Fascia: The Body's World Wide Web
One continuous web runs from your scalp to the soles of your feet, and it is talking all the time. On the tissue that connects everything to everything.
There is a tissue in you that touches everything you are made of. It wraps every muscle, every bone, every organ, every nerve — one continuous, glistening web from the top of your head to the soles of your feet. It is called fascia, and for a very long time medicine treated it as packing material and cut it away to get to the interesting parts.
Our world wide web is the fascia.
In a forest, the trees look like separate beings. Underground, their roots are joined by networks of fungal threads through which they share water, nutrients, and information. The forest is secretly one connected thing. That is the truest picture of fascia I know. What looks like separate muscles and separate organs is joined, underneath, into one communicating whole.
And it does communicate — mechanically, chemically, electrically, through the movement of fluid. A pull at one corner of a web changes the tension across the whole of it. This is not a metaphor; it is mechanics. It is a large part of why pain shows up so far from its source.
Why it matters on the table
When I work with a body, I am always working with the web — there is no way not to. A restriction from an old surgery, an injury, even a long-held posture puts a drag on lines of tissue that travel the length of the body. Follow the drag and you find the origin.
One humble, practical thing the fascia asks of you: water. This tissue lives by its glide, and its glide lives by hydration. Of all the expensive things people do for their bodies, drinking enough water remains one of the few I will nag about.
— Leigh Ankrum