What Is Myofascial Release?
What is Myofascial Release?
Fascia:
Fascia is a tough connective tissue that forms a three-dimensional web throughout the body, extending from head to toe. This connective tissue, known as fascia, is ubiquitous, surrounding every muscle, bone, nerve, blood vessel, and organ down to the cellular level. Generally, the fascial system provides support, stability, and cushioning. Additionally, it plays a crucial role in locomotion and dynamic flexibility, forming muscle.
The tightening of the fascial system is a histologic, physiologic, and biomechanic protective mechanism triggered by trauma. When fascia becomes restricted, it loses its pliability and creates tension throughout the body. The ground substance solidifies, collagen becomes dense and fibrous, and elastin loses its resiliency. Over time, this can lead to poor muscular biomechanics, altered structural alignment, and decreased strength, endurance, and motor coordination. As a result, the patient experiences pain and a loss of functional capacity.
Value of Myofascial Release:
Myofascial release, a form of fascia therapy, is a hands-on soft tissue technique designed to facilitate a stretch into the restricted fascia. During this treatment, sustained pressure is applied to the restricted tissue barrier; after 90-120 seconds, histological length changes occur, allowing the first release to be felt. The therapist then follows the release into a new tissue barrier, holding the position. After a few sessions, the tissue becomes softer and more pliable. The benefits of myofascial release include restoring length and health to the myofascial tissue, alleviating pressure on pain-sensitive structures like nerves and blood vessels, and restoring alignment and mobility to the joints.
Myofascial Release Benefits
Benefits of Myofascial Release
Experts estimate that upwards of ninety percent of disease is stress-related. Nothing ages us faster, both internally and externally, than high stress. Myofascial release, a form of fascia therapy, is an effective tool for managing this stress, which translates into numerous benefits of myofascial release, including: decreased anxiety, enhanced sleep quality, greater energy, improved concentration, increased circulation, and reduced fatigue.
Myofascial Release can also help specifically address a number of health issues. Bodywork can:
Experience the numerous benefits of myofascial release, including alleviating low-back pain and improving your range of motion. This fascia therapy can assist expectant mothers by contributing to shorter, easier labor and reducing maternity hospital stays. It also helps ease medication dependence and enhances immunity by stimulating lymph flow, the body's natural defense system. Myofascial release exercises and stretches target weak, tight, or atrophied muscles, aiding athletes of all levels to prepare for and recover from strenuous workouts. This therapy also improves the condition of the body's largest organ—the skin—while increasing joint flexibility. Additionally, it can lessen symptoms of depression and anxiety, promote tissue regeneration, and reduce scar tissue and stretch marks. By pumping oxygen and nutrients into tissues and vital organs, myofascial release improves circulation, reduces postsurgery adhesions and swelling, alleviates spasms and cramping, and relaxes injured, tired, and overused muscles. Furthermore, this therapy releases endorphins—amino acids that act as the body's natural painkiller—offering relief from migraine pain.
Mind And body
By: John F. Barnes, PT
Without Awareness, There is No Choice!
Imagine you were injured a couple of years ago. You received ongoing therapy in the form of hot packs, ultrasound, massage, electrical stimulation, exercise and flexibility training, joint mobilization, and muscle energy techniques, along with medication and psychological counseling, yet nothing seemed to work. All standard tests show nothing, and you desperately want to get better. You have been given a multitude of different diagnostic labels, and all the experts are telling you there is nothing physically wrong. You feel imprisoned in a body that won’t respond, preventing you from playing and working again. You feel helpless and out of control. What if something crucial was overlooked? What could it be? THE INSTINCTUAL "FREEZE RESPONSE"
When many of us are injured, we enter a state of disassociation at the moment of trauma to survive. Our body/mind experiences an instinctive "freeze response," and this positional, psychological memory becomes indelibly imprinted into our mind/body awareness. The sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic nervous system becomes stuck in a hyper-arousal state that we cannot voluntarily control. It’s similar to having your foot on the accelerator of a car while the other foot is on the brake, which consumes an enormous amount of energy and eventually exhausts us.
Because this positional memory becomes disassociated and locked in our subconscious, we lack awareness of it, and without this conscious awareness, we cannot exert control over it.
This "freeze response" over time creates holding or bracing patterns that lead to increased chronic muscular tone, spasms, and myofascial restrictions, which ultimately manifest as symptoms.
Traditionally, therapy focuses on symptoms, explaining why modalities, exercise, joint mobilization, muscle energy techniques, massage, and/or medicine often yield poor or temporary results.
Why didn’t effective psychological counseling help? Possibly because most psychological therapy is conducted in consensus consciousness. In other words, "talk therapy" and analysis focus on the conscious level, while the cause of the chronic symptom complex often lies at the instinctual level, which is not accessed through words and analysis, nor by traditional therapeutic interventions or medicine.
What can assist with this state of disassociation? The benefits of myofascial release and myofascial unwinding. Myofascial restrictions do not show up in any standard tests, so these restrictions that solidify chronic holding or freeze response patterns in our bodies are often missed or misdiagnosed in healthcare.
Myofascial release effectively frees these powerful structural restrictions that exert significant pressure on sensitive structures, resulting in pain, headaches, and restrictions of motion. Additionally, myofascial unwinding, the motion facilitation component of fascia therapy, guides the patient into significant positions linked to past traumas.
In the safety of the therapeutic environment, the therapist gently holds the patient in these significant positions of past trauma. In these therapeutic positions, the patient's tissue memory releases the instinctual bracing patterns. Consequently, the "freeze response" is deactivated, allowing for continuous structural release and elimination of symptoms. The release of tissue memory fosters awareness, returning the patient to conscious choice and control over his or her destiny. The patient can then progress toward the ultimate goal of healing and health.