What is Connective Tissue?
Connective tissue or fascia is the immediate environment of every cell. Fascia is a web of protein fibers and a liquid/gel complex that makes up the spaces between the cells. Fascia forms the framework that holds the cells together, the sheets that bind and separate tissues, and the structural components of the muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones.
Connective tissue communicates with itself throughout the body. It's been called a liquid crystal -- a continuous fluid structure that crosses joint lines, moves in and out of body cavities, and changes throughout when any part of it is changed.
Connective tissue lines all the body cavities, provides the framework for the minerals that create cartilage and bone, and separates the muscles and their individual fibers. It so permeates the body that if you were to remove every other kind of cell and leave the connective tissues in place, you'd still be able to see exactly what you looked like.
If you've ever prepared fresh meat for cooking, say a chicken leg, remember what the tissue looked like when you removed the skin. That thin white/clear film covering the muscle is fascia. Now imagine this fascia not only covering the muscle, but permeating the muscle belly, separating all the individual muscle fibers, dividing muscles from each other, and forming the structural framework for the whole body. This framework includes muscles, bone, skin and organs.
Fascia does other things, too. Connective tissue is the material that repairs broken bones, torn muscles, deep wounds, cuts, and surgeries by forming scar tissue. This same material can form web-like adhesions when it gets too enthusiastic, causing problems, expecially in body cavities like the abdomen and pelvis. And it's very strong. Connective tissue has a tensile strength of about twenty-two hundred pounds per square inch, which could explain why it's so hard to stretch tight hamstrings.
Connective tissue possesses special properties that make it possible to change its shape and pliability. Bodyworkers taken advantage of these properties to get results that make a positive difference in the client experience.
Connective tissue has the ability to change state, depending on its level of energy and activity. This property, called thixotropy means that the fascia can move from a gel-like state to a liquid-like state and back. Just like Jell-O, fascia becomes more fluid when it's warmer and more gelled when it's cooler or more static. In fact, the gelatin in Jell-O is rendered animal protein and comes from exactly the same kinds of tissues as our own connective tissue matrix.
It's easy to feel this in your own body when exercising. When you first start your workout, you may feel stiff and tight, but as you warm up, you notice greater ease and comfort. Your fascia is moving from a gel to a liquid state during the warm-up.
The same thing happens when you receive massage. But instead of your own movement raising the energy in your tissues, the therapist's hands add heat, energy, and motion to the fascia. And their specific hand placement can free and mobilize places that exercise may not be able to get to.
Collagen is the basic building block of fascia. It's not a living cell, but a long protein molecule that forms sheets, ligaments, tendons, the covering of bones (called periosteum), and the framework for the minerals that form cartilage and bone. These fibers are made by a special kind of cell called a fibroblast. Fibroblasts can travel anywhere in the body that they're needed (for example, to repair a cut or a broken bone). Once collagen fibers are formed, they're directed by the body to organize into the appropriate structural formula, and they build this tissue by gluing to each other with molecular hydrogen bonds. The good news is that hydrogen bonding causes collagen to build along lines of tension, making tendons and ligaments stronger. When you lift weights or begin a running program, you're not only building joints, bones, and muscles, you're increasing the tension in the connective tissue, which makes it stronger, too. That's why it's important to gradually increase your workout level. You'll avoid injury by giving your muscles, bones, and connective tissues a chance to respond to the challenge. The bad news is that collagen fibers also build hydrogen bonds when there are abnormal lines of tension.
When you have poor posture or poor biomechanical patterns, you'll develop a buildup of collagen that eventually holds you in tthose places. The hydrogen bonds glue your collagen to the point where you can't stretch or exercise out of the pattern. Inactivity also causes collagen to glue together.
Anyone who's been casted for a bone fracture knows that the hardest part of recovery is getting back range of motion in joints kept immobile for the six weeks it takes the bone to heal.
This extreme stiffness is hydrogen bonds at work on the fascia in and around the joints. Structural Integration relies on specific techniques designed to soften and organize the connective tissue matrix.
Collagen fibers are strong in tension -- like cables or rope -- but the hydrogen bonds that hold them together are weak against shear forces. A shear force is one that's applied across the length of the fiber -- like scissors or shears. By applying gentle shear forces into the connective tissue matrix, a bodyworker trained in deep soft-tissue work can encourage the release of some of the hydrogen bonds and stimulates the collagen fibers to unglue themselves. And while the collagen isn't actually a living cell, when its hydrogen bond glue has been softened it will be more pliable and the body canthen mold in a new way.
Clients frequently ask what we mean by "releasing tissue". Let us consider that we are accessing all of the properties of the fascia at once with our therapeutic touch. We are encouraging the gel part of the fascia to become more liquid-like, and are gently breaking hydrogen bonds between fibers, thereby communicating with the whole connective matrix regardless of where we are working in the body. The connective tissue matrix knows how to do its job. It changes with the right kind of input. It organizes itself along lines of tension so that we can move freely and confidently. It softens and deforms whenit's warmed, and it reorganizes throughout life as we grow, change and age. And soft-tissue work can encourage it to do all these things in a way that makes us healthier.
(Article used from Body Sense Magazine, Spring/Summer 2007)
NOTE: During Nancy's Structural Integration training, she studied Tom Myers' Anatomy Trains mapping system in depth and incorporates this philosophy into her sessions. While this excerpt is lengthy, it is a fine explanation about Anatomy Trains.
About Anatomy Trains (excerpt from Tom Myers' website):
The Anatomy Trains maps are attempts to organize a systems approach to improving human structure and movement. In considering manipulation and movement education for performance enhancement or rehabilitation, both thinking and practice have been constrained within a mechanical model of human functioning. Like most analyses in Western academic tradition, the basis has been to break the body down into its component parts, and then examine how each part contributes to the whole. Thus we consider individual bones, muscles, joints, and nerves, and when considering pathology, seek to find which component part has broken down so that we can fix it. While this frame of mind is sufficient to tackle a broken automobile or factory machine, it faces certain limitations when applied to biological structures. While the mechanistic approach has fostered much research that has yielded many insights and valuable approaches in physical therapy, it has the unfortunate result of steering the mind's eye away from properties of the whole system not predicted by the properties of the constituent parts.
Human movement is one of those whole system chaotic (in the mathematical sense) events that requires that the synergetic effects be considered, and the Anatomy Trains is a transitional map between the reductionistic traditional anatomy and the gestalt of the living body.
Part of the basis for this new view is that the human body is not assembled in parts. It self-assembles from a single cell that proliferates wildly before differentiating into the different functional cells that make up our body. Concepts like 'muscle' or 'organ' are man-made concepts imposed on the whole which was never divided and never functioned separately until we approached it with a knife. The blade is the fundamental tool of anatomy, and the blade separates the parts for our inspection and research. But we must not forget that the divisions we make with the blade are our own, and not objective.
For instance, the neatest divisions are made by going along the fascial planes of the body, which both separate and join each structure to its neighbor. The resultant picture - from the etchings of Vesalius to the most modern anatomical text - are this going to emphasize the divisions rather than the interactions. To focus down our microscope, to create a picture of a muscle - a deltoid, say, or a gastrocnemius - this structure must be separated from its surrounding muscles and fascia, and cut at either end - what we call origin and insertion. This cutting turns the mind away from what effect the muscle may have on its surrounding neighbors - as in the case of the vastus lateralis, whose pressure out against the Iliotibial Tract is essential to the stability and integrity of the hip joint and femur. It also turns the mind away from considering the longitudinal effect the pull of the muscle may have via the connective tissue beyond the attachment.
The Anatomy Trains Myofascial Meridians scheme maps the longitudinal connections through the fascial webbing. The premise is simple - follow the 'grain' of the muscle and fascia to look for tensional lines, straps, and slings that extend beyond the single muscle to traverse the body's segments. These extended lines of muscles then provide a picture of now stability is transmitted in proper function, and how strain is transmitted in the body in improper function. With this knowledge, we can unwind such strain patterns, often finding the source at some remove from the problem, e.g. low back pain may have its source in a fallen arch, or a cervical whiplash come to rest in a disturbed breathing pattern.
Such knowledge does not negate what has been learned in the mechanistic process of the last several hundred years, but adds a new and dynamic dimension to such knowledge. The fascial webbing develops as a 3-dimensional spider-web during the second week of embryological development. The muscles, bones, and organs develop within this web, shaping it and being shaped by it. This web is folded, stretched, and sealed through the rest of embryological development and the remainder of life. It can be cut with a surgeon's scalpel, torn by injury, frayed by age, shortened by strain, or made less functional by improper usage or less-than-optimal nutrition, but it will always remain one net. The Anatomy Trains are revealed by a simple change in orientation of the scalpel applied in dissection: By turning the blade on its side and lifting the attachment of a muscle from its connection to the periosteal covering of the bone, we see the continuation from one myofascial structure to the next, much like a string of sausages.
We constrain ourselves to follow the lines of pull revealed in the fascial fabric, and what is revealed when we work this way is a system of 12 meridians (not acupuncture meridians, though there is significant overlap) which transmit movement, stability, strain, and ultimately limitation from one body segment to the next, often over several to some distant place that takes the effect. These continuities run up the front, back, and sides of the body, around the body in helical patterns connecting the limbs ipsi- and contralaterally, and up through the body's core surrounding the organ systems. The series of sessions works systematically with the tissues to open the body's sleeve, awaken and balance the core tissues, and then bring harmony to the interaction among the lines of muscles and sinews that form a tensegrity network in which the bones move. The Anatomy Trains represents a significant step forward in mapping the relation between stability and movement in the unique human plantigrade posture, with its tiny base of support and high center of gravity.
