If there’s any words you’re unfamiliar with you’ll find a glossary of terms at the end!
I am so incredibly excited to be here today. I am here with the amazing John Sharkey. Why are we doing these interviews? First of all to help people to begin to grasp the detailed and complex nature of fascia in a way that they can comprehend and apply. And if you’ve already done some of the work and are wondering why it’s so important to map out your own body and its history, you’re in for a real treat today because there are few people, if any, who are more experienced than my guest today when it comes to the world of fascia.
It is a privilege to introduce and be here with John Sharkey who has over 40 years of experience in the fascia industry and exploring fascia generally including many many dissections of the entire human fascial network. He has also written books and papers on both the very essence of fascia and connective tissue but also in a very practical way has looked at the processes and how he can apply his research.
So let’s start with helping people who maybe know nothing about fascia at all understand a little bit about the the complexity that is fascia because it is such a vast subject and the definitions around that are ever evolving because we are beginning to dig into what’s possible with this term that we have started off by calling fascia.
John, you’ve spoken a lot about what they call the five states of fascia. I know you recently did a presentation with uh Dr. Guimberteau or I affectionately call him Dr. G. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to, but I’m going to. But what are the five states of fascia as you understand them and anything that you want to share on fascia generally?
Okay, so there’s so many things in there.
I know, I’m sorry.
Yeah, there’s so many things in there. So really in trying to help to simplify things for people, I think that that maybe the categories that I did come from one of my books, but what I would say to you just it was good that you introduced it as the fascia net because in contemporary literature, we’ve got people who are constantly referring to fascia as a system. And fascia is not a system, nor could it ever be a system. Right?
There’s various different reasons why fascia cannot be a system. Number one, so I’m a clinical anatomist, Savannah, and that basically means that as a clinical anatomist I’m a member of the anatomical society and the British association of clinical anatomists but all the major countries in the world would have an association of anatomists and then there is an umbrella body which is the, I’m sorry about this there’s a lot of acronyms and names, but there’s the international federation for associations of anatomists and they are basically the organization or the body that are responsible then for determining the language, the nomenclature, the language, the vocabulary and the definitions of those words because they have legal implications.
So for medically qualified people that is so from that viewpoint there’s a kind of an assumption that’s embedded in research papers and opinion articles etc, that fascia is a system and yet you know this designation has never been formally ratified by the IFAA.
So number one, if you mean we can come back to that another day, but number one, it’s important to say that fascia is not a system. It really transcends a system. I think people have difficulty with trying to get their head around fascia because it is so unique. Also I suppose I’m talking about connective tissue generally and then fascia specifically.
So the IFAA would have a definition of fascia which is a tissue that is dissectable and it is a sheet s-h-e-e-t or a sheath s-h-e-a-t-h. So if you were to ask clinical anatomists “Is a tendon fascia?” they would clearly say no. If you asked if a ligament was fascia they would clearly say no.
So from my perspective, fascia does a number of different things. First of all, fascia is ubiquitous, which means it is everywhere. And then its morphology changes depending on where it is in the human body. And that would be a combination of genetics and epigenetics. In other words, you could have an embryo that is growing but its lower limb is in the wrong position. And being in the wrong position when that embryo then when that baby is born it’s possible that the baby could be born without an iliotibial band.
Now why would it not have an iliotibial band? Simply because the legs need to be tucked up in this kind of position in the body and that creates specific tensions which lead to the formation of the iliotibial band. It doesn’t mean the baby won’t develop an iliotibial band but when they’re born because the lower limb was not in the right position and not receiving the right tensions that the iliotibial band is not there. So to me that’s evidence of epigenetics.
Now an iliotibial band is therefore what? Well it’s in my estimation a fascial tissue that is showing direct connections and exchange of forces of mechanotransduction through the pelvis to the anatomical leg. So your leg starts at just your knee joint and finishes at the ankle joint. So that’s the anatomical leg. And so we see the forces running through there. So that would be fascia then acting as a force transmitter.
So that’s mechanotransduction but also fascia can act as, how would you describe it? It can act as a kind of a septal tissue where you have muscles but the muscles are broken up into compartments. So it compartmentalises the tissues.
For what reason? Well, for several different reasons. First of all, if you got a blow to the body, the fact that the fascia, which is going to be the you’ve got your epimysial, perimysial, and endomysial tissues, this compartmentalisation reduces the risk of the forces damaging the entire muscle and kind of tends to kind of locate it.
So yes, so fascia can play various different roles in the body. Superficial fascia is very kind of, it’s a bit mysterious to us still. We have a lot of research to do on superficial fascia. I think there’s just a lot of fertile ground that has yet to be discovered and yet to be investigated in terms of fascia.
So it’s not just a fatty covering, it’s not just an insulator, but it’s also playing a role in metabolism and hormone production and so on. So maybe it’s also good that we might give a brief kind of definition to what fascia actually is.
So absolutely please please feel free.
Yeah, so it’s a continuous living connective tissue network. That’s how I would describe it. It gives coherence to the body. It gives adaptability to the body. It is in continuity with the skin. So when I’m dissecting, you know, you have to blunt your uh scalpels.
The human body is solid. So it is solid from skin to bone and back out to skin again. so that’s what the fascia does. It brings continuity to organs and nerves and bones and blood vessels and it’s integrated into a whole rather than separate parts. And I think the history of anatomy is that we try to reduce things down to parts, which is very useful from a pedagogical viewpoint, very, very useful to talk about the parts. As long as we then keep in mind, or that we remember, that everything is in continuity.
I love something that I read that you wrote and spoke about myotensgrity and the one muscle principle in the body. I’d love if you are open to expounding on that a little bit just to understand about that whole one piece through the whole body because I think that’s one thing that a lot of people struggle to understand probably typically because they’ve seen anatomy books, which typically have well maybe some of the newer ones are starting to show things but typically have no fascia or any thing in there apart from singular muscles and tendons and ligaments.
Well, one of my very close friends, her name was Jan Field-Byrne and her husband Roger Byrne, they used to run an event in Blackpool every year. I think it’s possibly still running, but they ran the event and we lost Jan Field just last week. She was a great pioneer in the health fitness industry and they used to run, you know, a big convention every year and I can remember being because, I came across the brochure for there last year or the year before last, and a younger version of myself and what I was doing at the time I was calling it get the name of my presentation was “Get The Connective Tissue Advantage.”
Now the reason I did that was because first of all I’m very interested, as is Jean Claude Guimberteau, and we’ve done some recent research which is published in a special edition for for the journal Life and both of us really come at this from a connective tissue perspective and then fascia being a speciality within the spectrum of connective tissues but my presentation as I say was “Get The Connective Tissue Advantage.” I wouldn’t have mentioned fascia too much back then because back this was around 1990 or sometime around that time.
I’ve read some bits from 92.
Yeah, around that kind of a time. And then people, you know, people wouldn’t have used the word fascia. And when you come in as just one lone person, you start talking about that, they get a little bit confused. But the idea would be, and what I was talking about, was that what you would have is you have your let’s say we start with a muscle like a biceps brachii. Okay?
So your biceps brachii is here in the upper limb. and you have what we call tendons and in classical anatomy we would say that tendons attach to the skeletal system. So I would have a different view on it, which basically is that what you have basically is a speciality of connective tissue – fascia – which has a spectrum of softness to hardness. So the hardest connective, you know fascial, tissue would be perhaps bone and then we could debate what the softest would be, maybe the leptomeninges associated with the brain.
So depending on where it is, I mean, go to the tip of my nose and you can feel cartilage tissue, you can feel cartilage tissue on the rim of your ear or you can feel cartilage tissue just off your breast bone. So cartilage again comes in different morphologies, different stiffness, different hardness. And so that’s basically the way in which I teach. I tend to teach using spectrums when sometimes they’re colors and in this case it’s about stiffness. And so what you have basically is you’ve got the tendinous tissue which takes a lot of tension and is quite stiff.
And then you get to the belly and the belly or the gaster of muscles is not as quite as stiff as tendons. So what happens to the tendon? The tendon then becomes the periost of the bone. It is in continuity with the tendon. So it’s not like the tendon stops and the periosteum takes off. This basically is a continuity and you know a transition point if you will. And so now the tendon becomes the periost and the periost now runs along the bone and then rises back out again as a tendon.
So really what you have in the human body is the one muscle concept. So you have muscle, tendon, periost, tendon, muscle belly and so on. So that’s one way of being able to you know provide an explanation of how there is one muscle in the body but that it gets squeezed into these fascial compartments and therefore, we’d end up saying that there you know maybe 680, something in that region, there’s been some new muscles in the last few years. So, one muscle in the body if you’re looking at it from a fascial perspective and if you’re including the periost or multiple muscles, individual muscles from a classical anatomy viewpoint.
I love this as an idea and I love the idea that it’s the spectrum, the language that you’re using around that in terms of a spectrum within the fascial tissues.
Yeah, well, spectrum because it depends on where it is in the body. Like people say to me, well, you know, a lot of people look at cartilage tissue for example. Let’s take cartilage between the tibia and your femur. And they would say, you know, cartilage tissue is a shock absorber. Well, oddly enough, we have absolutely no evidence to support such a claim. None whatsoever. Myself and a colleague of mine, Eric Barnhill, who’s in Germany, and he’s a specialist in MRI technology. And we could not find a way to be able to carry out research to be able to investigate when somebody is jumping and landing, if the cartilage tissue was acting as a shock absorber. So think about that.
We couldn’t actually carry out the research. We couldn’t find them the correct modus operandi to do that and in looking into that whole subject we couldn’t find any papers on it. So the fact of the matter is we assume that cartilage is a shock absorber. I would argue that what happens in a natural healthy body is that on landing, let’s say for instance you’re running in a marathon or you’re doing jumping jacks in an aerobics class, the bones are neither moving further away nor are they coming closer together. In other words, the fascial tissues in the human body from a tensegral viewpoint, stiffen to be able to safeguard that virtual space between the bones.
Because if you could think of 6 to 12 times your body weight, you know, crashing down on this tissue called cartilage tissue, which many people have never seen, by the way. The best analogy that, you know, I’ve heard over the years would be or that I could give you would be that the cartilage tissue is like the white of a hard-boiled egg.
So, that’s how soft it is. And I just don’t think that if bones were compressing and coming together, I don’t think cartilage tissue would be able to withstand 6 times your body weight for several hours of running. So there has to be another another set of explanations. And I think it’s from a tensegral, viewpoint as I say, that virtual space – there are no spaces in the human body – but that virtual space is maintained through the integrity of tension and compression.
I absolutely love that and I think that’s a really powerful way for people to begin to contemplate and consider how fascia, basically a lot of people have the idea that the skeleton is what’s holding them up. But in fact what you’re saying arguably is that it’s the fascia that’s using tensegrity, that’s moving everything through the body.
Absolutely. And of course the skeleton, as we call it the skeletal system, remember in classical anatomy that’s what we do. We dissect and we try to, you know, bring things down to parts. So, if you were to, you know, stand up in a room and people could magically disappear your skeleton, well, then all of the other softer soft tissues would fall to the floor. But likewise, if you were standing there and you disappeared all your softer soft tissues and just left the skeleton, then the skeleton would fall to the floor. So, the question has to be who’s holding who up? And of course, it’s a combination of the various forces and energies at play that are, and I would argue that those forces and energies can be described as tension and compression.
And yeah, so once we have the right the correct integrity, then we’re going to be able to, you know, uh have what we call lift, which is what both you and I, Savannah, at the moment are demonstrating. In other words, we’re not collapsing in our chair into a puddle, but we have lift, you know.
I love it. I love it. Fascia in action.
Fascia in action.
I recently watched the presentation that Dr. Guimberteau did with the Fascia Research Society, and he showed a whole load of images of living fascia and how the most apparent thing at least for me with those images and what he was speaking about was that fascia he spoke about how it’s nonlinear, how it’s very unique to each person in terms of how it is being distributed through that person’s body. And I’ve heard you before use the statistical term stochastic to refer to this. Could you explain what you mean a little bit about that just so that people can begin to understand? They’re already maybe beginning to touch on what fascia is and the idea of how it could be in their body, but then this concept that they’re unfamiliar with stochastic.
Stochasticity.
Exactly. And how the fascia in each person’s body is potentially nonlinear or is nonlinear from these images that we’ve been seeing.
Yeah, I mean stochasticity and either linearity or nonlinearity are, I mean they can be, part of a conversation but they’re very different things. So the stochastic nature if you can think about Brownian motion, in other words if you sit near a window on a nice summer’s day and you see the sunlight coming through, you’ll see that there’s little small dust particles and they’re moving you know they’re moving in all sorts of little directions. At one point, um, the anatomists and physiologists thought that they were small little living entities, believe it or not. Oh, there’s a little pussycat.
Say hello. I’m not sure if it’s a cuddle. Sorry.
Yeah, that’s okay.
He’s gonna keep touching me until I cuddle. Carry on.
That’s great. And but this the stochastic nature whether we’re talking at cellular level or we’re talking about you know from a morphological viewpoint if we’re talking about a more structural level of fascia, the stochastic nature basically means the unpredictability of connective tissue and the easiest way now I have a reasonably new paper which I wrote with Dr. Karen Kirkness on the stochastic nature of fascia as people can find that by putting in you know Sharkey Stochastic Nature of Fascia or Sharkey and Kirkness but ultimately, it’s translated into a kind something that people can understand what that means, basically is, and this brings us back to the topic of genetics versus epigenetics in other words are we you know exclusively dictated to by genetics, the answer is no because of the stochastic nature of the human body and the stochastic nature of fascia and its unpredictability. When I’m dissecting, will I find a trapezius on almost every donation? The answer is yes.
However, no two trapezii will be the same. So,they’re all completely different. And so that’s part of the message from the stochastic nature of fascia is that there are no two human bodies that are the same, you know, and that then leads us into the conversation on the nonlinearity of connective tissue. So and I put something up on my Facebook just a couple of weeks back and I I happened to say something along the lines of the train station has been demolished and the train tracks have been lifted up and Tom Myers wrote to me, he wasn’t particularly impressed, but I think Tom had just simply maybe gotten the wrong end of the stick with me because I love Anatomy Trains. I love the narrative of Anatomy Trains.
I think it’s really been helpful from a pedagogical viewpoint to help students, for example, understand if somebody’s throwing a stone but that you know you’d need to have the opposite leg on the ground and you can talk about forces in that regard but at the same time you have to understand that is a point-to-point or linear description and I don’t believe in linear descriptions, so I think it’s useful to an extent but the facts of the matter are that forces are not operating through the body in that way.
Now, if you were to take an image of all of the forces that are operating at any one time and then you took a point, you know, point A to point B. And if you were to rub out all of the other points except for the two that match, of course, you’re going to see a linear relationship. But that’s a problem insofar as you’ve simply disregarded everything else and then said, “Oh, look, these two points happen to match each other.” Well, of course they would be because the forces are going in every conceivable direction. And not only are they going in every conceivable direction, but you’ve also got to take into consideration the spirality, the spiraled nature of living connective tissue and the fact that it’s a hydrated medium as well, which is important.
I love that and I think I mean I love the principles of Anatomy Trains. As you’ve said, it’s been really helpful. It’s really helpful as a piece of research and information to support people to begin to understand the forces and function.
And continuity I think it was great in introducing the idea of continuity so that people could make you know visually and you know if they were reading it as well you know phonetically when they’re speaking and they they they hear this being described to them that really helped them to be able to get from parts, you know, to to lines, but now we’re moving on from lines. I think we should be moving on from lines to fields.
I agree with what you’re saying as somebody who, I cracked my sacrum and my sternum, which obviously as two like cornerstones in the body, makes a big difference in terms of when you’re then rehabilitating yourself. Add on top of that that I’m very very hyper mobile, and having never broken anything before and been totally fine up until that point, the recovery process for me was huge and it was very fiddly.
Luckily, I had the background that I had to be able to figure out how to unpick everything, but it was very nonlinear, the unpicking process and it took me about six years to do that. Because I was having to really re understand what was happening in my body. So from my own personal perspective, I agree with what you’re saying, like there’s more complexity to it and yet also the initial pieces are really powerful to understand how the forces can move in the body, but there’s so many other layers that go with it, especially if you’re dealing with scar tissue or breaks or, you know, all of those pieces as well. Because the body will move very differently because it has to move differently when you’ve had something like that happen in order for it to still be able to function.
Anyway on an let’s go on from that a little bit because I am very curious to talk about scar tissue a little bit uh and to look to to just discuss a little bit from your perspective with the human dissections that you’ve done and before obviously people would use the fascia as a waste product which I think is almost crazy when we look at it now when I say use they like throw it away when they would when they were dissecting the bodies. But I saw, I didn’t actually realise it was your image when I first saw it, but I saw a dissection of an entire almost fascia suit. I think it was Cara Stecco that used it at the International Fascia Congress that we met at.
And I’m really curious to understand from your perspective what you see in terms of scar tissue through the body, and when you’re dissecting, can you, is that something that you can see spreading when you’re peeling the layers back or that has spread I should say when you’re peeling the layers back?
And as a researcher yourself, I’m just interested, I’m fumbling around a little bit here, I’m basically interested in your take on scar tissue through the body because I feel that scar tissue is something that people will only think of as “I’ve cut something and therefore there is a scar there.” But in my experience, when you break something or when you have an impact injury, even if it’s not broken, there’s scar tissue, for me that I’ve had to unpick in my own body. So, I’m just curious, from your perspective, what you’ve seen as you’ve dissected bodies, if that rings true across the board, basically.
Yeah. And I can understand how you’re just even having a little bit of difficulty in formulating your question. You know, what can happen sometimes when we want to ask a question like that. We get so many different aspects in our head and we’re trying to reduce it down to you know to something that, for those people who are listening that, one that they can understand so that we can narrow it down to a specific conversation.
So, you know, when somebody cuts themselves, if a woman goes in and has a C-section, you can understand how taking a scalpel, creating a cut across the skin, and then having to cut through the subcutaneous tissues, these are the superficial fascia, all the way down perhaps to the muscle tissue. So, we’re now getting to cut into the epimysial tissue, cut the muscle fibers, and then, you know, go deeper again. That would be in C-section.
Or somebody could have had, you know, a knife wound or a bullet. Maybe if you’re in North America, you could have been shot, or you’re in a road traffic accident. So, you’re getting a disruption to the continuity of the connective tissue. If you’ve been in an operation, you’ve also perhaps then been cauterised. In other words, they will use a specific piece of equipment to burn the ends of the blood vessels to minimize the loss of blood. Oddly enough, by the way, because someone like myself would have such an interest in fascia, I’m able to talk to the surgeons from an embryological viewpoint to be able to show them.
I just did this last week actually uh to be able to show them how to be able to get to let’s say for instance retroperitoneal tissues in the very back of the body and some people like to go in through the umbilicus through the belly button but there are other ways of being able to get to these structures and if you understand embryology you will be able to use the knowledge of the fascia and how the fascia forms and how it ends up, you know, being where where it ends up from an embryological viewpoint.
And we can use what are called bloodless planes to be able to get access to these retroperitoneal structures and that tends to surprise surgeons because as you rightly said, you know, and this is still true to today by the way. So if you’re in a university where you’re studying an undergraduate medical degree and if an obviously then anatomy is part of your degree although I meet many who maybe only attend the dissection room once, they don’t go back on a regular basis. It doesn’t seem to be as important to them, but if you are dissecting you’re absolutely correct there is a process where really they will try to remove the fascia and then place it in the trays beneath the donor beneath the cadaver. Why? Because they want to get to see what are considered to be the important structures, the blood vessels, the nerves, the muscles, the tendons, the ligaments.
And so from that viewpoint, both the superficial fascia and even the deep fascia were not really considered anything other than packing material or perhaps maybe useful for insulating the body. But in fact, from a surgical viewpoint, a surgeon would make an incision, make their way down to the epimysial tissue, and then scrape the epimedial tissue away in order to get a better look at the muscle tissue. And of course, this disrupts the connective tissue, the fascia, and it can also then lead to scarring.
So and that then by the way is also influenced by the method in which the surgeon used to create the opening and also the stitching. So all of that is hugely important uh to be able to get right so that they can minimise the risk of you know undue scarring occurring. But bear in mind as I say this is a distribution of disruption of the connective tissue and we’re talking about disruption of the connective tissue possibly from the superficial aspect of the skin and then how deep does it go?
Well you’d be amazed how deep it can go. You can see a scar on the surface but that’s and we’ve done this in dissection where we have followed those scars you know to incredible depths.
Wow.
So, and scar tissue tends to heal very very well in the early stages. It tends to heal anatomically correct but then what happens we have something called super compensation. So if somebody were to break a bone in the body you’ll notice that when you feel that bone where the bone break was you’ll feel a little lump or a large lump as the case may be.
So, let’s just try to put a bit of language on it as if the body was having a conversation. Well, the body is basically saying, “Oh, well, we broke this bone and we don’t want this bone to break again.” So, what we’ve done is we’ve laid down new bone cells. We’ve repaired the fracture, but now we don’t want the bone to be broken again.
So, we’re going to spit out more bone cells than are really required. Now, there’s a couple of reasons for that. One would be that the body doesn’t when we use new bone cells to repair the bone break, they’re using secondary bone cells. They’re never quite as good as the original ones you got in embryology. So therefore, it’s kind of a weak, slightly weakened structure and this is the body’s way of trying to strengthen it. So this is called super compensation. So that’s why you feel that lump and it’s the same then with connective tissue.
So with connective tissue, what happens is you don’t just spit out the correct amount of connective tissue required in order to be able to, you know, heal the tissue, but it’ll also spit out a little extra connective tissue. And what’s hugely important, of course, is movement and hydration in order to be able to ensure that you’re always going to have an injury or an insult there because you’ve had an injury. So it’s not that you can you know get away without having a scar but you can minimise the disruption to that area and try to make sure that the scar is anatomically correct and that’s done as I say through appropriate manual therapy with movement therapy as well and understanding hydration of connective tissue if you can.
Yeah. I mean I’m obsessed I, it’s more than this, but I often call myself an alcoholic because I’m obsessed with the concepts of how well you need to hydrate yourself and I will always have multiple drinks but I’m also looking at other ways in which the connective tissue needs hydrating beyond just the water piece. So I’m curious actually this isn’t something I originally wrote down to talk to you about but I’m very curious about your take on hydration and the best practices.
Wow. Okay. So well well I think then based upon what you’ve said Savannah, I think it’ll surprise many people to hear that hydration of fascia is not achieved through only water, through drinking water exactly, hydration is is regulated by calcium mediated mechanotransduction which is what as I said the stochastic paper is really talking about and calcium responds to graded variable movement we could say, the body is organised water under tension.
So when I talk about fascia hydration, I’m not only talking about water volume. I’m talking about the biology that governs water. And two of the key regulators are calcium signaling and then what we call HAS2 or HAS. H stands for hyaluronic synthase or hyaluronan synthase. So it refers to a family of enzymes that build hyaluronan which is one of the key molecules that helps fascia behave as a hydrated adaptive matrix.
So I don’t know I won’t get into synthase. There’s a special relationship it has with regards to it that doesn’t use ATP.
We’re going to get very nerdy if we go too far down this.
Yeah, I don’t want to go too nerdy, I suppose.
But I love it though because I think it’s important to recognise that water is powerful, but there’s so many other components to hydration than just the liquid piece.
I would say hydration is a reflection of your behavior.
Oh, that’s nice. I like that.
Right. So, fascia expresses that behavior moment to moment. In other words, if you know, I use this with my students all the time. I go over to a massage table and I put my, you know, my shin bone. I put my tibia up onto the table. So, I’m bent at the knee, if that makes sense. My knee is flexed. And I say to them, if I sit here for a couple of minutes and I talk to you, the conversation that I’m having through tension and compression here in what you call the quadriceps, that area, is that this is the posture that I want. And so what will happen basically is think of this there’s a couple of ways.
First of all we know that muscle tissue from an evolutionary viewpoint has evolved as a specialised connective tissue to provide us with this thing we call contraction. Now incidentally by the way I would imagine that if I spoke to most of your community and asked them what does the word contraction mean I would imagine none of them know what it means.
They might think they know or they might try to invent something. Could you have a go, Savannah?
Oh, no,I know where you’re going with this.
So, but the point I’d make is I’m always encouraging people to take, you know, five or six words from the language we use, you know, within anatomy and and if you find yourself in an airport somewhere and you’ve got free Wi-Fi, go and look at the etymology of those words. Go and look at the origin of those words because I think it will help you to better understand and you know to to have a better conversation with people when we talk about these anatomical terms and see well where did that come from?
Well, it came from the 16th century and then you know it was influenced by you know by maybe some French interpretation and then some English word was added to it and you know you get a sense of of how we’ve ended up with this particular term and the specific definition of it and of course to contract means to shrink.
Now many people you know wouldn’t have thought that it meant to shrink but that’s again that might be a conversation for another day but the point I’m making is that whatever this is, muscle fibers have evolved to offer this as a specialty. They are brilliant at doing this thing called shrinking. They’re brilliant at doing a contraction which is generating forces you know so that we can perhaps move and talk and do these different things. So you get different tissues offering different specialities.
So where was I going with this now? I’m after losing my train of thought there because I went off. What was I saying about?
I mean you were talking about many things. We were talking about water and hydration. and then you started talking about the class that you had where you put the leg up.
Oh yes. So that’s what I wanted to get back. Well done. Well done. Yes. So now I’m yeah, so if you can if you can imagine me then for instance with my with my lower limb up on the table and I’m in this deep knee flexed position what your body if there if there was a conversation taking place your body’s basically saying oh you want that that particular posture.
So think about it. The human body, so we’re told, the human body is about trying to conserve energy.
Now, if you think about muscle fibers contracting in order to be able to provide you with a posture, well, that’s very costly from an energetic viewpoint, from an energy viewpoint. Well, is there something that we can do that might reduce our energy expenditure? And the answer is yes. What we can do is we can stiffen the connective tissue.
So, now you’re saying, “Ah, you want that posture. Okay, here’s how we’ll support you in the posture.” Now, after several minutes of talking to students, I go to move further down the room and I have to take my lower limb, my leg off the table, and you’ll find that it’s stiff. And suddenly, I start to walk down the room and now you’re saying to the body, “Oh, this is the posture that you’re looking for.” And so, you’ll find that it might take a few seconds to roll it out as such, you know, to kind of to get rid of the stiffness, but now suddenly the body’s saying, “Oh, no, no, no. This is the posture that you want. Okay, let’s give you this posture.” Now, that posture was dynamic. It involves movement and therefore that has a big influence on hydration.
So, as I say, fascia expresses that behavior. So, if you’re going to be static, then you’re going to get a static posture and you’re going to get a static fascia. Whereas if you are dynamic and you’re moving then fascia will reflect that dynamism and that movement. That’s really the major point.
So we used to think that fascia held water. But now increasingly we understand that fascia manages water. Hydration is a process. So hydration is not a storage issue. It’s a signaling issue. And calcium is the language of load inside a cell.
I love, I love so many aspects of what you just said. There’s so many things that are spinning around my head. I’m going to speak from my story just because I think it will be easier for people to follow where I’m going with this because I want to dip into the idea of pain and you spoke about stiffness.
Now, one of the things I noticed when I cracked the various parts of my body that I did was that a stiffness came into play and I know that stiffness was there to try and support me basically because I was very unstable because of where I’d cracked and that stiffness was very helpful for a time. However, because I was stuck for quite a while, that stiffness slowly became five migraines a week, not being able to walk without my hip popping out of place. And all the things that when I initially went and spoke to a doctor about them, I was given the idea of things like painkillers and anti-depressants because there’s nothing that can be done. And one of the processes that I found particularly fascinating was finding ways to go into that stiffness gently, kindly, attentively, and basically help it remember how to move.
And I think sometimes what people think of as ageing or a problem in the body, is something that it’s just not many people are speaking about in terms of helping that stiffness to shift. And I’m curious about what I know from my perspective, I had a lot of things happening with pain in my body because of the migraines. And the migraines weren’t just in my head. They were at all my junctures. So they were in my wrists, they were in my hips, it was in my shoulders, ankles. And it was like it was going the whole way through me. Um, and there were various different practices that I worked with. Very much focused, I guess, like engineering. Because I went into Feldenkrais and different practices like that to begin to help the nervous system to switch back on. And I’m reminded by the quote that Ida Rolf used, which is “Where you think it is, it ain’t.” Because I know when I first started like trying to unpick everything, where I thought the problem was coming from was completely wrong.
So I’m just curious from your perspective for someone who is in a process perhaps dealing with pain coming from where they think is one area. What is it that would be interesting for them to explore or what’s your understanding of what that might mean in their body in terms of pain because I know from my perspective when I went through the process that I did to unpick everything and unravel everything, I had to really just slow down and begin to be attentive to just basic engineering function through my body to help switch everything back on.
Wow. Okay, well.
Sorry, so many different things!
No, it’s a Yeah, I’m sad, sorry that you had to go through all of that. You know, it’s your journey and you know, it makes you the person that you are one way or the other, perhaps.
I’m really grateful for it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.
Okay.
I really am. I’m really grateful for it because now I have no migraines. I can walk for as long as I want. I’m incredibly strong. Like I have rebuilt myself. I know that what I’m talking about is actionable and works, which is why I want to help people understand how to have that. And I love that you refer to it in the same way. To be able to be in a conversation with their own body because their body is in a conversation with itself and you need to be a participant in that process. I’m very pragmatic in that sense. And I am grateful for the experience because it’s allowed me to know what’s possible, in terms of where you can be and where you can get to. Although it is a journey and it’s a forever journey like we have bodies, we’re always going to have things that are happening, but having an understanding of how to work with it is so powerful.
Well, I’m interested in and have always been interested in, for example, topics such as consciousness. That’s really what, believe it or not, brought me into the world of anatomy. When I was a kid, I was really interested in consciousness. I’m interested in cosmology. I’m interested in quantum physics. I’m interested in, you know, everything from, you know, string theory. I teach, you know, my anatomy, I teach it from the viewpoint of an inner cosmos, you know, in continuity with the outer cosmos.
And when you get into things like quantum theories and you get into string, string theory, etc., you hear the physicists coming up with what sound like crazy hypotheses. I mean really crazy hypotheses such as you know negative numbers in mathematics and you kind of go why where did negative numbers come from and the question could be well did somebody invent uh negative numbers or did they discover negative numbers were negative numbers just always there waiting to be discovered these conversations are amazing, I find them amazing anyway but the point is that by having negative numbers it helps them to actually solve equations that they couldn’t resolve or solve you know without negative numbers. You think, “Wow, this all sounds a bit kind of crazy.”
Yet, in anatomy and physiology, if we tend to come out with something that seems to be outside the box or a little bit crazy, we’re shunned. So, in physics, you’re allowed to get away with it. But in anatomy, you’re not allowed to get away with it.
So, let’s look at the whole conversation around pain. Pain is a liar. Having said that, if you were to place your hand onto something that was extremely hot, we’d all pretty much have the same experience. I’m talking about people who have, you know, a healthy body and a healthy nervous system.
What we know about the nervous system in terms of what you call your spinal nerves. So your spinal nerves C1 starts just above the first vertebral body, which is the Atlas and so you have eight nerves in your neck C1 to C8. So people go, we only got 7 spinal vertebrae. Yes you do but the first nerve starts above it so therefore you have 8. So when and these are called spinal nerves.
So all of these nerves all the way down to the coccyx, these are all spinal nerves. So I’m not now talking about the nerves that are your cranial nerves. Your optic nerve and your olfactory nerves are not nerves. We called them nerves but they’re actually not nerves. They’re actually direct outpouches of the brain. But we’ll leave that again aside for another day because we get into all sorts of conversations.
But so let’s not include cranial for just a moment. Let’s just talk about spinal nerves. So number one, we know that whenever and this is what all the research, you know, has told us over the last you know millennia and more. When a nerve is insulted or a tissue that that nerve innovates is injured or insulted, the experience that you will have if it’s a pain or a change in sensation, so, some people might say they can feel water running on their limb or whatever the case may be. You will feel that you will feel that sensation down the body. So the sciatic pain runs down your leg.
What you won’t hear people saying is that the pain is shooting upwards. That’s if it’s nerve pain. But people will tell you the pain is shooting upwards. So within the world of medicine, if you were to say to, you know, a medically qualified practitioner that the pain is shooting upward, then they’ll think that it’s psychosomatic. They’d say, “Well, it must be in your head because there is no explanation for you experiencing pain that’s travelling upwards.” Now, the only explanation that I have for individuals is about pain travelling upwards in the human body, I just noticed my screen was kind of going a bit funny, wasn’t it? So, hopefully, you can still hear me. I think you’re good.
You’re back to normal.
But well, I don’t know about that, but anyway.
As normal as you get.
Yeah, as normal as you get me. But so the only thing that I know of that explanation that I have for pain traveling up would be myofascial trigger points. So, it could be that there are myofascial trigger points in the system, but there could be some other explanation. I don’t know and I’m very open to hearing what other explanations might be out there in my 45 years you know of moving to bodywork therapy in fact more now because I’m 65 this year so whatever that is you know I don’t know what the explanation could be so if there’s anybody out there who who has another explanation feel free to contact us and let us know that but it but pain is also part of your belief and your belief systems and your previous experience so if you believe something should be painful. Well, then you’re going to experience pain.
But I think an interesting point to make is based upon the story that you’ve given us, you know, this the scenario you’ve given us is that I’d say that and remember everything I tell you could be wrong, won’t you just always remember that. This is my story over the last you know 40 whatever it is year six seven years and this is the best set of explanations that I can provide to people based upon my experiences. And so the way I’d look at it is that the human body has evolved.
I was in the United States just recently. I was working with horsey people, believe it or not, and horses. And the guy who I was one of the main characters there, he said to me I was completely wrong and everything that I had said because I had talked from an evolutionary viewpoint. And he was making the point that horses just, you know, they just were horses and they’ve always been horses. And I was thinking, okay, but then again, he thought that the world was also only around about 6,000 years. So there are various different individuals with different rationales and different explanations.
I come at it from an evolutionary viewpoint and what I would say to you is that you know humans, Homo sapiens sapians, we have evolved in such a way that the body is very very good at dealing with scenarios and resolutions of those scenarios in the short term.
So, somebody’s in the water. Let’s say they’re in Australia somewhere and they’re, you know, up to their waist, but they’re enjoying a nice summer’s day in the water and they feel a tug and they go, “What was that?” Well, they’ve just been bitten by a shark and they don’t know that, but they felt a tug and they walk out of the water and then suddenly they see the blood and they see the injury. Now, they may collapse further up the beach and depending on where the shark bit them, it could result in their death. them or it could just be a very serious injury. But there was no indication of how serious that injury was at the time they felt the tug.
But the human body can release endocannabinoids. It can release norepinephrine, you know, and it can get you away from the source of insult or the source of injury. And that’s a great short term, you know, strategy. But then long term it could leave you for instance with spastic tissue or myofascial trigger points which can stay in the system forever.
So it’s not really that the body, as far as I can see, hasn’t really introduced very good long-term strategies and that’s where a manual therapist or a movement therapist can come in with good knowledge of anatomy and neurophysiology and can offer some type of therapeutic income which requires a response from the body which then brings it back to homeostasis. If you wish to use that word. But that requires you know, good knowledge of anatomy and physiology and neurophysiology.
Yes, I completely agree. I mean one of the things that I know for sure I wouldn’t have been able to even with my own knowledge of you know I’ve worked in this field for nearly 30 years. Even with my own knowledge of what I knew, it took me 6 years to get myself back to what I would have considered normal.
To be perfectly honest, I feel like I’m better than I was before, ironically, just because my understanding of so many different facets of my own body has improved and because I’ve been more focused on every different aspect as opposed to just walking through life just doing some basic movement. But I would have been unable to get to where I am now without the support of other people. I mean at one stage I was having between 20 and 30 hours of work a week done on myself to really just help you know reconnect and switch things back on. But it was tough to find the right practitioners. You know, I and I feel that it was really only when I started to come across some people who were working even more with the nerves or had a really deep deep understanding of anatomy like the combination of those two things, Rolfing, Feldenkrais, different things like that that really brought everything together to help everything move and switch back on.
So it’s really important to make sure you have good support and not just somebody who’s just moving the tissues on the top.
You could be lucky. You could be lucky.
Yeah. True.
I mean movement is better than no movement.
True.
It’s interesting, hearing you saying you know you using you know descriptions like switching on and switching off. I always think it’s interesting to listen to a patient. They live in their body and even if they don’t have knowledge of anatomy and physiology, listen to their vocabulary, listen to their language and their set of descriptions. I think that’s very very informative and the longer an insult because I refer to them as insults.
I really like that you call them an insult because I feel like I feel like it respects the body actually.
Yeah.
I really like that.
I’ve had so many patients over the years who have come in and they can’t remember one particular incident. They can’t say I had a fall or whatever the case they can’t but yet they have you know that they’re they’re experiencing these sensations whether it’s pain or some other sensations and so from from from that perspective I always I was I look at them yeah from the viewpoint of being insults and when the injury or insult is in the body over a period of time this is having an effect on the physiology and the metabolism in the body and so this can lead to the death of certain cells, certain glial cells.
And those glial cells could also be specialised cells that basically they’re like a little knob you can turn to to inhibit or turn down the experience of pain. And so when those tissues when those nerve cells get damaged, of course, now you don’t have that inhibitory facility. And so it tends to kind of amplify everything and those cells don’t get reinstated very quickly. Those cells take time to be reinstated.
And so with people like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, these are not conditions that you can or Ehler’s Danlos, I’m not quite sure what your particular situation is in terms of hypermobility, but but these things take time to reverse because we’re talking we’re talking about metabolism and physiology.
Yeah I mean I would also add in there was a lot I had to supplement to support my body as well so that it was able to do that switching back on process. It wasn’t only the manual piece or only the nervous system work that did that for me. It was a combination of all of those things. And this is why I think it’s so important for people to really have an understanding. I get people to look at what their body history is to really have an understanding of what kind of place their body is in and why it might have arrived in that place. You know, from multiple different injuries or impacts. because I think it’s a much bigger conversation and I think people need to be in their own driving seat of their own journey with their body but be open to conversation with other people who maybe will have an insight for them to support them in unraveling whatever it is that they’re working on.
But I feel like each person is responsible for their own bodies in that way to have to be in that conversation and to have an understanding of, “Okay, I’m working on this right now. I feel like this area needs support.” And they may arrive with that and say, “I’d like some help in this area.”
And they might also be surprised, like we just mentioned earlier, like Ida Rolf saying, “Where it is, it ain’t” to discover that like I was, I was dealing with crazy neck stiffness. And for me, it was like the work through the ankles that released my neck. And that just blew my mind. I did a whole load of ankle work and all of a sudden I could move my neck again having not been able to move it properly. So, you know, it really is about being open but also being present to what is happening in your own body. So, yeah.
And that brings us into the conversation of continuity.
Yeah.
You know, you could say connected. I mean, somebody said to me at the Fascia Research Congress, two individuals came up to me with the same type of comment to make to me. One guy came up and just said, “Can I have a word, John?” I said, “Yeah, not a problem at all.” And I said, “Come on, we go over here. We’ll have a cup of coffee.” And we sat down and he said, “Yeah.” I just want to say thanks for everything. But he says, “I just want to let you know.” He said, “You really pissed me off, you know.” And I said, “Really?” And I said, “Why do I piss you off?” And he said, “Well, it just seems to me that every word that we use, you have a problem with it.”
I don’t see it that way. I particularly like your questioning of words because I do think you have to consider the origin of something in order to grasp it. And I also feel that it’s so fluid a lot of what is being described, it can be really hard to pin it down. It’s almost like you have to listen in silence to so many different aspects of what’s happening in the body and to be able to hear it rather than just give it words.
So I really like your picking of words because I feel like it’s almost intangible what is trying to be discussed here or not what is being discussed here. So it’s good to kind of help frame it slightly.
Well, you see, our problem is that we’re prisoners to a history of the human body as a machine. And therefore, that’s why you have joints in the human body. That’s why we have levers.
That’s why we replace hip joints and knee joints with stainless steel and ceramics and superglue and cement and so on. And I think that we could be in a different place if 70 or 80 years ago we had understood that we were not machines. Now we have biomaterials. Uh which is really exciting and fascinating that this is actually happening. But he was right to an extent. I’m dyspraxic and therefore when somebody says something to me and I often say to them, you know what you just said and I’ll explain what the words were and then they’d say to me, oh no, but that’s not what I meant. And I go, “Well that’s what you said though.” You see?
So, therefore, you’re either using words that you really truly do not know what those words mean or you think you do and you’re using them, you know, to explain something. And to me, it just causes me to, like the term hyaluronic acid.
Yeah.
So, hyaluronan is not an acid or should not be an acid. It can be an acid and if it’s an acid, then it’s a salt and if it’s a salt, it’s a very, very small molecule. So you would use hyaluronic acid for instance in face creams because it’s easily absorbable but in the body it is hyaluronan and it shouldn’t be in an acidic state that would it’s not and it’s not that hyaluronan repels water hyaluronan is a water loving molecule
But it’s just it’s not an acid you know. Does it make a difference to many people’s lives? I don’t know but in terms of researchers and others they should get that right and I think they need to be accurate about what it is that we could have another conversation with. So it’s not hyaluronic acid, it’s hyaluronan. And there’s different variations of hyaluronan that do different jobs which help in hydration.
And if we can accept the premise that calcium is the language through which fascia regulates you know water distribution and structural tone then as I say hydration is not a passive fluid intake issue. It’s a calcium mediated mechanochemical event. I don’t even like the word mechanochemical because there’s mechano mechano there which means mechanical.
But in that framework, the therapist’s task is not to add water, but to optimise calcium signaling dynamics within the, what myself and Karen Kirkness called, the fascial manifold, which basically means you’ve got one connective tissue which has spiraled and rotated and invaginated.
It’s where the word vagina comes from to invaginate to turn back on itself and then to rotate. So that’s why you’ll end up getting what we call virtual spaces in the body, but really they’ve come from one original fabric as Jaap van der Wal likes to say the original fabric which he calls the fascia or mesenchyme in embryology.
Did we cover it?
We covered a lot there. Yeah, I think we did cover it. I am very aware of your time and I could talk to you for hours. Maybe if you’re happy to and if you have time, we can have another conversation.
Of course.
I feel like there’s so many pieces we could have gone into there. But I’m just curious and again this is just my own interest really here. I’m curious what you’re most excited about in this conversation around fascia and connective tissue at the moment that we see in the world. like what is it that is sparking your interest and keeping you curious?
And I also come just so I’ve said because I don’t think we’ve had this conversation from a similar background as you. The reason I got into the body work piece was because I actually came from meditation and energy work first. And so for me I’ve gone kind of backwards into body work even though the body work I’ve done for nearly 30 years.
But for me it was about opening up the body to have more energy moving through it. So I am excited to hear there’s a similar crossover and I’m unsurprised as well. But anyway, yeah. So, what’s sparking your interest at the moment within this world of fascia and connected tissue?
Well, I’ll be a little bit like you were earlier. I’ll start going there because there are so many aspects which all get tied together. I mean, I’m very interested in wanting to make sure that the exercise science world would encourage movement variability. That’s the stochastic input spiral loading. So people should pay attention to Dr. Karen Kirkness’s book “The Five Filaments” and also Joanne Avison’s book on “Yoga, Fascia, Anatomy, and Movement.”
I’m interested in also trying to find a kind of a middle ground between Dr. Steven Porges’s work on polyvagal theory and my colleagues in the world of anatomy particularly Paul Grossman who has spent 30 years just tearing down Dr. Porges and I would tend to think that there is actually a middle ground.
I think there’s a miscommunication there or a breakdown in communication. So I’d love to be able to find a way to be able to demonstrate to both parties that there is a common ground and in fact polyvagal theory I think has a lot to offer.
I agree.
I’m also very very interested in the role that fascia plays in consciousness. but that’s a huge topic. And to be quite honest with you, just to be able to convince or to get people to realise the ubiquitous nature of fascia and that fascia, as I say, is not a system.
It transcends a system. So from an embryological viewpoint, although we didn’t call the original you know kind of cellular matrix, the original ground material, we call it mesenchyme, we didn’t call it fascia. But long before you ever had a blood cell, long before you had ever had a nerve cell, you had the connective tissue, you had the fascia, you had the mesenchyme.
So, you know, it precedes all of these tissues. You can’t have a liver without fascia. You can’t have muscle fiber without fascia. So, it is so important and we really need to have a greater emphasis and a greater vision of what fascia is.
I could only agree with everything you’ve said there. I am fascinated by fascia. I have been for forever and I think I probably will be for forever because I feel like this is a conversation that will last my lifetime and probably others after. But it’s a privilege to have been able to chat with you about this and a privilege to even be in the conversation about what and how fascia works for each of us. So thank you so much for your time, John, and I look forward to more conversations like this hopefully and yeah good luck with everything that you’re up to and all the research and sharing and talks that you’re doing. Thank you.
Brilliant. I actually I’ll finish on one thing and that is that I’m just about to submit a paper actually at the moment which is looking at the role of fascia in rigor mortis. So yeah we have had absolutely no change to the science on rigor mortis since 1811.
Oh wow.
So this is a paper that I definitely want to get out there and I want to uh you know to get people you know talking and considering fascia and its role because in forensic science I think it’s going to have a you know a significant impact. it should have a significant impact and of course my alma mater which is Dundee University specialises in human identification and and forensic science and so I’m hoping that somebody will take up the gauntlet and uh following the publication of that paper then may start getting into looking at research related to death and to rigor mortis.
For more information on John Sharkey check out
ntc.ie/dissection
https://www.johnsharkeyevents.com/
Stochastic Nature of Fascia: John Sharkey & Karen Kirkness
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41465862/
John Sharkey – Understanding Fascia, Tensegrity, and Myofascial Trigger Points
https://geni.us/Understanding-Fascia
Joanne Avison – Yoga, Fascia, Anatomy & Movement
https://geni.us/Joanne-Avison-movement
GLOSSARY
| Term | Plain‑English definition |
| Anatomical society / British Association of Clinical Anatomists | Professional organisations for anatomists that help set standards for how human anatomy is described and taught. |
| Anatomy Trains | A model that describes long, continuous lines of muscle and fascia running through the body to explain how forces and movement are connected. |
| Atlas | The first neck vertebra (C1) that supports the skull and allows you to nod your head “yes.” |
| Brownian motion | Random movement of tiny particles in a fluid, used here as an analogy for how unpredictable fascia organization can be. |
| Deep fascia | Dense connective tissue layers that wrap around and separate deeper muscles and structures under the skin. |
| Dyspraxic / dyspraxia | A coordination disorder where planning and carrying out movements (and sometimes sequencing and language) is more difficult. |
| Ehler’s Danlos (Ehlers‑Danlos syndrome) | A group of inherited connective tissue conditions often linked with very flexible joints and fragile tissues. |
| Embryo / embryological viewpoint / embryology | Early stages of human development in the womb, and the study of how tissues like fascia form before birth. |
| Endocannabinoids | Natural “cannabis‑like” chemicals made inside the body that help regulate pain, mood, and stress. |
| Endomysial tissue (endomysium) | Fine connective tissue that wraps each individual muscle cell (fibre). |
| Epigenetics | Changes in how genes are expressed that are influenced by environment or mechanical forces, not by DNA sequence alone. |
| Epimysial tissue (epimysium) | The outer connective tissue layer that surrounds an entire muscle. |
| Fascial compartments / compartmentalisation | The way fascia divides muscles and tissues into “compartments,” influencing how forces and fluids move. |
| Fascial manifold | A way of describing fascia as one continuous sheet that folds, spirals, and dives in and out to form apparent layers and spaces. |
| Fibromyalgia | A chronic condition characterized by widespread pain, fatigue, and tenderness, often involving altered pain processing. |
| Feldenkrais | A movement method using gentle, mindful movements to re‑educate the nervous system and improve coordination and comfort. |
| Glial cells | Support cells in the nervous system that help neurons and can strongly influence pain and sensitivity. |
| HAS / HAS2 (hyaluronan synthase) | Enzymes that build hyaluronan, helping fascia stay hydrated and adaptable. |
| Hyaluronan | A large, water‑attracting molecule in connective tissue that helps tissues stay slippery, hydrated, and responsive. |
| Hyaluronic acid (cosmetic context) | A form of hyaluronan used in skincare products and injections to attract water and plump tissues. |
| Ida Rolf / Rolfing | Founder of “Rolfing” structural integration, a manual therapy that aims to reorganize the body’s structure through fascia. |
| IFAA (International Federation for Associations of Anatomists) | Global umbrella body that standardizes anatomical names and definitions. |
| Iliotibial band (IT band) | Long band of fascia running along the outside of the thigh, linking the hip area to the outer shin and transmitting forces. |
| Leptomeninges | The two delicate inner layers covering the brain and spinal cord (arachnoid and pia mater). |
| Mesenchyme | Early embryonic connective tissue from which fascia, bone, cartilage, and other tissues develop. |
| Myofascial trigger points | Small, sensitive spots in muscle and fascia that can cause local pain and send pain to other regions. |
| Myotensgrity / myotensegrity | A view of the body where muscles and fascia work together in a tensegrity network of balanced tension and compression. |
| Perimysial tissue (perimysium) | Connective tissue that wraps bundles (fascicles) of muscle fibers inside a muscle. |
| Periost / periosteum | The connective tissue layer covering the outside of bones and continuous with tendon tissue. |
| Polyvagal theory | A theory about the vagus nerve that explains different autonomic states (fight/flight, shutdown, social engagement) and their impact on behavior and safety. |
| Rigor mortis | The stiffening of muscles after death, discussed here with possible links to fascial changes. |
| Sacrum | The triangular bone at the base of the spine that connects the spine to the pelvis. |
| Spastic tissue | Informal term for tissue that feels chronically tight, over‑contracted, or “stuck” after injury or long‑term strain. |
| Spinal nerves (C1–C8 etc.) | Nerves that exit from the spinal cord at each vertebral level to supply sensation and movement to the body. |
| Stiffness (tissue) | Increased resistance to movement in tissues, sometimes protective at first but problematic if it persists. |
| Stochastic / stochasticity | Refers to randomness or unpredictability; used here to describe how individual fascial patterns vary person to person. |
| Subcutaneous tissue | The layer of tissue just under the skin that contains fat and superficial fascia. |
| Super compensation | The body’s habit of repairing an injury by adding extra tissue, creating a thicker or denser area than before. |
| Superficial fascia | The more surface‑level, often fatty layer of fascia beneath the skin involved in insulation, metabolism, and hormone roles. |
| Tensegrity / tensegral viewpoint | A structural principle where stability comes from a system of continuous tension and discontinuous compression, applied to how the body holds itself up. |
| Trapezius / trapezii | Large back and neck muscle(s) used to show that each person’s muscle shape and size can differ. |
| Umbilicus | The belly button; sometimes used as a surgical entry point into the abdomen. |
| Virtual space | An apparent “space” between structures (like between bones) that is actually maintained by tension and compression in tissues rather than being truly empty. |
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One Response
Savannah what a brilliant, fascinating conversation. My mind is blown to hear more about about our multi fasciated, fascia in our amazing bodies. Would love to hear another chat about John about Fascia and conscious!