannot be resolved through any other means than by divorce. If you have ever been married you know that “Married people fight. “ It is just a rule. It is inevitable. If a couple is well versed in conflict resolution they usually get through the tiffs and go on. If they are not, then the conflict “stagnates” and there is limited or no resolution. Time marches on and the conflicts are either released through a person’s own spirituality or they hit a wall and you have divorce. If the conflict stagnates and the anger is intensified and prolonged then this will eventually have an adverse effect on the liver.  This is an example of conscious ongoing anger.

There is also the example of unconscious ongoing anger. Many times there are normal people that participate in a normal healthy lifestyle that still have problems with “stagnation”. This comes as a result of unresolved conflicts that we experienced in our younger years.  Conflicts that were unresolved and as life marched on we forgot about it.  If it is an incident of abuse, maybe it was so painful that we dissociated and denied it even happened, just so we could survive ‘til the next day.  These incidents, even though we deny or forget them, have a continuing effect or our liver and our life experience.

Fear anger, hate, anxiety, alienation, and hopelessness are not just feelings; neither are love, serenity, and optimism. All are physiological states that profoundly affect our health. However our experience has shown us that trauma, inflammation, surgery and unresolved emotional holding patterns dehydrate and tighten the system. This loss of fluid and the resultant solidification of the ground substance block this important communication, which eventually produce symptoms of pain, headache, anxiety, restriction of motion and disease.

Myofascial release structurally and energetically opens and rehydrates the human fascial system for the coherent flow of the frequency, vibration, information and organization necessary for the health and quality of life.

Experience has shown that when a trauma is too painful, too fearful, or so intense that we go into shock, our subconscious activates a survival mechanism and pulls our feeling intelligence out of our body. This survival mechanism numbs us so we can survive the ordeal. However since science and the Western culture has ignored this, most of us are trying to function or heal in a state of dissociation.

In other words, your subconscious perceives that the truck is still crashing into you car, you are still falling down the stairs, the surgical knife is still cutting you or you are still being attacked.

The subconscious tightens against the unresolved trauma like a broken record that plays all day and all night. It does not matter how intelligent you are, how strong you are or how hard you are trying to get better. It is not on the conscious level. Ignoring the subconscious “bracing patterns” had thwarted our ability to truly heal.

You cannot consciously control these subconscious bracing patterns. This chronic tightness, throughout time begins to solidify the ground substance of the fascial system. This creates and perpetuates structural fascial restrictions that result in pain, headache, and restriction of movement. These holding patterns also create a state of mental and emotional hyper vigilance and anxiety. Our mind body remembers everything that ever happened to it, especially the events with high emotional content.

The subconscious bracing patterns stop when all the information from the past trauma, which has been buried, comes billowing forth in the form of sensations, pictures, emotions and memories. As this sensory information enters the conscious mind, the tightness from the bracing pattern softens and healing commences. Now that these repressed tissue memories have been retrieved the subconscious releases its iron grip on the structures that are restricted. The tissue relaxes and the healing will be successful and lasting. We can look at and use intellectual techniques forever and no healing will occur.

This sensory information is memory and memories never injure. It is the lack of expression of tissue memory that perpetuates the holding patterns that inhibit our ability to heal.

Psychologist, Hans Selye offers a theory called the general adaptation syndrome. It involves the limbic-hypothalamic system, which is the core of the reptilian brain. The syndrome has 3 states. (1) Alarm reaction. (2) State of resistance and (3) state of exhaustion. The hormones responsible for the retention of memory are epinephrine and norepinephrine. These are released during the alarm stage by the activation of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. The state or position (position is posited by John F. Barnes) the person is in at the moment of trauma is encoded into the system as the person progresses into the state of resistance. The system adapts and develops strategies to protect itself from further trauma, fear or memories by avoiding these 3 dimensional positions.

The emotions communicate this mind-body information through its network by way of neuropeptides. This creates a vicious cycle of interplay among the endocrine, immune and autonomic neuromyofascial system and the neuropeptides. If this cycle continues for too long the person enters the exhaustion stage in which the body’s defense mechanisms expend enormous amounts of energy, thereby depleting one’s reserve and perpetuating or enlarging the symptomatic complex.

These subconscious holding patterns eventually form specific muscular tone or tension patterns and the fascial component then tightens into these habitual positions of strain as a compensation to support the resulting misalignment. Therefore, the repeated postural and traumatic insults of a lifetime combined with the tensions of emotional and psychological origin; result in tense, contracted painful fibrous tissue.

A discrete area of the body may become so altered by its efforts to compensate and adapt to stress that structural and eventually pathological changes become apparent. Researchers have shown that the type of stress involved can be entirely physical (e.g. Repetitive postural strain as adapted by dentist or hairdresser) or purely psychic (chronic repressed anger).

The neuron doctrine and neuromatrix theory suggests it is the brain and neural system, which runs the body. However it turns out the brain and neural systems are embedded within a much larger and vastly more important crystalline fiber optic network. . . the fascial system. It transmits the flow of information, light and sound necessary for a healthy and vibrant life.

The brain and every nerve of our body lie within and are profoundly influenced by the liquid/gelatinous ground substance of the fascial system.