Find your inner stretch

FIND YOUR INNER STRETCH

At the end of a long hibernation, a grizzly bear emerges with her cubs, nimble, fresh and active. I, on the other hand, roll out of bed after just a 7-hour night, and shuffle to the bathroom channelling my inner 90 year old through my knees and back.

With the help of a hidden camera in the bear’s den, some intrepid researchers in British Columbia discovered that, at the same time every day for around 30 minutes, the hibernating mother bear half wakes, then paces, yawns and stretches, before settling down again for a further 24 hours. This movement reactivates the tissues, preventing them from seizing up over the winter months of confinement. My own early morning routine (when I remember) is a series of moving stretches before I even get up; five minutes on a good day, one minute if I’m cutting it fine. Getting out of bed after doing so makes walking a piece of cake. No cat or dog would forget to do their yawning stretches after a long sleep, but we human beings seem to have lost that instinctive stretching reflex, which is odd if you consider the number of hours we spend asleep, or sitting at our computers or in our cars.

But it’s not just the muscles that the mother bear is firing up, or that I am addressing during my before-I-get-out-of-bed workout. It’s fascia.

If you’ve ever had plantar fasciitis in your heel or foot you may recognise the word and associate it with pain. If you’ve been unlucky enough to damage your Achilles tendon or tear a ligament, you will be aware of fascia in its strongest form, as dense connective tissue; the strapping that attaches muscles to bone (tendon), and bone to bone (ligament) which absorbs shock and distributes impact.

The fascia I’m specifically targeting in my early morning exercises and during my deep stretch Pilates classes, is a finer version; the super-strong, tensile, 3-D cobwebbing that weaves its way in, around and through every part of the body, wrapping and connecting skin, blood vessels, nerves, fat, muscle and bone. Viewed through an endoscope in a living body there is no division between these layers. Made predominately of collagen protein and kept in peak form by good hydration, and by Vitamin C (green leafy vegetables and citrus foods), zinc and copper (shellfish, nuts and seeds, dairy and eggs), and the nutrients found in red meat, this wonderful material literally keeps our bodies together, and our skin elastic and youthful.

Fascia keeps your organs supported and suspended, separate but connected, controlling power, spring, movement and shape. There is no part of the body that is not cocooned and woven through with this resilient gossamer, or suspended by its millions of strong stretchy guy ropes criss-crossing in every direction, taking tension as required. When you do a cartwheel or a somersault, or you fall over, fascia’s amazing elastic strength brings you back to your original form. And it is sensory; fascia has the highest proportion of nerve endings within the body; it is what you feel when you do your stretches, or get injured.

The importance of fascia was only discovered in the mid noughties. In a dead body, this fine material desiccates and flattens, its form and function disappearing as the different parts of the body separate back into layers of skin, fat, muscles, bone. Modern surgical procedures and revolutionary dissection techniques have finally allowed us to see what is really happening in a live being. Although the study of fascia is in its infancy, it is already affecting how we exercise, how surgeons operate, how athletes train and how we manage pain.

Because there is no start or finish to fascia, no joins or ends, everything is connected to everything else; every movement in the body will have a knock-on effect via the fascia to every other part of the body. It attaches, straps, wraps, connects, and suspends. Nothing is unconnected. So, good people, start stretching first thing, drink plenty of water, eat your greens, and go out and find a class where you can explore your own inner stretch and get in touch with your fascia.