For Yoga Teachers

57. The Relationship between Fascia and the Nervous System

• Yoga Hero • Episode 57

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"Any intervention on the fascia is also an intervention on the autonomic nervous system"
- Staubesand in 2003

This podcast episode is  inspired by a yoga research session held this week on The Base, which looked at studies investigating the nature of the relationships between fascia and how the nervous system reads stress and pain, which was really interesting from a whole-person holistic perspective; in that someone’s pain or chronic stress can potentially be altered through working with the fascia - I mean wowza!

See the shownotes here

In this episode, we cover:
- A brief history of fascia
- What fascia actually is, even though it’s proving pretty difficult to define!
- How the nervous system and the fascia interact with each other and live alongside each other, and affect each other
- How this helps you, as a yoga teacher, teach yoga

If you want to watch the Yoga Research session on The Base, you can catch it here - use code COMMUNITY for 25% off your first three months.

This episode is a sliver taken from our super exciting 300-hour yoga teacher training module: Myofascial Release, Energetic Anatomy and Yin Yoga  is designed to deeply explore two important but often unexplored areas of yoga; the fascia and energetic anatomy, and the unique relationship these two share. 

Both fascial anatomy and energetic anatomy have a huge impact on our physical and mental wellbeing. This training will break down what fascia is, how it impacts our physical and mental health, and how to use this knowledge to create a rewarding and therapeutic practice for ourselves and our yogis, before exploring yoga’s subtle energy; prana, nadis, chakras and prana vayus and the role of prana in understanding holistic health.  We’ll then go on to understand the relationship between movement, myofascial release, energetic anatomy and how we feel. 

Expect to graduate with a whole host of options now at your disposal to layer on to your classes, feeling inspired and ready to teach what you’ve learned, and to integrate learnings in to your own practice for your own wellbeing.

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📚 Training for yoga teachers
300 hour yoga teacher training, starts March 25
Myofascial Release, Energetic Anatomy and Yoga, Mar 25
Yoga and The Neurobiology of Stress, June 25
Yoga Nidra with Yoga Wisdom, Sept 25
Restorative Yoga and Polyvagal Theory, Jan 26
Yoga for resilience, March 26
Teaching yoga for anxiety & stress, June 26

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​[00:00:00] 

And welcome to For Yoga Teachers. This podcast has been created to help yoga teachers teach with passion, avoid burnout, and earn a fair living. 

Today we're looking at the relationship between fascia and the nervous system, inspired by a yoga research session held this week on the base, which looked at studies investigating the nature of the relationships between fascia and how the nervous system reads stress and pain, which was really, really interesting from a whole person, holistic perspective in that someone's chronic pain or chronic stress can potentially be altered through working with the fascia.

So if you want to know more about what the research says about that, just log onto the [00:01:00] base and watch the insight session. The link is right there in the show notes. So back to today's episode, which is a look at the nature of the relationship between fascia and the nervous system. We'll start off with a brief history of fascia followed by what fascia actually is, even though it's proven pretty difficult to define.

And how the nervous system and fascia interact with each other and live alongside each other and affect each other. And we'll finish off with how this helps you, as a yoga teacher, teach yoga. Let's crack on.

Let's start with a brief history of fascia. So, in order to look at the history of fascia, we're actually going to break down the etymology of anatomy . the word anatomy actually comes from Greek. Um, [00:02:00] so ana means up and Tommy, initially it was T O M I E, actually means cutting. So anatomy means cutting up. And so what happened with cadivers, with people who had unfortunately died and their bodies were used for science. And so what happened was it was a bit like when something is delivered from an ambiguous career, you know, when something arrives in a box like this, it tends to take out the packaging, right. To get to the good stuff. And that's kind of what happened with fascia, right? That the fascia was seen as packaging. In cadavers it was, um, really dry and brittle and definitely seen as, for want of a better word, packaging.

And it was moved out of the way to get to the stuff, whatever it was that they were researching, whether that was muscles or the neural pathways or organs or whatever.

 Until, Dr. Yap [00:03:00] Vandewaal, who is a really, he's a really cool guy. He's very, um, very holistic, very esoterical. And he performed what I have called an inverted dissection. Almost like, um, a back to front dissection. So basically, in order to research anatomy, a cadiver would have the fascia taken out to get to all of this other stuff, the muscles, bones and tendons.

 But Dr. Yap Vander Waal, in the late 1980s, he actually took out the muscles and the organs and the bones. And it showed that with it, even without all of those things, the fascial network forms a complete, unbroken and continuous structure. This was a really, really pivotal moment in the study of anatomy. 

And then following that, super, super famous, strolling under the skin, by Dr. Jean Claude Gombardeau. His name is a bit [00:04:00] of a joy to say. Which was an endoscopic camera, tiny, tiny, tiny little camera in a lady's hand, if I remember rightly, which showed that fascia is not dry, brittle packaging, but actually it is liquid crystal. Hold that thought because that's pretty cool. Um, that fascia is a web, or like a 3D web, of hydration. it's 3D sheets of collagen and also tubular networks.

So again, hold that thought because that's a really cool idea. 

 What is fascia? 

Actually the definition of fascia is, is changing, however, it's all the collagenous based soft tissues in the body including the cells that create and maintain the extracellular matrix.

 And then Joanne Averson, super cool lady, got some really amazing ideas about fascia, and she says, fascia possesses a crystal [00:05:00] nature, allowing it to morph and shape shift according to the forces and demands under which it is placed.

The same recipe of bound water, minerals, collagen, and elastin fibers can therefore at times be as soft as egg white or as hard as bone, accounting for the huge range of structures defined as fascia. And then Dr. Jean Claude Gombardeau, I wonder if I'll ever say his name, not like that, said fascia is a structure that evolves hierarchically.

This is really cool. From a one cell embryo to the whole organism and it is constantly adapting to new stresses to meet the organism's structural demands. So, Dr Yap Vandewaal and Dr. Jogla Gumbardo, both are really interested in the idea that fascia is right there when we start as one cell, and then as we duplicate and duplicate and duplicate, the fascia net [00:06:00] grows and changes and adapts, and that is why it is absolutely everywhere in our body.

 

Fascia and the nervous system. So there's two terms I'm sure that you will already have come across that you may well already understand. We have interoception, nerve endings communicating with the nervous system to integrate information about the inner states of the body.

 and proprioception is a sense of, where our body is in space, so a sense of our location and movements of body parts. And these are via motion sensing nerve endings called mechanoreceptors. So we'll come back round to mechanoreceptors in a moment or two. So fascia in the nervous system, the fascial network is estimated to contain, like drum roll, da da da da da da da.

Two hundred and fifty million nerve [00:07:00] endings. Like, what? What? So, think about the fascial net in your body is estimated to contain 250 million nerve endings. And so what that means is that any intervention on the fascia is also an intervention on the autonomic nervous system by Staubesand in 2003. This is a really cool comment, and really quite amazing for us as yoga teachers and we'll come back to how this helps us teach yoga.

 So, a study on people unfortunately experiencing major depressive disorder showed that unfortunately these people displayed heightened stiffness and reduced elasticity of the myofascial tissue compared to match participants without any history of depression. this is really interesting, it could be a two way street and I think [00:08:00] given prior knowledge and experience and teaching yoga, I think it probably is, that people unfortunately experiencing major depressive disorder are experiencing a tightness in the in the tissues and this tightness in the tissues this um, struggle to get moving, struggle to get hydration and hormones and nerve impulses around the body then contributes to the mental state. And I feel like this is one of those vicious circles that we see so often in yoga.

I think that this is one of those vicious circles in action.

 

And then last, but most certainly not least, a closer look at the cellular and molecular components of the deep or muscular fascia. When we looked at that crazy number, 250 million nerve endings in the fascia, I mentioned that they were interoceptive and proprioceptive nerve endings. So there's loads of [00:09:00] research yet to be done on interoceptive nerve endings in fascia, and I'm sure that's an area that will explode.

In terms of the proprioceptive nerve endings, there's a few different types, five if I remember rightly. Um, there's like Puccini and Ruffini, I always think they sound like types of mushroom or types of pasta, they're really cool names. and then this less cool name, free nerve endings. Bit boring. and these are by far the most and they can be found almost everywhere in the body, and they respond to pressure, like touch, right, or lying on the floor, or moving around,, temperature and pain.

However, it seems that when they do not get enough proprioceptive stimulation, they begin to look harder for this information, and in doing so, they can start to register input as pain. So, if you think about someone that you know who's experienced chronic pain, and then [00:10:00] sometimes when they get moving, when they do something mindful like a yoga class, they might say, it really helped with my pain, and that might be because something's happening with the body.

But it might be because these free nerve endings, the mechanoreceptors, the motion sensors aren't reading any and all input as pain. They're only reading painful input as pain, maybe. Some real food for thought there.

 How does this help our teaching of yoga? So I think that the reason that this helps our teaching of yoga is because it's not necessarily down to your confidence, right?

 When we have a a confidence wobble. Oh my goodness, I can't teach this. My class numbers have been really low. My sequence yesterday was awful. Whatever. when we can just come back to the basics and know that what we're sharing is helping the whole person. I really honestly believe [00:11:00] it really takes confidence out of it.

It's just fact that you're helping the person. And we know that we can help through asana, mindful movement, it's giving them something to focus on so they're not thinking, what is this, and I should have that, and I wish this, and you know, what have you. we also know that yoga helps through the breath.

So really any emphasis on the breath, most certainly on the exhale breath will activate the parasympathetic nervous system. And now we have a route in through the fascia as well, that the fascia will influence the nervous system and overall help the person feel better. basically working with the fascia, just to really underpin that point, working with the fascia will work with the autonomic nervous system and will help the body back to homeostasis, right, back to balance.

 the fascial world is really unsure as to whether fascia actually stretches, but the consensus is Healthy Fascia is free movement of the fascia, an unstuck web that [00:12:00] allows for all of this movement, allowing for hydration through the fascia, allowing for hormone transportation, nerve signaling, and Remember going back to our definitions of Fascia, one of them was that it's a tubular network. And that's really striking because the yogis talk about nadis as a tubular network. So again, a bit of food for thought for you there. 

And that's it. Whistle stop tour of fascia and the nervous system. So, thank you very much 

and as always happy teaching.