What is fascia? A lot of people are talking about fascia these days. Perhaps you’re familiar with the term myofascial release. Ida Rolf, the founder of Structural Integration, popularized the understanding of fascial tissue.
Fascia is the connective tissue that surrounds your organs and sometimes permeates into them. The outside of your stomach has a fascial layer to it, and the outside of your muscles have a layer of fascia that both wraps around and permeates the tissue to hold the muscle in place.
Each individual group of muscle fibers is wrapped in fascia, and when you put those groups together, the fascia wraps around them as well, all the way out to the whole muscle group. Tendons and ligaments are not technically fascia, but they’re made of the same collagen fibers, and the same general matrix and types of cells as fascia. The fascial tissue extends from the muscles, joining with the tendons and ligaments, which attach to the bones, the outside of which is wrapped in fascia as well.
Fascia is this whole matrix that all of our organs, our bones, and our muscles are floating in, and if you have a restriction in one part of that matrix, it will cause a pulling effect on the rest of it. When we release fascia in one part of the body, we can open things up, and create more space and fluidity for all of our bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and other organs to move more freely and resiliently through our body.