Bodywork to relieve myofascial pain.

Bodywork isn’t just a massage to feel nice. When working with someone the therapist will be thinking about many aspects to create change depending on the presentation on that day.

One aspect is fascia. When a soft tissue is injured you are taught to look somewhere between the insertion and origin. Fascia is continuous and has no endpoint, the original injury site can become the cause of further injury further down the line in the form of a compensation pattern.

The restrictions caused by the original injury disturbs and restricts communication between cells, it traps the injury trauma within the body memory and plays it repeatedly, causing fatigue and resistance to move.

The fascia will eventually shorten, reduce in strength and contractile potential. The anti-gravity network will always try to achieve pain free tensile integrity, using the least amount of energy by spreading tension throughout the entire network therefore using compensatory patterns to deal with stress, emotional load and structural load.

Imagine a banquet table covered with a tablecloth. If you take the corners and pull equally towards you, the cloth will pull towards you evenly. Now imagine a nail driven in the middle and slightly to the right (area of injury or pain) and pull both corners. Not only can you not pull the cloth, but the more you pull the tighter the cloth becomes.

Now imagine the site of pain is fascia, the more you stretch and lengthen the tissue of the injury, the more the fascia responds by binding down on the injury. However, if you follow the line of fascia back to the original site you can remove the tension from the whole fascial line and find the original injury, restoring the fascial line.