The 3rd step in healing is Fascial Exercise. This is where we move beyond releasing fascial restrictions and into regaining healthy use of our previously injured areas. This piece is so often missed. But without any one of these 3 steps of healing: connection, release and fascial exercise, we will ride the symptom merry-go-round with our pain returning over and over. Complete your healing and finish your recovery with fascial exercise!
The 3rd step in healing is Fascial Exercise. This is where we move beyond releasing fascial restrictions and into regaining healthy use of our previously injured areas. This piece is so often missed. But without any one of these 3 steps of healing: connection, release and fascial exercise, we will ride the symptom merry-go-round with our pain returning over and over. Complete your healing and finish your recovery with fascial exercise!
Healing Step 3: Fascial Exercise
Welcome to MFR: A New Perspective on Healing. This podcast is all about physical and emotional healing with myofascial release.
My name is Liana, I’m an expert level MFR therapist. I specialize in pain relief and all things related to authentic healing of physical and emotional injuries and trauma. I help clients from all over the country and abroad via private Telehealth MFR treatments. You can find out more about working with me and healing with myofascial release at bodyfirstmfr.com.
This episode is entitled Healing Step 3: Fascial Exercise. The 3rd step in healing is Fascial Exercise. This is where we move beyond releasing fascial restrictions and into regaining healthy use of our previously injured areas. This piece is so often missed. But without any one of these 3 steps of healing: connection, release and fascial exercise, we will ride the symptom merry-go-round with our pain returning over and over.
To me Fascial Exercise and MFR Rehab are where healing gets really fun. This is the part of healing where we get back to using our muscles and complete the healing process. This is also the part of healing that most MFR therapists and physical therapists miss completely which is why I had to work so hard to find this healing for myself and why it is so exciting to now share it with my clients. I plateaued relatively early in my healing process and couldn’t figure out how to get beyond just releasing the restrictions over and over only to have the pain return.
Eventually I started to figure out that by never returning my areas of old injury to full proper use again, the pain would always return and perpetuate itself indefinitely. This is because-- when we get injured our body figures out other ways to move and lift and do all the things we do in a day without using the areas of injury. Which is really very cool in the short term that our body can do this for us and we can continue living. However after we are healed the body doesn’t go back to the original way of using the right muscles for the job, it just continues using the tricks it used while we were healing. After a while of using the wrong muscles, it takes a toll on the body.
I like to think of it this way. If someone hurts a leg and they have to use crutches, while they are healing the crutches are really wonderfully helpful and allow them to continue to get around and live relatively well while they are healing. But if they continued to use the crutches after the leg was healed, those crutches wouldn’t be so helpful anymore, they would really slow the person down and impede their ability to live to the fullest and even cause new injuries. The compensations that our bodies figure out while we’re injured are just like internal crutches you can’t see. And even after we’re all healed up our body continues to use those internal crutches forever. Eventually the crutches start to take a toll on the body, wearing down areas doing a job they are not meant to do.
The good news is if we take the time we can fix this and relieve our recurrent pains and save ourselves a lot of trouble in the future. The only problem is these crutches are invisible and most people don’t know they are using any internal crutches. So unaware they don’t know how much they could help themselves or save themselves future pain and relieve their current pain and symptoms. This will take the help of a very experienced therapist to help you become aware of your body's compensations and help you learn to fix them.
The body obviously doesn’t send you any notice or text when it starts a compensation but trust me when I tell you, we all have them. Even if you’ve never had a major injury, we have compensations just from living life, from repetitive stress, from having babies, from physical jobs, sports, sitting at a desk, I mean literally every single one of us is using compensations somewhere in our bodies, in our own unique way from our own unique histories.
I was compensating or using the wrong muscles all over my body due to the full body nature of my initial injury, plus a lifetime of smaller injuries, surgeries, scar tissue, and other fascial restrictions. When I started to bring this to the attention of my MFR therapists no one knew how to help me, even though they were experienced, expert level therapists some of whom had physical therapy backgrounds. I whined to myself about not being able to find the help I needed for a good while and then set out to figure out how to fully recover and bring back those old areas of injury to proper use again.
Now some people, therapists and doctors told me that it was due to my injuries that I could not use those muscles, as though I would never be able to use them again and I should just give up. But ever since I was injured I had this idea in the back of my mind that if I could clear the tissue memory and the restrictions out enough to actually get these areas around my injuries to function properly again, that I could rehabilitate and make a real physical comeback. This was just a theory at first and it was a slow start all based on following my instincts.
When I was first starting out using the areas near my injury again it would make me so sick with nausea and vertigo that at times I would have to lay down for the rest of the day and wait until the next morning for the room to stop spinning. I felt certain that this was a healing crisis and it would pass and it always did but it was incredibly slow going in the beginning. But over time it got easier and easier and the symptoms I’d cause while doing my rehab exercises got less and less until I could actually use the muscles I’d been working on in my daily life again which made many of my common pains and symptoms magically disappear.
Your history and your injuries are unique to you and completely different than mine so the symptoms your recovery will cause will be unique to you. But the good news is you don't have to invent the system, I’ve done the work for you there. It took me quite a while to figure out how to use muscles I hadn’t used in over a decade but it can be done and it should be done. And now I can help my clients enjoy a much speedier recovery than my own because I’ve figured out the process of identifying and correcting the compensations.
As I have said every adult is compensating muscularly, using the wrong muscles due to old injuries, repetitive stress, hypermobility, etc. You don’t have to wait until your compensations cause you terrible pain, you could be ahead of the game and clean up your muscle imbalances before they wear down your joints or cause you pain or symptoms. Or if you’re already in pain or struggling with symptoms then yes, you need to learn to connect and then to release your fascia first, then you need to get to the fascial exercise and rehab component of your recovery. I can help you thru all these steps of an authentic healing process and help you complete your healing and get all the way back to feeling like yourself again, maybe even better and wiser.
Why bother rehabbing your body and correcting compensations? Because the majority of the pain clients present with in treatment is due to compensations. The tricky part is inspiring them to fix it. Most MFR clients would rather just stick to the releasing part of the healing process and use their self-therapy tools or have a therapist do the fascial releasing for them. But no matter how much fascial releasing you do, when you get up off your therapy tools or up off the treatment table you’ll go right back to compensating and your pain and symptoms will return. That is why skipping the fascial exercise and rehab component of healing is such a waste of all your good effort and of your time and money. You miss out on the best part or healing, the part where you get all the way back to healed.
After my injury I always wanted to be able to get strong again and make a real recovery and be an underdog story of healing success. It has been a long journey for me but I had to find the path and create the program and now I can help your healing move considerably faster than mine did and be more thorough and that is an important piece of my story now too.
Healing doesn’t have to be so hard, it doesn’t have to take so long, if you have the right guide and you are willing to do the work. This is the 3rd and final step in my 3 part series on the steps of healing. Step one connection, step 2 release and step 3 fascial exercise (recovery)
Without the movement component of fascial healing you will not make a full recovery. Unfortunately as I have said, this step is completely missed by the MFR community at large. Releasing is only half the journey to recovery. The other half is regaining the full use of the once injured areas of the body and their cohorts (meaning their muscular friends and neighbors). If this proper usage is not restored, pain and symptoms will linger. Perhaps going away for a short time after releasing the fascia and then returning over and over, never truly letting you off the symptom merry go round. Complete your healing and restore yourself to feel good working order with Fascial Exercise and my MFR healing program to complete your recovery.
Mind you most other kinds of therapists attempt to skip the connection and release steps in the healing process and move straight to exercise. This does not work because you’ll do all the exercises by compensating with your internal crutches. This is why so often physical therapy, while well intentioned, can be unsuccessful. They aren’t correcting the compensations, that is incredibly detailed work that most therapists do not know how to do. Nor could a therapist ever truly understand this level of rehab or teach it to others if they had not experienced it themselves.
These are the secrets of authentic healing I learned while pursuing my own healing and I have now seen their application make all the difference for many of my clients who had long struggled with pain, weakness or who hadn’t been able to make a full recovery after an accident or injury. After working for many years to rehabilitate myself I finally figured it out and created the program that would lead to my restoration and recovery. I have taken all my experience healing beyond just releasing fascia and I have created a proprietary, personalized healing program to help my clients achieve the very best results.
Fascial Exercise works great for those healing chronic pain or those who wish to take good preventative care of their body. Fascial Exercise is also great for those who sit still too much at work, and those looking to stay youthful and mobile as they age. Properly exercising your fascia is an important part of everyone’s health plan. Even if you are young and healthy, most workouts are extremely repetitive so fascial exercise is useful to balance out your muscle usage and prevent injury and immobility. When properly combined fascial release & fascial exercise together make a powerful method of healing or preventing pain and injury or keeping up mobility and combating age related decline.
If you are not doing Fascial Exercise you are missing a big necessary component of healing and maintaining your body. Fascia gets stuck, it gets restricted and it tightens down and first we need to learn to release it as we talked about in the previous episode. But after you release the fascial restriction the areas don’t just magically start functioning properly again. We need to learn to move, use and to contract and release these formerly restricted areas again to restore your body’s natural use of these areas. As I have said this is much trickier than it sounds because most people can’t even tell that they are not using all of their muscles properly.
If you have an area of your body that you never use, over time it will either become numb or it will hurt or ache constantly. Pain is so much more complicated than we think. Yes over use of an area can cause you pain but so can never using an area. That’s why avoiding pain by just never using part of your body and trying not to aggravate it does not work. That is also why releasing the fascia is only half the healing. Then we have to get it working, moving and exercising again.
Why wait for injury or pain, we all have fascial restrictions and tissue memory within us, it’s just whether it’s all riled up enough to cause you pain and symptoms yet. If you can be inspired to take care of your body before trouble strikes then that seems like the best way to be ahead of the game and help your body, your health and your mobility last your whole life through.
To work with me on your healing visit me at bodyfirstmfr.com. Empower yourself with the skills to heal and care for your body right and free yourself from relying on anyone else to heal you.
Thank you for joining me today my friends and as always, happy healing!