Tracey Mellor Pilates

Connect 2017 connective tissue and sports science conference in Ulm

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 16:04:00 +0000

Connect 2017 in Ulm Germany

So sad to leave Ulm today, it is always so welcoming.

As I travel home I am pondering on the last 4 days and the things I have learnt and the people I have met.

As usual the Fascia family never ceases to amaze me with their enthusiasm and their passion and knowledge. I met old friends and made new, many more from the USA than before.

When I attended the conference in 2013 it was full of football physio's and was all about how much pain could be inflicted and the cost of injured players. This year the whole atmosphere was softer, more about the mind and the mindbody connection. The field is maturing, there was less about what fascia is and it's uniqueness and more about how it integrates with muscles and the nervous system. Lectures looked at the importance of environment on the fascial system and the cells within it, nutrition, hydration, movement as well as manual therapies.

The pre and post conference workshops were more movement orientated and I struggled to decide on the ones to take, in the end I missed the Melt workshop and Marie-Jose's workshop and I decided on one by Christopher Gordon, an old Fascia Friend. I met Christopher in Vancouver and we have been friends since. Christopher is a remarkable man, clinician, researcher and teacher. I really enjoyed learning about the Fascial-releaZer and will return to his lecture again as it was full of detail and information; and yes I did buy one. The afternoon session was sponsored by Merrithew who you may know from the Stott school of Pilates. They have a new Fascia exercise offering that I wanted to check out and compare with the Fascial Fitness principles I use and teach. The workshop concentrated on the way the brain perceives movement, the actual movements were interesting, using props for proprioception, again I will revisit this topic. The most exciting part of the workshop was the quiz and I won a Rollga. I had met its inventor earlier in the conference. Taggart Downare is a really creative man and his latest invention is the Rollga. I will use it and report back on my impressions. Getting it home however proved a challenge due to it's size, however it's proved more portable and less controversial than the Fascial-releaZer, which had the airport security sniggering when I explained in sign language that it was a vibrating massage tool.

The pre conference workshop was taught by Divo and was Fascial Fitness for the lumber spine, again it showed that the work is maturing and I enjoyed the sequencing. A small workshop given by Eric Franklin on his imagery concept, again really enjoyable and useful, I think he has always worked with the fascia system just never named it, now the word is in every other sentence.

The main lectures were full of the importance of meditation, movement and interdisciplinary approaches to keeping sportsmen and women in their peak condition for longer.

The attitude to pain and movement was explored, mindfulness and other meditative practices were openly practiced and evaluated. Stress was addressed.

There were many pieces of research on the popular roller fascial release, some saying it worked, some saying it didn't.

Lots of information from cellular level (which quite frankly was mostly beyond my understanding) to the whole body. Less about manual workers more about exercise. Rehab and returning to sport, optimal rehab protocols, resting athletes and taking a longterm view. There was a lecture just about female sportsmen and the effect of estrogen on the connective tissue, not great news for those of us whose estrogen levels have now dropped off the scale.

My brain is exhausted and full to bursting, so much information in such a short period of time. So many people to meet and bring together so that lasting co-operation across the world can carry on beyond this conference.

At one point I was in the same workshop as Eric Franklin (the Franklin method and the man who pioneered the use of imagery in movement teaching), Sue Hitzman (the Melt method), and Moira Merridew (Stott pilates), all these big hitters listening and learning and sitting next to me! Learnt about Variable heart rate resilience training, this I will bring into the studio as the results are quite impressive.

I met some lovely old friends, Wonderful Wilbour, Robert Schleip, Tom Findley, Christopher and David . The Fascial Fitness trainers, Divo, Dani, Rochelle, and Trixy.

I even discovered the origins of my name from a lady called Tacye, apparently we are named for the Roman emperor Tacitus. many people called Tacey went over with the pilgrim fathers and the name morphed into Tracey, and I thought Tracey was a made up name used in the film High Society.

My take away from the conference is that the role of fascia in our minds (not the same as brain) how our emotions and feelings are being recognised by science as important in the synthesis of collagen in our connective tissue. The feedback from fascia to brain and visa versa is the next thing to be uncovered by science.

Finally, as the my plane is about to land, I now have lots of work still to do on the information in this conference and work out how I can use it and share it- happy days.

p.s. If you go to the Melt facebook page you will see Sue Hitzman interviewing the great and good at the conference, she does such a good job.

March 2017

Pelvic Organ Support

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 17:05:00 +0000

Pelvic organ support

In Pilates the ‘Core’ or ‘Powerhouse’ is often given a location and in true Pilates form a visualisation.

The visualisation I use is a tin can, the walls are the Transverses Abdominous, the connecting seam at the back of the can is the spine, the lid is the diaphragm, and the base is the pelvic floor. To have a strong, stable ‘core’ all of the can must be healthy and connected.

We use breath and positioning to engage our core but often resort to vague pelvic floor exercises to complete the structure of our imaginary can. Many clients have little idea where their pelvic floor is, how to connect with it and what its purpose is. Teachers pay lip service to ‘doing our pelvic floor exercises’ are we really giving our clients the best advice or help.

In a healthy uninjured body all the ‘core’ muscles co-exist and work in harmony with each other. You do not need to consciously connect to engage, but life gets in the way and particularly for women who have carried and given birth to children, the pelvic floor and pelvic organ support system is compromised, trauma and injury is somehow accepted as part of the birthing process. The stigma of incontinence however slight is now assuaged by adverts for Tena lady pads on prime TV slots. ‘Little ops’ are given regularly to sort out ‘the problem’ sadly many do not sort out the problem at all and are followed by more ’little ops’.

Pelvic support and a poor relationship with the pelvic floor is also a male issue, often over recruitment will be the cause of problems.

What can we, as Pilates teachers, do? The odd squeeze of an overball between the thighs may seem to answer the question but is it really helping the pelvic organ support question? The forced couple relationship between adductors and the pelvic floor will certainly get to the right location but is prone the best position to exercise the pelvic floor? How do we serve the over recruiters?

I am grateful to Janine who leant me a book written by Christine Ann Kent called ‘Saving the whole woman’, it is full of information on natural alternatives to surgery for pelvic organ prolapse and urinary incontinence. Christine runs a training course on-line which provides huge amounts of information, statistics and advice as well as suggestions for good pelvic organ support. The book is not comfortable reading, but did give me a starting point. I also looked at the fascial anatomy of the pelvic floor and am grateful to Divo Muller of the Fascial Fitness Association for the information she provided. My clients have all been ‘hip hoping’, swinging legs, releasing fascial structures and finding pelvic floor muscles all week, however the most important message I have been giving out is that posture and pelvic positioning is key to good pelvic organ support both pre and post trauma and certainly for the ageing process.

Pilates is perfect for regaining good postural habits.

As I am writing this I am aware that my pelvis is tipped under and I am sitting on my tailbone. My lower back is in a slumped position, my front line has collapsed and my head is forward with the chin tilted upward, all of which is providing no support for my pelvic organs. In the short term I am finding it reasonably comfortable but If I sat like this all day every day this would become a habit and become part of my posture, over months/years this habitual posture would become so set that it would become structural in nature. To change this would take effort and time. Luckily it’s almost time for my next client and I will move about, demonstrate exercises, stand, sit, jump, climb and engage with my body and my body will respond by not getting set in the slumped computer posture. However If I worked in an office all day with very little opportunity to walk about, drive home or sit on a train and then sit in front of the TV all evening, I am repeating the posture over and over again, my body would react by making it easier for me to achieve the shape of the posture and change it’s fascial structure according to the loads habitually placed upon it.

One hour in a Pilates class per week will not be enough to counter a week sat in front of a computer, a habitual pattern can only be changed by a regular intention to change our posture. Hopefully Pilates teachers can bring postural awareness to their clients and can provide incentive to undertake a bit of homework and to look at ways to improve posture on a daily basis.

Why is posture so important for pelvic organ support? Another visulisation is needed:

Imagine your pelvis is a house with two exterior supporting walls and a couple of interior supporting walls, two floors and some non-weight bearing partitions a foundation and a roof. If all is well the house will stand and provide shelter for everything inside it.

However:

If one of the internal supporting walls is removed without adequate propping then the house could collapse inward.

If the part of the foundations fail the house would tilt, all the contents slide to one side.

If the walls are too thin, too weak or crooked they could not support the internal partitions, the floors and the roof.

All of these and many more scenarios can be seen in the pelvis, removal of the broad ligament when the womb is removed, injury to the pelvic floor, poor abdominal and lumber muscle strength etc

By paying attention to pelvic posture whilst standing and sitting will help. Exercising in a position, which creates support for the internal pelvic organs will build strength in the abdominal wall.

The Sitz bones (Ischial tuberosity) can be considered the heel of the body, it is where our weight should be resting when seated. Most of us sit behind our sitz bones or on one side only, tilting our pelvis, sliding our pelvic organs about, and setting up intra-abdominal pressures. If we exercise in this non-optimal position we are strengthening our muscles to keep the pelvis in a non-optimal position.

In prone, where most Pilates exercises are undertaken, particularly for beginners, the pelvis has to deal with gravity and habitual patterns of movement ( all those aerobic classes, crunchies and flat back instructions). Proper direction to achieve a neutral pelvis and to maintain a neutral pelvis where appropriate is essential, I use a prop to help the client to maintain position by giving a proprioceptive cue. I have also started to introduce connective tissue stretches to release the pelvis and allow it to lie on the bed easily (several ligaments attach to the coccyx, sitz bones and pubic bone). Some clients may never achieve neutral on their own in prone. In my opinion there is no point building ‘core’ stability in position that is not functional or transferable to everyday living. Seated, standing or kneeling are better for pelvic postural position training, the abdominal wall is there to support the pelvic organs, the gentle round belly of a woman particularly post childbirth is natural and should be encouraged, not sucked in and removing the natural lumber curve.

A strong abdominal wall is not necessarily a completely flat abdominal wall, whatever the tabloid newspapers say.

Fascially the pelvic floor has layers of fascial tissue contiguous with the fascial sheets of the abdominal organs, muscles and the body suit just under the skin. Each layer has fibers running in different directions creating a hammock. There are also ligaments, which support the various openings. Some movement models have the pelvic floor as part of a deep front line, contiguous with the diaphragms of the foot, lower leg, Diaphragm and throat (Anatomy trains). Other movement models suggest that the pelvic floor is a change in direction of continuous muscles, from front to back, left to right etc.(Philip Beech).

All agree that it is a complex area, this makes it hard to understand and to exercise. We have many pelvic floor exercises for the muscles of the pelvic floor; my favourite is one that involves a boat and a fisherman. Fascia responds to vibrations and rebound and recoil movements. It is important to hydrate this tissue and allow for glide between the fascial layers, knowing this can help to reach this region of the body, however direct fascial release techniques with rollers or balls is not recommended for everyone. By creating healthy fascial tissue elsewhere in the body will effect the pelvic floor, a good posture will allow the structures which help support the pelvic organs to be strong and stable, pelvic floor health is truly a whole body issue.

This week I am being very strict on the seated position, making sure that the clients posture in sitting is good, releasing the pelvic structure, breath, keeping a 90 degree angle or less at the hip (greater than 90 degrees, in any orientation, can create a posterior pull on the organs, stressing the structures of organ support (Christine Kent)). We will be using the chair, reformer and barrel, propping if necessary, making movements small and focused.

As Christmas is on the horizon, everyone will be sitting a lot, in cars, at tables and on sofas, we will probably be eating too much and our pelvic floors will be tested as we dance at party’s or join the kids on the trampoline. This is a great time to remind everyone of the importance of posture, it will also make us look great in our Christmas outfits.

Tracey Mellor

December 2016

Hyper mobile?

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 16:46:00 +0000

Hyper mobile?

I maintain that a sign of a good training course is that it stimulates a change in thought patterns. Last week I was blown away by Yin Yoga, I still am. However there are other aspects of the training provided by The Yoga People which have really impressed me, and if I ever design a training programme, I will ‘borrow’ this practical session.

The area of study is functional anatomy, and we spent a considerable amount of time comparing the differences as well as the similarities in the shape and construction of the pelvis, using the 30 people in the room as a study population.

This little bit of research revealed an interesting and blindingly obvious result,

EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT.

The purpose of this study is to bring home the importance that, as everyone is unique in pelvic shape and form, and unique in movement history and use, and individual in every other way, it is impossible that one pose, movement or asana (it is yoga) can be achieved in the same way for everyone- obvious isn’t it. So why do trainings and teachers, even with huge amounts of experience insist that a pose is only correct (I hate that term) if it looks perfect? Why do teachers force legs wider, turn hips square, push bodies down, make forceful adjustments to achieve the perfect (who defines perfect?) shape, and why is achieving that perfect shape so important. I suspect it’s aesthetics, it looks beautiful, and ease and grace are often used to describe someone who has a perfect practice, all very judgmental and not very yogic!!

I’m not really knocking yoga, but I am critisising teaching that places clients, who are ‘naturally’ bendy ahead of the ones who struggle to long sit or drop into splits. How many clients have tried yoga only to be disillusioned because they are not ‘doing it right’ can’t bind or do inversions or have to use a block! It seems to me that some yoga classes are full of people who do not need more flexibility, how many participants know the original reason why yoga asana were performed? Great for the Pilates teachers out there, our classes are full of failed yoga participants who think yoga is not for them, but I think it is sad that many miss out on other aspects of yoga, in it’s widest definition.

Why this little rant? Well the functional anatomy observation session made it easy to see that huge ranges of movement of the femur in the hip socket is only available to some, the rest are not hindered by short muscles but by the shape of their bones. Some cannot go further into a wide legged position, internal or externally rotated because of compression, literally the bone of the pelvis hitting the bone of the femur. No amount of stretching can change this situation. No amount of manual adjustment can make it better unless breaking a bone is thought appropriate.

In the arts, where range of movement is important, such as ballet, Xray’s of the pelvis are used to check out the shape and depth of the hip sockets, no amount of stretching can significantly change basic bone structure without injury and the dancers with inadequate pelvis shapes are not offered places at ballet school, ballet however is all about aesthetics.

This is important to know in all movement disciplines, a simple change in angle can facilitate a huge difference in Range of Movement, being pedantic about foot position or pelvis direction is not serving the client and may create unnecessary pain or injury both physically and mentally.

The question is; when is a huge range of movement due to a lack of compression (the skeleton restricting the movement) and when is it due to joint hyper mobility syndrome. I often hear people describe themselves as hyper mobile because they have a huge range of movement, is this really the case?

Joint Hyper mobility syndrome is not to be admired or wished for, it is caused by genetic defects affecting the encoding of collagen( Beighton et al.1999, Bird.2005, Grahame.2009) anyone who has this syndrome is susceptible to trauma/overuse injuries. It is a complex condition, with a wide range of clinical features:

· Neurophysiological
· Musculaoskeletal
· Skin
· Cardiopulmonary (asthma)
· Chronic pain
· Gastro- intestinal dysmotility
· Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.
· Etc…..

Hyper mobility can be inherited, easily tested for, using the Beighton Scale and currently there is no cure, so management of the syndrome is the only option. The spectrum of the disease is from being bendy with generalised joint hyper mobility to not being able to walk because the joints are too floppy to stand up.

It is a connective tissue issue, Collagen is one of the components of Fascia or connective tissue, and Fascia is ubiquitous in the human body, if there is an issue with this tissue it will affect the whole fascial network, hence the huge range of possible clinical features. For many hyper mobility can be an asset but it comes with risk of injury.

I think that we all have areas of our body which exhibit an ease or flexibility in the joint, often they are the site of chronic injury, this can be caused by so many factors, I see very few truly hyper mobile people, Pilates being one of the management options available to this population.

Fascia is plastic in nature, think about pushing your finger into a plastic bag, the resulting blister will not return back to the original shape, if too much pressure is applied the plastic will break. If ligaments are forcefully stretched they will break, or the resultant stretch ‘blister’ will not return to its original length. Fascia can survive the melting stretch as the tissue creeps back to it’s original length, however whilst it is creeping back it is vulnerable to injury.

So next time someone tells you they are hyper mobile, check if it is caused by lack of compression or by a connective tissue issue. It may be that the lack of compression creating a huge range of movement (a cause of pride in many) is masking an imbalance. Simply by adding variations in movement vectors/angles or bending a limb will provide more space for movement or elicit a stretch where it was not felt before.

November 2016

Thanks to The yoga People and Dr Jane Simmonds.

Melting Stretches and Yin Yoga

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 20:06:00 +0000

Melting stretches

I have just returned from a 4 day introduction to Yin Yoga. Those of you who know me well, know my questioning nature, also my drive not just to read or be told about different movement modalities but to really understand them and to feel them in my own body.

Yin Yoga has been bouncing around on the edge of my understanding for several years, initially in my Yoga training, one of my fellow students introduced us to Yin Yoga, I remember walking around the garden of the house where we had our retreat, trying to understand TCM 5 element theory and not much else. However the seed was sown and so when Yin Yoga resurfaced at an International Fascia Congress in Washington, I sat up and listened. The speaker was Paul Grilley and he took the podium with Robert Schleip and explained about compression and tension in yoga poses. Because of his use of the words Compression and Tension, I thought he was talking about biotenegrity and I struggled to fit his explanation into the model of biotensegrity I held in my head. Today I think I was adding 2 and 2 and making 5, however I am still not 100% sure of that, and somewhere just out of reach, there is a connection but probably not the obvious one.

Yin yoga has also surfaced in the Fascial Fitness training relating to melting stretches.

Fascial stretches are part of the Fascial Fitness training, the principles of which are the activation of long chains and tensegrity structures, Pendiculation and variations in direction of stretch, and loading of the stretch using weights, resistance and bounces.

So when a Yin Yoga course based on the work of Paul Grilley popped up on Face book I didn’t press delete, I followed the link. The course was in London and offered the option to take the first weekend of a 200 hour Training as an introduction.

So what is Yin Yoga? My understanding was that it was mediation in a pose. Why is it so Fascial?

After 4 days of Yin yoga (2x 2hour classes per day), meditation, Traditional Chinese medicine (meridian theory) and psychology, including a good dose of energetic anatomy, classic anatomy, functional anatomy and a sparse sprinkling of fascial anatomy; here is my understanding based upon my own experience.

Like all yoga it’s not all about the asana or poses, Yin seems to take more from the Chinese philosophy than the traditional yoga practice which is based on Indian.

Yin is the opposite of Yang, however they are co-dependant each having a little of the other in them, think of the symbol.

Yang is all action, masculine in nature, a yoga practice/exercise/movement practice or lifestyle, which focuses on exercising muscles and moving blood around the body is Yang.

Yin is calm and nurturing, feminine in nature, a yoga practice/exercise /movement practice, which focuses on the connective tissue.

The balance between the yin and yang is essential for wellbeing and this is what practicing Yin yoga along side yang forms of exercise aspires to bring.

The plastic nature of connective tissue, according to Yin Yoga, enjoys gentle pressures, applied for longer periods of time in order to grow strong.

These are my personal observations and may not be true for others however the classes for me where both extremely challenging, at times painful (in a good way), and wonderfully calming and releasing. You moved into the positions slowly, each position targeted different areas of the body which correspond to meridian theory, you are not in the pose until the target area to be ‘stressed’ by stretching has been found, this involved a lot of bolsters, blocks and experimenting with different foot/leg/body positions before the target area was found, some poses just didn’t work because of my unique pelvic shape/ femur head angle, tight tissues, past injury etc etc. The idea is to find a point of stress in the target area, which is not injurious or painful in a bad way and surf that point. This is a self practice, you have to trust your intuition your own awareness of how your body feels, everybody looked completely different, we were not adjusted or assisted in progressing the stretch just in finding the target area, the bolsters were not there to support as in restorative yoga, but to allow the practitioner to work around natural compression felt in their own body and to allow the muscles to turn off and a melting stretch of the connective tissue to occur. You then stay in that pose for anything between 1-5 or more minutes depending upon your experience. The time in the position was the challenge, I noticed how muscles I didn’t know I was contracting became obvious and so I released them and I sank deeper and deeper into the stretch. In order to feel the melt it helped to close your eyes and look inside your self, quiet and still. The hardest bit was yet to come but the reward was so wonderful. Coming out of the ‘melted position’ was far harder than going in, everything was done slowly and no-one was rushed. I often had to use my hands to move my legs out of the pose, there was a lot of groaning and grimacing. You then take a ‘rebound’ position, prone, supine or pose of a child where the most popular, sometimes taking a counter pose first, in the rebound time of around 2 minutes you could feel the connective tissues rebounding, slowly returning to their usual length, your body felt open and released, a cooling flow and such a peace and tranquility. The Yin yoga says that this is a restoring of the flow a Chi. My Fascial Fitness inner teacher probably would say it was also a rehydration of the tissue. What ever it was it was worth the wait.

After the class we went into mediation so easily.

Will I go back and continue the course?

This morning when I woke up I actually missed the early morning yin class. I also seemed very alert and ready to get going (unusual for me as I am not a morning person). I do ache in parts of my body, which I probably pushed to hard because I thought I could, after all I couldn’t let the youngsters in the room see that I was struggling could I! a lesson learned, it is my practice and no-one else was looking anyway.

The melting stretch was delicious and pleasurable, everything a fascial movement should be, I’m not sure I would be happy for a hyper mobile client to take a class and the usual contra-indicated population, pregnancy, joint replacements etc would need extra care but it is an experience I would recommend to my over stressed, anxious over exercised clients who need the repeated buzz of the Yang.

So now I know what a melting stretch really is, and I will do it again. Sadly I can only get to a couple more days of this course because of studio commitments.

The course was run by The Yoga People and well taught, bringing in experts in the various disciplines. The classes were amazing.

My fellow participants were lovely and very generous towards me. Thank you.

Spiders, space and tensegrity

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 18:29:00 +0000

Can Spiders spin a web in space?

NASA ran a competition for school children to suggest experiments that could be done in space, and this question won.

So NASA sent a spider and lots of flies up in the space shuttle.

At first the spider created very messy webs but just as Robert the Bruce noticed the spider tried, tried and tried again, and eventually created working webs in weightless conditions- isn’t that amazing.

I discovered this incredible fact at the Smithsonian air and space museum in Washington DC. I had taken a few days holiday after attending the 1st Biotensegrity Summit and 4^th International Fascia Research Congress and on my last day decided to avoid the center of town and stay close to the airport and this ‘overflow’ museum in Dulles hit the spot. I was totally blown away by the scale of the building and the exhibits, which included a space shuttle! In one of the exhibit cases was this story about the spider.

Why am I telling you this?

Because the concept of tensegrity explains how the spider could build a web in space.

It’s appropriate that I was in Washington because tensegrity sculpture is celebrated at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn museum. Also, it was in Washington that Dr. Stephen Levin put the concept of tensegrity and living architecture together and invented the area of science called Biotensegrity. Dr. Stephen Levin was honoured at the 1^st Biotensegrity summit and spoke about his ‘eureka’ moment.

What is tensegrity? Buckminster Fuller created the word tensegrity out of two words tension + integrity, inspired by the sculptures of Kenneth Snelson.

In Stephen Levin’s own words (2009)

” Tensegrity structures are omni-directional, independent of gravity, load distributing and energy efficient,hierarchical and self-generating. They are also ubiquitous in nature, once you know what to look for.”

A Snelson tensegrity model, The Needle, stands in the gardens surrounding the Hirshhorn museum, it is elegant and light in construction. The compressive elements float in the air, supported by the tensional elements. It satisfies both the eye and the intellect, I can see why Stephen Levin was so fascinated by the structure; you cannot tire of its simplicity.

Dr. Levin was looking for a reason why along with dinosaur footprints we do not find tail marks. The tails of dinosaurs are very long and the absence of tail marks means that they must have been held clear of the floor at all times. From his musings the concept of biotensegrity was born. The concept explains why geese can fly with their necks stretched out long in front of them. –and a spider can spin a web in space????

In the earths gravitational field life uses ground force. Ground force opposes the gravitational downward force to provide tone tension and stability. Our bodies, along with every other living structures, continually negotiates these two forces using the biotensegrtiy concept, but what happens when ground force and gravity is taken away? When man first went into space one of the ways the body reacted to weightlessness was to lose some of the compressive structure, in particular the bones, and astronauts returned with varying degrees of osteoporosis. Subsequent space missions introduced weighted exercises to counter this side effect of weightlessness.

So how did the spider spin a web without ground force and gravity? Well at first it didn’t, the spider had to work it out. A true tensegrity model is self supporting, it can be picked up, turned, compressed and still return to or maintain it’s shape. I doubt the web could be called a true example of biotensegrity because it needed to be attached to something, however the spider can. On a micro level (cell) and macro level ( whole organism) the biotensegrity concept explains how space is surrounded and stops the cell....Organism from collapsing in on it ‘self. In a body it creates space for organs and liquids. It explains how Fascia (connective tissue) can both connect and separate and provide sliding layers, protecting delicate structures like blood vessels during movement. This was beautifully demonstrated by Dr. Jean-Claud Guimberteau. At the congress he screened a 2 hour video revealing what fascia looks like in a living body, his beautiful pictures are a masterpiece of patience and skill and show just what the ancient anatomists missed because they did not have the technology to look inside a living body. Now we have the technology we cannot ignore what we have found.

As movement teachers we can use this new understanding of structure and anatomy. Understanding biotensegrity and the fascial system is now within easy grasp. Biotensegrity explains how we can hold yoga poses such as Warrior 3, the same biotensegrity model explains how we can use Pilates machines to achieve seemingly effortless movements which are difficult to do on a mat. The idea that this bodywide force transmission system, which is adaptable and continually changing to accommodate changes in load and movement, uses the concept of biotensegrity is liberating and exciting. Like the butterfly effect ( a small movement in one place can escalate into a large movement elsewhere) moving one part of the body effects the whole structure. From this we can show that dysfunction in one area can be caused by a restriction elsewhere.

Biotensegrity is a model that all teachers of movement should learn and understand, because knowing the model makes creative teaching possible.

Like Selson’s needle we can all be gracefully self- supporting, like the spider we can all persevere with our practice and discover our own internal web and we too can

BE AMAZING.

Rocking Reformer Revelation

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 17:34:00 +0000

Rocking Reformer Revelation

I know that Pilates teachers can get very excited about the smallest piece of Pilates equipment, and I am no exception. Remembering just how excited I got about my yellow reformer spring is frankly quite embarrassing. However I am unashamedly over the moon about the newest addition to the studio- my rocking reformer.

The Pilates reformer is a great machine, easy to use for the beginner and super challenging for the expert. It allows for creativity and flare, fits all the Fascial Fitness principals. You can use it as part of a regular workout, it soothes the mind and creates calm, with the addition of the bounce board it can reduce the fittest client to a sweaty pulp. It requires concentration and focus, it highlights imbalance in the body and magically creates the perfect conditions for self awareness and correction; in fact it has everything a pilates teacher and practitioner would want from a machine. So how to improve upon perfection? Add rockers.

I first saw the rocker kit on-line a couple of years ago, but was beyond my pocket at the time. It sat in the back of my mind until I attended the balanced body convention in London and there it was, already boxed up just waiting for my name to be scribbled on the lid. I resisted for 3 days and then gave in about 30 mins from the end of the last day. The rest is history! It is quite a wonderful addition to my studio and a firm favorite with my clients. One declared-

“ it’s like working in 3D”

Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.

So what is it?

The rockers transform the static base of a standard reformer into a giant balance board. There is a clever way to bring stability back to the reformer so it can still be used as normal. It stands higher off the floor, which is popular with my less mobile clients.

At first I used it in the conventional way, footwork, legs in loops, quadruped etc with the additional challenge of keeping central, balancing left and right, equalising weight on each side etc, everyone did really well, it encouraged greater focus and a certain amount of sub-conscious work as well as increased conscious self stabilization. It was fun and lots of laughter, especially when I briefly forgot it was on a rocker and I inadvertently leant on the foot bar and tipped the reformer to one side.

No one was seasick, everyone had a go and everyone reported back that they could feel the extra work required to stabilize in their bodies.

I was making the repertoire up as I went in those early days, mixing known exercises with this new addition.

Then I found a great on-line course by Elizabeth Larkin, who I had spoken to prior to buying the rockers and who was very excited by them. She used them in the rehabilitation of service men who had lost limbs in combat and who suffered with problems with their vestibular system (balance).

I took the course and the rocking repertoire she taught is just amazing.

In my studio we adapted this information, matched it with my clients needs and the results have been astounding. Increased balance and ease of gait; along with hours of laughter and focused mind/body work.

So far the best result has been from a client who has a mild cerebral palsy. Doing the simple rocking movements appeared to release so much tension in the hips that standing in parallel was possible. If this can be repeated, then it is the most wonderful of outcomes and we will be sharing the results with a wider community.

The rocking reformer repertoire is here to stay, it joins the other exercises and movements only possible on the Pilates machines.

Tracey Mellor

September2015

Rehydrating Fascia using fascial release techniques.

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 16:04:00 +0000

Fascial Release

Over the last couple of years strange pieces of equipment have been appearing in Gyms and exercise studios around the country.

Rollers, spiky balls and other equipment used to inflict pain and sweet agony upon our-selves. In movement classes, Pilates Classes and Fascial Fitness classes, the instructors encourage you to roll and massage, lie on or over these balls and rollers.

Have you ever wondered what it is actually doing? It hurts so it must be doing us good- right?

Apart from being a way of challenging balance, ‘core’ and proprioceptive skills, all good reasons for using them, they are a way of releasing tension in areas of overuse, if that place is along a myofascial line then the release of tension may go beyond the immediate area of pressure. However their use to rehydrate the connective tissue or fascia is the less obvious but most important reason for use, to promote long-term fascial health and reduced injury, and perhaps to whole body health.

Why is rehydration of Fascia so important?

Lets remind our-selves of what Fascia is. Here is the definition adopted after the first International Fascia research congress:

Fascia is ‘all collagenous fibrous connective tissues that can be seen as elements of a body-wide tensional force transmission network.’ (Fascia in Sport and Movement, 2015).

Fascia is ubiquitous, it surrounds and separates muscles, bones, organs, nerves, indeed everything in our body, and until very recently it has been treated as a rather dull packing organ. But new research techniques and ways of measuring and seeing this colourless fibrous tissue has catapulted it into the limelight and it is now attracting worldwide attention and excitement amongst some of our most talented scientists.

Fascia, as defined above, (the medical profession has a more refined definition) is made up of cells and an extracellular matrix. The cells make up a very small part- about 5% and are mostly Fibroblasts, which act as builders and repairers of the extracellular matrix.

The matrix is made up of ground substance and fibres.

The fibres are mostly made of collagen and some elastin, the exact proportions varying according to location, load and use. These form what we think of as the body wide net.

The Ground substance is mostly water bound by proteoglycans (a form of protein).

All we need to know is that 2/3rds of fascial tissues, in volume, is made up of water, and our body is full of fascial tissues. Healthy fascial tissue has a high proportion of a special form of water, known as bound water.

The first time I heard about bound water I was sitting in the underground International Fascial Research Congress hall in Vancouver in 2012. Gerald Pollack, PhD gave a ground breaking lecture on the magical world of water and the properties of Bound Water in our body. It was a little late in the day, we had been sitting all day in an airless room and yet no one left the hall, we all knew what he was saying was important and just a little controversial. Pollack produced slide after slide of why bound water was so important to health. His findings are still ‘new’ to science but the possibilities of his findings are opening up many new fields of research in every area of health.

Since the congress Pollack has gone on to publish his findings (The fourth phase of water. Beyond solid, liquid and vapor, 2013).

Pollack suggests that bound water has the characteristics of a liquid crystal and a higher elastic storage ability. The rest of the water found in fascial tissue is known as bulk water. Pathologies such as inflammatory conditions, oedema, accumulation of free radicals and waste products are linked with a shift to a higher proportion of bulk water in the ground substance of our extracellular matrix. So it makes sense to find ways to encourage and maintain a higher percentage of bound water in our fascia

When we roll on rollers or balls, spiky or smooth we are mechanically loading and stretching our fascial tissue, which acts like a sponge when squeezed. Particularly in more stressed zones when fascial release is performed the ‘polluted’ bulk water, full of inflammatory cytokines, free radicals and other by-products of stress and aging are squeezed out and refreshed with water from blood plasma which forms bound water, improving the ratio of bound to bulk water, and hopefully leading to a healthier ground substance and fascia. I think that this is a good reason to incorporate fascial release techniques into your exercise routine.

However beware, rolling is not for everyone, there has been recent research, which questions the speed and depth and frequency of the release. Hours of painful rolling is not recommended.

So all these funny bits of equipment are here to stay and may be a way to healthier fascia and all the benefits that brings to us.

Tracey Mellor

March 2015 ©

All references are from Fascia in sport and movement 2015, DVD's of Fascia Research Congress 2012.

The magic of Jacobs ladder

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Sun, 01 Mar 2015 19:19:00 +0000

Question: What do books on Fascia and buses have in common?

Answer: You wait for ages then two come along at once.

I have been waiting for the books: Fascia in sport and movement and Yoga Fascia anatomy and movement to be published for years and then they both arrived in the same box, on the same day, an abundance of information and ideas, too much to digest in one go, and consequently I have the equivalent of information indigestion. The rich diet served up by the wonderful authors was just too much for me, so I have had to slow down and read in smaller portions.

I have the great pleasure to include many of the authors and editors amongst my friends and acquaintances and I know how long they have strived to bring this information into the public domain. I recognise and remember the birth pangs of some of the ideas from Summer schools and gatherings of Fascia devotees.

If you are interested in Fascia and movement then please log onto the Handspring publications website (http://www.handspringpublishing.com/publications/) and secure your copies now, you will not regret your purchase.

As some of my clients know, I have had fun playing with some of the content, indeed the editors of the Fascia in sport and movement, encourage the reader to open a conversation with the content of the book, to discover and make up their own minds about the ideas suggested by the authors; and so I thought I would share one of my observations with you in this blog.

I was flicking trough the Yoga book by Joanne Avison, and came across a picture of the children’s toy –the Jacobs Ladder.

Immediately I was transported back to a lecture theatre in Brussels watching Stephen Levin holding up this everyday toy as be gave a lecture on biphasic movement, it was fascinating to watch the movement of the toy, to remember back to childhood when I played with my own Jacobs Ladder and to realise that this simple toy could demonstrate and symbolize so many principles of movement. Later Joanne bought a couple of the Jacob ladder toys and we spent a frustrating couple of hours getting to grips with the concept Stephen lectured about and finally in the wee small hours there was a light bulb moment, in fact it was several light bulbs which continue to flash over the intervening years. How could such a small event make such a big ripple through my Pilates and movement teaching?.

I am playing with that Jacobs ladder toy now as I am sitting at my desk, continuously fascinated by this simple wooden and ribbon toy. I have even made a chocolate bar version (which didn’t last very long) to understand the way it worked and now want to share one small but significant aspect with you.

If you want to know all about the bio-tensegrity and how it relates to yoga teaching and movement then please read the beautifully written chapter 7 in Joanne’s book.

However the bite sized aspect I am interested in here is finding the silent stillness at the point of perfect balance just before the biphasic movement of the toy, i.e. just before the wooden blocks tumble down. It is in that pregnant pause, the point just before ‘no return’ that the effortful becomes effortless, the tension between the ribbons is equalised and the blocks are held in a seemingly magic suspension. It is in this moment that we can play, we can suspend time and we can discover the hidden tension, which is always there in a bio-tensentric body. The tissues of the body are never in a state of ‘no tone’, we may say we are relaxed but that is never truly the case unless we are anaesthetized or dead. In the space between, as can be shown so perfectly by the Jacobs ladder toy, we have a choice, possibilities exist, balance and movement flow from that point.

In the Pilates studio we can place the body into shapes, which mimic this space between, where it is relatively effortless and where we can play with the possibilities. In the studio we played with recognizing these points of balance, tone but minimal effort, points of choice. The clients experienced the calm silence of the space, a time of self-perception.

All movement moves from and too, between these points, from a simple breath, to a complicated exercise. It is the magic of that point that I would love everyone to find in his or her own movement practice.

Over the last year we have been involved in a project where we took scientific concepts relating to our connective tissue (fascia) and using movement, we tested them. From out of this project has evolved a creative movement system Connective IQ movement and Self -perception is key to the way we teach.

Just like Christmas chocolate eaten quickly, the glut of detail and information quickly read in these two books is soon regretted as it formed a log-jam in my brain, instead, I realised that a little exquisite taste can be fully appreciated, digested and savored every once in a while and that is how I will now proceed. As invited by the editors, I will contemplate on the content and make up my own mind. There is so much that it may take some time, however, I look forward to opening that conversation with my own body and with my clients, I foresee lots of fun ahead.

Tracey Mellor

July's Myolastic Project workshop

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 19:22:00 +0000

The Myolastic project is a fascial research project to question our ideas of how movement and fascia are connected. I co-founded the project with Laurie Booth and we presented at the British Fascia symposium in May this year. The workshops and classes are continuously evolving our ideas.
This is a record of the workshop held over the last weekend.

Blog on Sunday Workshop 20^th July 2014

This weekend’s workshop was based around the theme of Ebb and Flow.

If you check the dictionary it means ‘a recurrent pattern of coming and going or decline and re-growth’.

We also looked at the phrase ‘negative plasticity’ again looking at the dictionary, plasticity in biology means ‘ the adaptability of an organism to changes in the environment or differences between it’s various habitats’ or ‘the ability to change and adapt’ so does that make the definition for negative plasticity ‘not changing’ or does it mean that nothing changes without a trace of what went before.

All movement involves a simple Ebb and Flow, an up and down, forward and backward, an in and out (spiral?), some movements are simple, some complex. All body systems work to this simple pattern, some involve pumps such as our circulatory system where the heart pumps blood, the cranial sacral system which involves simple valves, our digestive system using peristalsis, a simple constriction and relaxation of muscles to create wave like movements which push the contents through the system. Our breath relies on a gaseous exchange and our cells exchange nutrients on a daily basis. Other systems rely upon movement to flow. Our body loves rhythm and it when this ebb and flow is disrupted we get dis-ease.

It is believed that our fascial body wide network is a system built upon the principles of biotensegrity. It is constantly under pressure, and made up of compressive and tensional elements, balancing to create shape and space, simultaneously separating and connecting our body’s tissues. These examples of oppositions occurring in the body, in a rhythm, is in itself recurrent and worth more exploration. Could it be that we operate on a simple on-off binary system or where movement is involved and requires direction, a polarity system.

At the workshop we explored movement using the short sticks, which closed the movement by joining our right and left hand. This closure made our normal patterns of movement: up and down, back and forth, in and out, different and so we needed more concentration, by slowing the movements we created time to listen and pay attention to our body responses. On the shooting sticks we tuned into the internal fascial dance in order to maintain balance and we felt our body responding to increased loading and explored the adaptations being made on a temporary basis by exploring the lock, load, release, flow sequence.

In discovering our body’s responses we discussed the responses fascia has to increased or changes in load. We all know that our body continually renews itself. The speed of renewal slows with age and it has been shown that even the brain has plasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change as a result of experience or neuroplasticity.

Our fascia is continuously responding to our environment and movement patterns and can therefore be said to be plastic in nature, however does it really completely change or is there always a memory or shadow of the past? Is it like an old building which is refurbished, the original structure still exists behind and under the shiny new fittings.

Is our body the same, under all the new fascial network do we find an original or older framework which will sometimes resurface in some form or other. Or are we all constantly bulldozed and totally rebuilt as if new? If, as I suspect, it is a mixture of the two, what form may that resurfacing take? Could it be that the memory left is on an emotional level rather than a physical one?

Can we have a form of fascial self-remembering.

Take a moment to think about that statement.------

We looked at the possibility that fascia holds memory in a past workshop and this notion is just a continuation of the conversation we have been having with our movement practice in subsequent workshops and weekly classes.

To my knowledge this question has not been part of any published research so the only basis we have to go on is our own experiential data flowing from these classes.

So what becomes of our shadows of memory? Where is movement memory stored and on what level.

Recent research has identified that when describing fascial pain as opposed to muscular pain we tend to use emotional words. We noticed when working in a slow focused or conscious way we seem to access the body’s interconnectiveness, perhaps through our fascial network. We have defined two ways of moving as musculated or fascialated movement. We have noticed that when moving in a fascialated way our emotions are very close to the surface and we noticed that our language changes to reflect this.

The workshops always reveal more than we could ever plan for. This is only made possible by the engagement in the subject by the participants, so our thanks goes to this months group. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

“Between the idea

and the reality.

Between the motion

and the act.

Falls the shadow”

T.S. Elliot

Tracey Mellor

July 2014

Little Things

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 19:57:00 +0000

Little Things

Isn't it funny that it's the simple things that can make you happy.
This week happiness for me has been watching the wheel on my electricity meter ( I have an old meter) going backwards thanks to our new solar panels. Waiting patiently for that little black line to appear in the window of the meter is very hypnotic, the 'wrongness' of the direction, the fact we are producing our own electricity and being environmentally friendly helps to cheer me up, looking at a digital display is not nearly as exciting.
My teenage children have found happiness during the installation. The scaffolding which surrounds our house is a huge climbing frame. I'll find them sitting up at roof level which gives them a different perspective on a familiar view, they have been listening to music, chatting to friends, sun bathing and contemplating life, watching sun sets and stargazing up on our temporary balcony.
It reminds me of the christmas' when they were small, when the box the present came in was more interesting than the present itself.
In this world of gadgetry, constant mental stimulation and technology (we have lots of extra tech. with the solar power), it's the simple things which are cherished. The boys loved climbing and hanging of the scaffolding, getting back to the playground and our evolutionary roots. All of our simple observations can produce a state close to a mediative state, restful and calming.
I bet the solar panel marketing department don't advertise these benefits.

In the same way when advertising the benefits of Pilates, Yoga or Myolastic movement we concentrate on the physical benefits, however its all the small details of these practices which make the real difference, and produce real moments of happiness.
The rhythm of the breath when effortless movement is discovered, the pleasure of co-ordinated movement, the quiet pauses, doing what the body was designed to do, time away from technology and the stresses of modern life.

The whole process of observing yourself doing the simple things is hugely interesting- try it and find out for yourself.

The Fascia Timeline

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 18:56:00 +0000

Fascia time line

A subject that we keep returning to when investigating the properties of Fascia and it's relationship with movement is 'at what point in our evolution did fascia appear?' Earlier blogs refer to the jellyfish as being an early form of a Fascial organism, certainly the jelly substance in the jelly fish is a similar to fascia, but not exactly the same as the substance we find in our own body.

Recently I have been reading Phillip Bench's book 'Muscles and Meridians' in it he has answered this question of when fascia evolved.

He also refers to the. 'baupläne' or body plan which represents the rootstock or lineage of animals. The baupläne of our own species and the evolution of fascia is closely linked.

Let's look at the baupläne first.
Another way of explaining the concept of baupläne is to consider it as an operating system around which animal life is constructed. The baupläne sets parameters for all subsequent evolutionary development, to which that animal must refer.
All contemporary animal life on Earth coalesces down to 35-38 fundamental body plans or baupläne. Roughly these body plans correspond to phyla levels of classification used by zoologists. To delineate one body plan from another, crucial constructional features are looked for. Each body plan has a suite of characteristics, which interlock to form a biological operating system. Examples of constructional features looked for are, type of skeleton, symmetry, no of appendages (limbs), cleavage patterns (how our cells divide after fertilisation), segmentation and body cavity (Arthur, 1997).
By studying an animals constructional patterning you can gain insight into it's relationship with other members of the animal kingdom.

About 7 billion years ago multicellular animals emerged, these were primitive animals with no blood, gut tube or nervous system - slimes. Between 542 and 489 million years ago, in what we now refer to as the Cambrian age, the environmental conditions and the challenges for life that they presented, led to an explosion of larger multicellular animals and a bewildering array of baupläne evolved (McMenamin and McMenamin, 1990). The most amazing evolutionary change in animal life was the change from slime to animals, which could move at will, and with movement the concept of choice developed.
What happened to our baupläne to enable this most fundamental evolution in animal life? To understand this we have to consider the miracle of conception and the complex and still not fully understood development of life, embryology. It is at the very earliest point of an animals life, just weeks after fertilisation that the evolutionary change occurred. The baupläne's constructional feature of cleavage, the process, which follows fertilisation, creating mulicelluarity, underwent a significant evolution, which allowed movement to develop.
Around 500 million years ago a new animal baupläne emerged from the slime which had an extra embryonic cell layer, this 3rd layer is called the mesoderm and is sandwiched between the 2 older layers called the endoderm and ectoderm (Raff, 1996).
It is the mesoderm, which produces the tissues that facilitate movement. In Tom Myer's book Anatomy Trains, 3rd edition, 2013, he identifies the emergence of fascia fibres from out of the mesoderm at the 14th day after fertilisation, before both the nervous system and our brain and before the digestive and the enteric (emotions??) system form. The instinctive movement system acting upon signals from the environment predates both the systems we place a higher importance upon.
This evolutionary milestone, the formation of the mesoderm and the subsequent formation of fascia in the growing embryo, provides us with an answer we have been searching for.
The reason fascia formed was to facilitate movement in response to the environment. So to properly understand fascia, it's properties and it's possibilities we have to refer back to it's origins in our baupläne.
Movement creates choice, and the point of movement involves an appraisal of the environment. The animal can move towards food and move away from danger. From this beginning our bodies evolved.

Tracey Mellor
©March 2014

Ref' muscles and meridians , Phillip Bench 2010

The Magic of fascia and it's reactive nature

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:41:00 +0000

I have called this my happy blog, read on to find out why.

Happy Blog or The magic of Fascia and it’s reactive nature

I often wonder how much less complicated my life might be if I stopped asking questions.

At the end of last year, together with Laurie Booth, we created a concept called The Myolastic Project whose whole ‘raison d’etre’ is to ask questions.

We set up classes and workshops in Brighton to look in particular at the research and information coming out of the Fascia (connective tissue) research labs using movement to create an experiential way to interpret the science. After each class or workshop we evaluate what has emerged from this form of questioning and come up with a new question for the next class. The project evolves and has led us up along some very interesting paths. For my own part I have learnt about the thought processes developed by dancers to perceive their world, opened up lines of research into human and fascia evolution and experienced the body’s magnetism and it’s facility to store energy.

The one thing I do know for sure is that after 6 months of this project instead of getting answers to our questions we just keep thinking of new questions to ask!

The last couple of months I have turned my attention to spirals, The lock, load, Release and Flow ‘Myolastic’ concept and the new Anatomy Trains book. Anyone in my Pilates classes and all those attending the Myolastic classes will know we have been spinning round and locking energy in and reaching out along those lines of myofascial tension.

Has it made a difference?

An interesting self observation is that over the last 6 months of personally doing the lock, load, concept I have experienced a marked increase in reaction to these movements.

The question, which I keep coming back to is; why is the reaction getting more powerful?

Is it familiarity, is it muscle strength, is it an increase in fascial storage capacity, are we training a reaction rather than an action (a muscle contraction is an example of an action), will it continue to get stronger until the amount of effort is very small compared with the output response. Will we forget the response as easily as we learnt it.????

What do we know about the Fascial system, which will help to answer some of these questions?

Fascia is a body wide tensional energy storage and transmission system, it responds to load and reforms over time in response to that load.

It is a reactive system.

What do I mean by reactive? I ‘Googled’ the word ‘reaction’ and got some interesting results:

1. Something done, felt, or thought in response to a situation or event.

2. A force exerted in opposition to an applied force:

the law of action and reaction

3. A person’s ability to respond physically and mentally to external stimuli.

4. A reverse or opposing action.

Word origin:mid 17th century: from react + -ion, originally suggested by medieval Latin reactio(n-), from react- 'done again'.

So when we say Fascia is a reactive system do we mean that:

1. It can feel something in response to a movement event.

2. If a force is directed into it, an equal force in the opposite direction will happen.

3. External stimuli cause the Fascial system to respond

4. and finally that it reverses or opposes an action.

I think that experientially we can say that all of the above is true.

So can we train our fascia to become more reactive? The Fascial Fitness catapult principle as set out by Divo Müller and Robert Schleip in 2011 would suggest that it may be trainable, (see earlier blog for more information on the catapult principle).

It’s very exciting to think that we have found a way to demonstrate to ourselves that the reaction can be increased but to what end? How will this experiential exercise help us maintain a healthy body and youthful fascia or is that exactly what it is doing but we have no way of measuring it. Has the reaction always been there and we have only just awakened our senses to it or has the storage capacity of our Fascial net actually improved. More questions to which I do not have answers.

However at last a question I can answer:

What does this reaction feel like to me?

It could be described as ‘magical’, my body reacts without any conscious instruction to reverse the action or lock I have imposed upon it. Each week the reaction gets stronger, faster and lasts for longer. There is no effort or energy required to evoke the reaction and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. It’s fun and pleasurable.

It makes me happy.

Tracey Mellor

March 2014

"Cost of Transport" - a new way of calculating the energy used for movement

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 23:54:00 +0000

Regulars to the Thursday class (1-2.30 pm at BNHC) know that Laurie and I have been playing around with the idea that the jellyfish is the purest fascial movement based organism that we can think of.

Of course the jelly like substance of the jellyfish and our collagen-based fascia is not identical but they share many properties, which leads us to postulate that it affects movement in a similar way.

Jellyfish are an ancient life form on the evolutionary ladder, which raises several questions as to when our fascia formed in the timescale of human evolution.

This blog update is about another interesting aspect of the jellyfish and it’s movement.

We have all seen the graceful way a jellyfish propels itself through the water, it is hypnotic, so much so that in Japan they observe tanks of jellyfish as a way to reduce stress.

In a recent article in the Sunday Times (20^th October 2013) researchers in the U.S. have named the Moon Jellyfish (the most common type) ‘the most efficient swimmers on the planet’.

Brad J Gemmell of the Marine Biological Lab in Massachusetts has analysed the movement of the Moon jellyfish.

Brad, like Laurie and I has had trouble describing this movement in conventional language, there just are not the words available to us. So like us (we invented the word Myolastic), he has invented some new terms to describe the way the Jellyfish moves.

He invented a new way of describing and calculating the energy used in Jellyfish (fascial!!) movement calling it the “the cost of transport”

i.e. how much energy used to move.

He observed a 2 phase swimming motion:

Phase 1- jellyfish contracts it’s open bell and pulses water behind it, propelling itself forward.

Phase 2 – Jellyfish returns to its original bell shape as the bell refills with water.

Traditionally Phase 1 is the active phase, the contractile stage and Phase 2 is the passive or recovery stage.

However it has been shown that the second phase is also creating a push of it’s own, accounting for 30% of the distance travelled without actually doing any work! This is because the elastic tissue (their description not mine) of the bell, acts like an elastic band, reforming the bell and it is this action that produces a water action under the jellyfish called a vortex, which pushes it forward. This recovery stage and the kick it produces is, they believe, purely mechanical and VERY energy efficient.

The question is can our fascia be as efficient?

Our fascia is made up of two substances, collagen and elastin. We know that the location and use determine the exact quantities of the two substances. We also know that use or load placed upon the fascia can lead to changes in the ratio of collagen and elastin in a tissue at a specific site.

The fascial tissue or connective tissue in our body has an elastic quality. We know it stores energy and releases it, with huge efficiency such as can be seen when a kangaroo jumps.

(All of the above can be read about in previous blogs on the MMP site and www.Traceymellorpilates.co.uk blog site.)

The speed/strength of the return to original size and shape is what determines the elastic capability of a tissue or substance. Stainless steel has a high elastic capability for instance. The elastic of a jellyfish also has a highly elastic capability, giving it a low “cost of transport”.

It is possible to feel the restoration of shape in our tissue in the quiet stillness of non-movement, we have been exploring how this feels in our classes and workshops.

So what is our “cost of transport”? Can we improve it with training or is it there already just waiting for us to recognise it’s existence?

Tracey Mellor

The Catapult Mechanism and the birth of MMP

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 17:42:00 +0000

In this blog I am again looking to explore one of the Fascial Fitness concepts in more detail, the Catapult mechanism.

This blog also introduces Myolastic Movement Protocol.

The Catapult mechanism, the body’s storage capacity and MMP.

‘The catapult mechanism’, a unique ability of Fascia, and was discovered by scientists in 1998. Kram and Dawson were investigating why Kangaroos can jump further than can be explained by the force of the contraction in their leg muscles alone. They discovered that the tendons and fascia of the Kangaroo’s legs are tensioned, and it is the release of this stored energy that enables the Kangaroos to jump so high. Investigation of other ‘jumping’ animals such as gazelles showed that these other animals use the same mechanism. With the use of high-resolution ultrasound technology (Sawicki et al, 2009) it has been possible to show that humans also use this mechanism, and that our fascia has the same elastic storage capacity as kangaroos and gazelles and that we use the catapult mechanism not just to jump but in our everyday locomotion and movements.
Just this discovery alone is quite remarkable. We have all watched on television the amazing jumping ability of high jumpers and long jumpers at events such as the Olympic Games, but for most of us to be able to train to jump so high and far is beyond our imagination, but is it beyond our capabilities?

What is elastic storage capacity? How does the fascia hold this energy? How can we increase the capacity? These are just some of the questions, which spring (sorry about the pun) to mind.

First of all we have to look at, ‘what is meant by elastic?’. Contrary to commonly held belief the elasticity of a substance is measured not by how much we can stretch it but by the strength and speed the material returns to it’s normal size, be it length, width or capacity. When it comes to elastic capacities we have to look at materials such as stainless steel as well as rubber, it’s all about how much elastic energy the material can hold.
The laws of Physics tell us that energy cannot be destroyed so that elastic capacity has to be stored until it is released, the bigger the storage capability the bigger the release.
If we take a length of stainless steel wire, and coil it, it becomes a very efficient spring, if left as a length it has less capacity to hold energy and has less capacity to release that energy in the form of forward or upward motion. The research suggests that the fascia is like that length of stainless steel, it is very strong and if young and healthy the collagen fibers within it display a crimp like structure (Staubesand et al, 1997) very much like a spring. By keeping this spring like quality we can maintain or even increase the elastic storage capacity of the fascia, which means it can store and hold energy, which can then be released when we jump, hop, run or walk. If we lose this crimp, we lose capacity to hold energy and cannot jump or hop so high or run and walk so fast or for so long.
Science has also given us the perfect answer to how to train the fascia to maintain or improve this crimp like structure, regular oscillatory exercise.

This leads me to ask many questions:

How do we translate all this fascinating information into out movement practice?
Is there a way to feel the power of this storage capacity?
Can we observe this increased capacity?
Can we use this unique ability to store or absorb this energy?
Is it a good thing to hold this energy in our tissue?
Can it be released safely and upon demand?

However the first question we have to ask is:

Is it possible to be objective about how a tissue feels as everyone has different references and experiences?

Lets look at some of the answers given by fascia research for these questions.

There are some very expensive gadgets, which can measure the tissues ability to spring back to shape. Most of us do not have access to these machines but we can say our legs feel strong or they feel full of spring. We all know the difference between legs, which are tired and feel heavy and fresh legs, which float along under us as if we have no weight at all. Is this how we can measure the quality of the elastic storage capacity of our fascia?
Another, almost magical, way of demonstrating the storage capacity of the body is the simple parlor game - floating arms, where pressure is applied to a muscle which when released takes on a life of it’s own and floats upwards. The game perfectly demonstrates how the body could hold energy, painlessly and without an external change in shape or colour or weight, is this about the storage capacity of fascia, we do not know but it feels like an explanation of storage.

The training of the human body’s catapult system was considered in the research paper written by Schleip and Muller in 2011. They suggest that by re-introducing child like bounce into our exercises you can encourage the retaining or re-creation of a ‘youthful’ crimp structure in the collagen fibers of our Fascial network. This crimp will act like the storage capacity of springs. Research done on rats seems to suggest that this is possible.
This ‘bounce’ is easy to add to any movement; indeed it is already in our language to describe healthy movement and the feeling of happiness. Pulsing in exercise has gone out of favour, so we must look at quality and quantity, rhythm and rest periods amongst many other considerations, or perhaps it is just as simple as adding bounce into our movement and taking out heavy footed, noisy movements.
What happens when energy cannot be released, or cannot be easily moved around, where it becomes trapped or stuck? We all recognize these words and can associate them pain, a trapped nerve or stuck tissue. The body cannot move efficiently and effectively. As we age the crimp naturally becomes matted as we slow down, the tissue is not active, it is not hydrated or heavy and thickened, the tissue becomes like a mat, an area of stagnation, like a darn in a sock, where stretch and movement is inhibited. If not attended to this area of stagnation begins to grow unless there is a change in habit, a change in movement pattern or an intervention by a manual therapist, to re-open the tissue and release the stored energy usually in the form of heat.

Regular whole body, intelligent movement is, in my view, a simple answer to improving crimp, opening tissue to allow toxins to drain and avoid stagnation. Improving our Fascial health and general well being.

This is not a new idea, movement systems such as Qigong and Tai Chi, which open ‘energy pathways’ and promote health, have been practiced in the East for thousands of years.

In 2012 the Fascial Fitness Training programme was introduced by The Fascial Fitness Association to encourage Fascia friendly movement. I became one of the first Fascial Fitness trainers in the UK.

In 2013 I made the decision to find new ways to investigate and test this research and to bring my findings to a wider audience. This is a huge task, fascial research is still very much a new science, and there is still so much we do not know about this tissue, which makes up so much of our body. There are also so many misconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding fascial training.

I started by tearing up the rulebook and turning the existing ideas of Fascial Fitness training on its head. The current training looks from the top down, I want to come from another direction, taking away preconceived conceptions about how or what we should move, asking questions and letting the fascia (our body) suggest the answers, this requires the formation of a new language and a very open mind.

Dance is a perfect medium to start this interrogation its free form comes from the body listening to itself and suggesting the next move or shape to make. In this way Myolastic Movement Protocol (MMP) was conceived, I asked the questions and Laurie Booth- a very experienced choreographer translated the question into movement/dance and we waited for the answer to make itself understood within our own body, in a language our body understood. Laurie and I have spent years talking about Fascia and what it means, debating and coming up with ideas, this idea seemed to make perfect sense. We took the plunge and started a MMP class to see if others, who did not have any fascial research background, could find answers and understanding through movement, and they did.

We have now taught two, 5-hour workshops to provide time for the questions and answers to be formed, developed and answered, and they have been very successful. The wonderful creativity and the bringing together of ideas and thoughts has been beautiful. A truly experiential workshop.

Research, which is so intellectual and often difficult to explain can be translated into movement and understood even if that understanding is still difficult to put into conventional language.

I love asking questions, often the answer is another question and so it continues, curiosity and a desire to acquire knowledge and understanding is what makes us human, sometimes we already have the answers we just need to find a way to listen. Perhaps like Fascia the answer has always been there, and like Fascia it has been overlooked or ignored, we have lost the ability to listen to our in-tuition or inner-tuition.

We have more workshops scheduled (check out the Facebook page and look out for the new website).

We are recording reactions to the work. I see this as a way of creating research. Coming full circle from research to movement and then back to research, and if it informs people to be healthier and happier along the way, then that is perfect.

Tracey Mellor
November 2013
copyright protected

Bite size Fascia Research- Can exercise make you younger?

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:33:00 +0000

Can exercise make you younger?

Many of you will know that I am part of a collaboration to bring the principles of Fascial Fitness to the attention of all exercise professionals in the United Kingdom. This is quite an undertaking.

The principles are outlined in a paper by Robert Schleip and Divo Muller called the Training Principles of connective tissues scientific foundation and suggested practical applications published in the JBMT.

I thought it would be useful to look at the paper’s research in small bite sized pieces to use as a resource for the workshops.

Fascia has been described as ‘the body wide tensional network, which consists of all fibrous collagenous soft connective tissue’ (Schleip).

Research done by Staubessand et al, 1997 showed that the fascia of young people expresses, more often, a clear two-directional (lattice) orientation of their collagen fibre network. In addition the individual collagen fibres show a stronger crimp formation.

As evidenced by animal studies, application of proper exercise can induce an altered architecture with increased crimp-formation. Lack of exercise on the other hand has been shown to induce a multidirectional fibre network and a decreased crimp formation.

What does this mean?

Put simply young people have more bounce, more elasticity in their fascia (connective tissue). The crimp in their youthful fascia is reminiscent of elastic springs.

We all know that children bounce; their body’s are full of spring and energy. As we age however we lose this springiness to our movement.

My lovely Friday class of older people (average age 70) summed it up beautifully- we are getting stiffer.

Research by Jarvinen et al., 2002.showed that as we age the fascial architecture takes on a more haphazard and multidirectional fibre arrangement. This arrangement resembles a darn in a stocking, it is indeed stiffer. The fibres of this older fascia cannot glide past one another as easily as the younger fascia fibres. The fascia becomes matted.

Think the net you find around oranges as the youthful lattice, and a piece of Felt as the older matted fascia. The orange net easily changes shape, molding around its contents, reacting to changing positions. A felt bag is less flexible and stiffer.

The most interesting part is that research shows that when applied to animals, exercise can stimulate fascial fibroblasts to lay down a more youthful fibre architecture (Fukashiro et al., 2006). Perhaps in time someone will be able to prove that exercise can do the same in humans.

But which exercise is the best one to stimulate fascia fibroblasts to lay down a youthful lattice of fascia and dissolve the older matted stiffness caused by years of living a sedentary lifestyle? What form of exercise or movement pattern can delay the aging of our fascial network? At what age do we have to start worrying that our fascial network losing it’s crimp and springiness?

Fascia is constantly remodeling itself reacting to dominant loading patterns (Schleip). It stands to reason that an exercise or movement practice, which offers variation, will produce a body wide exercise answer to this question. Concentrating on one area or muscle will cause the network to become unbalanced. Exercise systems, which work the whole body such as Pilates or Yoga, should perhaps be encouraged over repetitive muscle specific exercise.

Repetitive movements create repetitive loading on our fascial network and we know that repetitive loading changes the composition and arrangement of the fascia. From an earlier and earlier age we allow our children to train repetitively in the belief that they will excel. We also see young people adopting a more sedentary lifestyle, playing computer games, repetitive actions shaping their body’s literally.

Luckily a change in loading and adopting exercises and lifestyle choices that bring variation and bounce back into their movements can reverse this trend, and exercise professionals are perfectly placed to bring about this change.

Watch out for our ElasticBody series of workshops for more information on Fascial Fitness.

Tracey Mellor

Class ideas. Empty and Full, a sense of interoception

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 17:27:00 +0000

Like many other teachers of Mat Pilates classes I like to have a theme for my classes each week. The inspiration for the themes could be from something I have read, an interesting lecture or workshop. Often it is just one element, a phrase or movement, which appeals to me and I expand it to be a theme not only for the mat class but into the studio as well, the challenge is to apply the theme to all the different bodies I see during the week adding variety and interest to the sessions. This theme develops as the week progresses and my creative side gets going. I'm always thinking that I should write it down these ideas for re-cycling at another time or as inspiration for other teachers.

Last week I was at my Tai Chi Class on Monday morning, it's such a lovely way to start the week, especially if I have been away training all weekend. We were going through the 'form'( a set series of moves), taking instruction from our teacher, Mike, who is so patient with those of us who struggle to remember the precise movements from one week to the next! Sometimes Mike reads from a translation of the original teachers instructions and the way of describing the feel of the movements is often very beautiful and insightful. On Monday the instruction to make our legs feel empty or full depending on whether we had our weight in them or not struck a cord and I played with this idea all week.

Before I give you some ideas on how I took this theme into a class, I just wanted to look at the idea that the teacher was describing how the move felt to the mover. I think that this ancient teacher was describing the feeling or emotion the moves might evoke. I wondered if this could be encouraging interoception. This may be a new word to many of you. We have all heard of proprioception, which is a sense of where your body is in space. Placing a hand on someone's back as they are moving gives them proprioceptive feedback as to how they are moving. The machines are constantly providing proprioceptive feedback, using small equipment in a mat class also trains this sense.
Interoception is defined as a sense of the physiological condition of the body, including, for example muscular effort. They are almost always attached to an emotion. The sensations are triggered by stimulation of free nerve endings, most of which are found in fascial tissues throughout the human body. Proprioception and interoception however are organised differently in the human brain. Anxiety, depression or irritable bowel syndrome have been described as interoceptive disorders. Robert Schleip and Heike Jager provide a very full description of interoception in the book Fascia (Elsevier 2012), providing full references for their research.

Put simply Interoception is how your body feels or is perceived by you.

In last week's class I asked my participants to firstly understand the idea of empty and full, considering their body, their arms, legs and head as a containers which is either full or empty. To each of us the words full and empty has a different meaning, I used all kinds of imagery to evoke this feeling. Something which is empty is light and airy, cool, something which is full is heavy and warm. Changing an angle changes the way their containers ( their arms and legs etc) feel, smooth changes of leg,arm positions required a smooth transfer of weight and content. Different body positions created new challenges, rolling like a ball meant a feeling of momentum caused by the contents of the container moving from one end of the body to the other. Sitting or standing made the head light ( describing it as empty brought a burst of giggling!) the feet/pelvis heavy or full. To keep the pelvis level, when in neutral for instance, I used the image of a bowl half full of liquid. Bringing this self awareness of how the inside of the body feels, makes it interoceptive in nature.
I also encouraged my class members to enjoy the feeling of their body moving, no discomfort or pain should be experienced, again this is subjective, listening to the body, how it feels today is very important, particularly in a class when the instructor has so many body's to watch, if a class member can feel and enjoy the movement, it becomes a safe movement.

I believe that as instructors we can encourage awareness and build the senses of interoception and proprioception of our class participants. A manual therapist can use touch to stimulate the fascia to encourage proprioception and interoception, as movement teachers we can use movement, the power of imagery and gently well placed manual cueing to do the same.

This was a fun theme to play with, it worked well keeping the movement smooth and rhythmic - no sudden, jerky moves. The class members enjoyed the challenge of the theme. The only down side is that as an instructor it involves a lot of talking, so take a drink into class and remember to warm up your voice beforehand and rest it after.

Tracey x
(c) November 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 22:02:00 +0000

Tensegrity

This wonderful Summer of sport is about to come to the end. Many of us in the UK will have had the experience of attending the Olympic games and Paralympic games in London. I was lucky enough to go to the Olympic Park last night and watched Oscar Pistorious win the 400 m imperiously.

The Paralympicans have amazed us with their athleticism. I heard many spectators say ‘how do they do that?’ How can a one legged man do the high jump or a one legged woman turn cartwheels after her long jump; check out the youtube video’s; I have attached one here for you to watch and be inspired to bigger and greater achievements.

The newspapers have had some spectacular pictures of athletes captured in mid air, making shapes in the air, holding form against the effects of gravity.

How do they do that? how can the body hold shapes in the air, defying gravity?

I think its all to do with tensegrity. The fascial ( connective tissue) network acts as a tensegrity structure, allowing supported movements of our arms, legs and body. A tensegrity structure is made up of compressed struts (bones) and elastic strings (connective tissue or fascia and muscles). The resulting structure holds space in the body, from both a cellular level to a full body level. We all use our internal tensegrity structures all the time. The paralympians use their fascial network to defy gravity everyday.

I have been making tensegrity models, yesterday I built one which mimics a spine, it’s great fun to do, but also by making the models you can appreciate how they divide space, make space and surround space. Look them up on www.biotensegrity.com,

Hope you have as much fun making the models as I did.

congratulations to everyone who got to the Olympics, competitors, officials, game makers and the great spectators.

Tracey Mellor

Workshops in Fascia Fitness

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 21:34:00 +0000

Today is my first day back to work after my summer break. I've returned refreshed and ready to get on with the next phase of my Fascia Journey. 2 years ago I promised myself that I would devote the next 2 years to investigating fascia research. At first this was a personal interest which I used to inform and inspire my work in the Pilates studio, beyond this I had no great ambition. I enjoyed passing on interesting fascia facts to my clients. I've attended workshops, congress, courses, meetings; read books and research articles. I have met and spoken with many of the men and women leading the fascia revolution, I have been inspired and, in some cases, shocked by the lengths they have gone to further their research.
I have known for a while that fascia can be changed and trained by movement; also if neglected fascia can deteriorate and be easily damaged. Neglected and damaged fascia effects our ability to move without pain. I know that Robert Schleip and Divo Muller have been teaching courses on how to keep our fascia fit, and I have attend several of them in London and Germany. The principals are simple to grasp once a basic understanding of fascia is obtained. The principals can be layered on top of existing exercise or movement systems. For the last 2 years I have been applying these principals to Pilates. This has involved a certain amount of creativity which has been fun for everyone involved. The idea for this blog was born out of the want to record and share the experiences of applying these principals to the Pilates system.
Earlier this year I wanted to make sure that my way of applying the principals to the Pilates system was in line with the Fascia Fitness Association's standards and made a series of videos. A compilation of short clips I set to 'bounce' music for a bit of fun and gifted it to Robert and Divo when I met them in Canada at the Fascia Research Congress. I have attached this private video to this blog for information/education and not for public publication or reproduction. Following the video's and because of the level of my interest in Fascia research and it's application to movement I was awarded a qualification to teach teachers about Fascial Fitness.
In truth I have been daunted by the amount of information which needs to be imparted, where to start?
Preparation of workshop material has now begun.
Workshops will be presented on 3 levels:-

Introduction- Understanding Fascia and Fascial research .

Application- Understanding Tensegrity, Myofascial Meridians, lines of tension and elasticity in the body,sensory ability of Fascia and the importance of hydration on Fascia.

Fascial Fitness- Application of Fascial Fitness principals to movement/exercise for the enthusiast,instructor and educator of instructors.

Enjoy the video- it was made for fun.

Tracey Mellor
(c) August 2012

Approved Fascial Fitness Trainer

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Tue, 29 May 2012 15:16:00 +0000

Tracey Mellor is the 1st Pilates Fascial Fitness Trainer approved by FFA

Yesterday I was told that I had been "approved as certified Fascial Fitness Trainer" awarded by the Fascial Fitness Association which includes Robert Schleip and Tom Myers. There are only 4 FFT's so far and I am the first Pilates based trainer in the World!.

What does the certification mean?
When I told my news to this morning's class they were worried that I would be changing the way I teach and/or putting my prices up -worry not, neither will be happening.
In reality I have been teaching within the Fascial Fitness principals for quite a long time. I have studied Fascia and been on many Fascia related courses over the last 8 years. The Fascial Fitness principals fit in quite neatly with teaching Pilates on the machines, I have already introduced the Fascial Fitness language into the classes, and smile when my clients start talking 'Fascia Fitness' amongst themselves. More importantly I can see, and my clients can testify that their bodies are changing very slowly ( it is a slow process) because of the change in emphasis. One client said this morning that even if her mind couldn't remember the exercises her body did- I couldn't have put it better myself.

What happens next?
We are being encouraged to conduct FF workshops. This is an exciting prospect and it will need some careful thought. There are some Fascia workshops already planned by at least one of the FFT's.
The reason for the hesitation?
The world of Fascia is continuously changing as more research is undertaken. This means that FF principals will need continuous maintenance. To teach the Fascia Fitness principals involves teaching their incorporation into existing exercise systems. This means that a complete new way of approaching fitness has to be encouraged and adopted. It isn't just another set of exercises to be taught, it's a different way of thinking. There will be resistance, as there is with anything new, and the current ideas will need to be revised to take account of new findings and reactions, but in the end I hope that adoption of the FF principals can transform the way we approach the health and well-being of our bodies and minds.

Congratulations to Jo Avison, Carrie Gaynor and Sol Petersen the other new FFT's

Tracey Mellor
(c) May 2012

Orange Fascia video

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:22:00 +0000

Orange Fascia Video- Vancouver 2012

This is a video that Jo Avison and I made in Vancouver. We realised that the words used to describe the ways muscles and bones move were not always appropriate for fascia so this video explored a new language.

The orange is often used to explain fascia and how it holds and divides space within the body.

Jo has done a great job in this video, I have attached the whole video clip unedited. It was our second attempt as I had my finger over the microphone on the phone for the first one!- so we had to buy some more oranges and start again, I have one silent movie and one with sound, we may play about with the clips and add voice overs but for now enjoy this one. It is very much of the moment, post congress and inspired by a need to find a language to describe how fascia works in the body.

Tracey ( the camera or more accurately the phone woman)

Chronic Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:03:00 +0000

Chronic Pain

We all have experience of clients coming into class or the studio who have chronic pain. Many attempt to carry on with their lives, continuing classes because they believe that movement is helping. It's up to the teacher to respect this brave decision and not make matters worse. We adapt exercises, listening and observing carefully. In some cases we have to gently persuade the client that today may not be a good day to exercise.
I thought it would be helpful to record some of the comments made by the presenters of the post-congress workshop on Chronic pain, Fascia and Feldenkrais. The workshop was taken by fabulous presenters, Diana Thompson and Barbara Frye, who are lecturers in Massage therapy and Feldenkrais practitioners.

Chronic pain statistics

Globally, 1 in 5 people suffer from moderate to severe pain (IASP)
1 n 4 people aged over 65 live with pain (IOM)
116 million live with chronic pain in the U.S. up 40 million from 10 years ago! (IOM)
unrelieved pain is more prevalent in low and middle income countries with an increasing burden of chronic disease - AIDS, Cancer (WHO)
Global war on drugs is leaving countries without access to pain medication - Uganda, India, Ukraine. (the pain project)

The IOM report on relieving pain in America - we were encouraged to download, sets out suggested underlying principles:

Effective pain management is a moral imperative, professional responsibility, and duty of people in the healing professions
the importance of prevention
clinician, patient and family working together
Public health and community based approach

I liked the idea of the patient working along with the clinician or in our case instructor, as movement requires the client to move themselves. This is quite a big jump from being moved, and requires more effort and engagement on the part of the client. We should not forget that for someone with chronic pain just getting to the class sometimes requires huge effort.

Conditions associated with Chronic pain:

Aids, Cancer
Arthritis, back pain,neck pain,headache
Diabetes, herpes, Lyme
Fibromyalgia,syndromes (chronic fatigue,irritable bowel, myofascial pain, phantom leg)
Spinal stenosis,sciatica, restless leg syndrome
inflammatory nerve conditions, neuralgia/neuritis (brachial plexus, thoracic outlet, carpel tunnel)

Types of pain:

Nociceptive - dull, achy, poorly localised, sensory receptors or neurons perceive pain and sends pain signal to the brain
Neuropathic - burning, tingling, stabbing, pins and needles. central nervous system disorder
Allodynia - pain due to a stimulus which does not normally provoke pain, involves a change in the quality of a sensation.

Pain definitions/ therories:

Acute pain serves a vital function as a warning sign of injury or infection, typically responsive to treatment
Continued pain, once it's warning role is over, is maladaptive, unresponsive to typical treatments
Chronic pain results in changes in the peripheral and central nervous system that aid in it's persistence.

Chronic Pain definition

often a disease in and of itself
A complex pathology - cognitive, behavioural impairment, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, function
A dysfunction of the nervous system - neuroplastic changes, pain signals active even when resting
original injury is no longer the source of the pain.

Complications of pain

Psychological factors - pain and fear of pain affects how people move, limited activity leads to de-conditioning and a drop in well-being
Neuroplastic changes - toxic effect of prolonged excitation, cortical damage - sensory and motor changes
Fibrotic connective tissue - compromised muscle function which leads to an increase in fibrosis and this in turn can lead to a decrease in lymph and nerve flow
Predisposed to future exacerbations
vulnerable to unusual activity, from new sports to prolonged sitting
if nerve inflammation is present, cannot tolerate normal activity or full range of motion, according to pain research and practice, 2010 American pain foundation, nerve inflammation can cause damage to nervous system, damage to circulatory system, damage to soft tissues and organs, suppression of immune system, excessive inflammation and delays healing

From the above information we can see that chronic pain will affect the way a client moves and approaches movement. The bodies fascia changes in response to chronic pain.

The workshop went on to list treatment guidelines for massage therapists. As movement teachers/instructors it is not up to us to diagnose, just to be aware of the issues surrounding chromic pain. The treatments however can be adapted to the movement world.

Treatment guidelines

Do not cause pain
Address the whole body
Give the body time to rest during a session
Use awareness as a tool for learning/neuroplasticity
teach self-care for in between sessions

Research on massage/bodywork for chronic pain

Maintaining mobility is an important component in decreasing pain in older adults; stretching, strengthening, balancing and self massage can help. ( Tse et al, journal of clinical nursing 3/11)
Long term benefits of myofascial release/massage on sleep, short term improvements in pain, anxiety and quality of life. ( castro-Sanchez et al Evidence-based CAM, 12/11) - I wonder if they looked at restorative movement???
multiple-disciplinary treatment more effective than single treatment approach; exercise, massage, lumber supports, education, hot/cold packs, traction, low-level light therapy etc ( Van Middlekoop et al, European Spine Journal, 1/11)
6 Alexander lessons nearly as effective as 24 when combined with exercise homework one year post treatment ( Little et al, British Journal of sports medicine, 12/08)
Fascia innervation is nociceptive and likely to be responsible for nerve trunk pain ( Bove 2009)
Movement at ankle and hip results in nerve motion at distant joints ( Hodges 2006)
Nerve endings are concentrated where stresses are the highest (Solomonow 2004)

I think that the research is quite exciting for movement teaching. Pilates and Yoga addresses the whole body. One of the things I hope I teach my clients, is a greater awareness of their body, re-learning movement patterns etc. we use rollers and rolling to create localised myofascial massage for the tissues. We move and use our fascial net to move, keeping the fascial fabric healthy is, I believe, very important for my chronic pain clients.

Tip of the iceberg- international fascia research congress 2012 overview

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:45:00 +0000

Tip of the iceberg

I have just returned from the 3rd International Fascia Congress where 800 delegates and at least 100 presenters and exhibitors, met and shared their research, experience, observations and aspirations over 5 days of conference , pre-conference and post conference workshops.

The theme of the conference was:-

What do we know? What do we notice? continuing the Scientist-Clinician Dialogue .

So why was I there? I am neither a Scientist nor a Clinician in the accepted definition of the word. I am a Pilates teacher who has spent the last 8 years soaking up every aspect of fascia research she can find. I started with the myofascial chains or lines, released by Rolfers or Structural Integrators, moved on to workshops with Fascial research leaders such as Tom Myers and Robert Schleip, undertook applied myofascial anatomy qualifications, listened to webinars and read many scientific papers. I then integrated it all into my Pilates teaching.

In my Studio and in my classes I notice a lot and I think that movement teachers/therapists have quite a lot to add to this conversation.

I was not totally alone as a movement teacher at the conference, I travelled with a Structural Integrator who is also a Yoga teacher, the partner of one of the main contributors is a movement teacher and several physiotherapists/clinicians attending had a Pilates/yoga/movement qualifications. We were, however, very much in the minority.

It is hard not to feel intimidated by science. Many of the scientists were there to protect their reputations, showcase their expertise or to challenge common held beliefs. The atmosphere in the conference hall was often drenched in the emotions of awe, amazement, confusion, respect, admiration and fear. It was a privilege, and a challenge, to be part of it.

It will take a while to assimilate everything I heard, The Congress book measures over 1 inch thick, my hand written notes run to over 50 pages of highlights to be looked up later. Luckily the congress was video taped and re-hearing many of the keynote addresses is something I am looking forward to, as I know that of the hundreds of pieces of information flung out to the delegates, only a very small percentage was successfully caught and scribbled down.

Along side the main congress hall and keynote addresses, there were Posters to look at. Each of these posters represented research projects undertaken all over the world. The exhibitors included Clinicians, Scientists and Students and each one had the opportunity to present their work to the delegates during the congress. Amongst these posters there several research projects which included movement therapies. The posters however demonstrated the problems in trying to prove that an intervention, be it clinical, manual therapy or movement/exercise based,is very difficult to do in an objective manner, which can be presented to and scrutinised by the scientific world.

The congress timetable was very busy. We started at 8 am and listened until 5pm with coffee and lunch breaks. We had one evening session where we watched the multimedia presentations until 9 pm. In the breaks we mingled with the other delegates, normally starting with where we originated from ( our passes gave our names and home countries only), it then progressed onto what we did. From my point of view often the conversation stopped there, as many of the congress delegates were there to make useful contacts ( Pilates teachers aren’t considered useful!!), however I did meet some wonderful people and once we started to chat about the research we had much in common and I think I may have persuaded some that movement teaching does belong in the conversation.

I had the huge advantage of traveling with someone who had been to the first 2 congresses and who had worked along side many of the clinicians who were presenting at the congress. At our breakfast table we discussed new ways of ‘scientifically’ measuring changes in fascia following interventions, over supper we talked about how exercise and manual therapies could be measured to benefit clients.

I attended a post- conference workshop delivered by Massage therapists on Chronic pain. The lady sitting next to me was a little put out that she would be working with a non-clinician, but I had the last laugh when the presentation moved onto proprioception and movement. I was on home turf. When we were taught ‘pelvic clock’ I couldn’t help chuckling to myself. I was, by that point, totally convinced that movement teaching does have an important contribution to the world of Fascia research.

For me the most wonderful thing about the congress was that there was no question that Fascia is an important part of the human anatomy, not just the throw away wrapping around the muscles and bones. The body wide web was universally accepted and expanded upon. We could concentrate on the beauty of the bodies movement from within. Although there were still arguments about what each layer of Fascia should be called, there was no argument about the part it plays in proprioception, or pain. loose connective tissue was described as the ‘forgotten organ’ .We discussed ‘the secret life of water’ and fascia as a highway for the immune system. I know that we were all ‘fascia-holics in the room, only there because we believed, but as one speaker said: just because we believe in it’s existence does not make it a religion, this was Science and we could prove it.

Where does movement fit in? - Well I believe that the Fascial network is the bodies movement system. If we waited until our brain told our muscles when to move life would be very slow and jurky- like a robot’s movements. Fascia glides and reshapes, holds structure, encloses and connects,it moves internally so we can move externally with ease and grace. When the system is challenged or breaks down through injury, disease or under or poor use we lose this grace, we experience pain. The medical profession can fix our bodies, the massage therapists and manual body workers can move our tissue but ultimately it is up to each individual to move themselves, to make sure we keep our bodies and our movement system , our Fascia, healthy and that is where the movement teachers have their part to play and that is why I went to the congress and that is why I want to bring the research on Fascia into the movement world.

This is the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more for us to discover.

Tracey Mellor

April 2012 (c)

Proprioception-the 6th Sense

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:18:00 +0000

What is proprioception?

Divo Muller at a recent Fascial Fitness workshop in London defined it as our 6th sense; the"body and movement"sense. Without a proprioceptive sense we could not feel our bodies.

To have this 6th sense we need to have sensory feedback, we only need to remember the tragedy of the Romanian orphans, who were left without sensory feedback in the form of touch, to know how damaged a person can become when deprived of this proprioceptive sense of body.

The proprioceptive sense is perceived using our nervous system. There are some medical conditions where the nerve endings become damaged and a lost of proprioception occurs. Ian Waterman had such a medical condition, many in his situation cannot walk, he taught himself to walk using his mind and his other senses such as sight, however when the lights go out he falls to the floor as he has no idea where his body is. You can see part of the BBC documentary about Ian Waterman on Youtube.

The fascial (connective tissue) system is far more innervated than muscle, it can be argued that proprioception and kinaesthesia are primarily fascial not muscular.
There are 10 X as many sensory receptors in our fascial tissues than in the muscles ( Stillwell 1957).
The receptors include: Golgi tendon organs which measure load ( by measuring stretch in the fibres). Paciniform endings, which measure pressure. Ruffini endings which inform the central nervous system of shear forces in the soft tissues. Interstitial nerve endings which do everting the others do plus, apparently, pain (Stecco et al 2009, Taguchi et al 2009). This means that when, you think, you feel your muscles move you are more likely to be connecting into your fascial network.

From a Pilates, Yoga or movement teachers point of view, particularly those in rehab or re-medial practices, proprioception has another interesting property. It has been suggested that pain and proprioception cannot exist at the same time, like oil and water they do not mix. This follows research done by Helene Langevin amongst others.

For all the above reasons we should encourage our clients to keep their fascia fit and to hone their proprioceptive sense.

How can we do this?-

Pilates, yoga, tai chi and other holistic exercise practices already improve body awareness.
Lying in semi-supine, in pilates neutral for instance, gives the client feedback or a proprioceptive sense of how their back is positioned. They will know how much pressure is being placed at different places along the spine or across the shoulders for example. They will be able to feel changes when limbs are moved or lifted. At first many of my clients would look blank when asked how their back felt, their awareness of movement and their proprioceptive sense was not yet honed. Many associated pain with movement, they insisted they could not feel anything unless it hurt. Bringing awareness and the proprioceptive sense into the exercises makes a big difference.
The Pilates machines provide even more opportunity for proprioceptive feedback.
Footwork on the reformer provides proprioceptive feedback for the back as it lies on the carriage, the shoulders if they touch the shoulder pads, the feet as they rest and push against the foot bar . Swan on the barrel provided proprioceptive feedback at the heel/foot, at the hips and pubic bone and the front of the body as it takes on the shape of the barrel.

In my studio improving body awareness, the "6th" sense is a big part of the Pilates training.

Tracey Mellor
March 2012

First Post- The Poetry of Fascia

noreply@blogger.com (Tracey Mellor) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:06:00 +0000

The Poetry of Fascia

In my Studio I have a blackboard upon which I write things which I think my Clients will find interesting or helpful.
My most recent scribbling is part of a poem written by Gil Hedley about Fascia.
I was introduced to Gil by Robert Schleip last year at a Fascia Fitness lecture in London. Gil runs courses on Human dissection and is perhaps most famous for his 'Fuzz speech' which you can view on Youtube. He made quite an impression on the audience, his enthusiasm for the subject was obvious for all to see. However the thing which stays with me was his reading of a poem which he had written about Fascia.
I copied down the last few lines of this poem onto my blackboard as they represent the reason why I love to teach Pilates and why the Fascia research being undertaken around the world is so relevant to my teaching.

"A moment bound in doubt of freedom can seem like an eternity"

This line sums up something many of us fear, the inability to move without pain. Even a few hours of muscle stiffness is tiresome, a broken bone is painful, a torn ligament is a long time mending.

Movement is essential to well-being. Gil's Fuzz speech humorously explains how the loose connective tissue, he calls fuzz, can bind the body together if there is no movement. Pilates and other whole body movement exercise such as yoga and Tai chi ensures that the whole body is moved. New research is allowing us to understand how we need to move to keep out fascia healthy and not allow the "fuzz" to bind our body together.

One of my clients has added this line of his own to the blackboard.

'One moment of not letting people know what you are thinking may leave them in doubt for an eternity"

This too is true - thanks Mike for reminding me that we should share our understanding.

Tracey Mellor Feb 2012