While moving through yoga poses begins to hydrate and free the superficial layers of the fascia, it’s often not enough to undo the deeper damage done the other 23 or so hours of our day. Many factors in our daily life, including poor postural habits, stress-induced muscular tension, limited movement, injury and dehydration, can cause velcro-like adhesions to form within the fascia sticking muscles together and restricting their ability to perform their individual functions. Forced to move and work as a team, the muscles become less efficient.
Fascia and Flexibility
We can't blame you if you've never given your fascia a second (or first) thought. Senior Yoga Medicine teacher Allison Candelaria explains why you will want to start now though.
Do you practice yoga regularly but somehow still feel “stuck” in certain spots? Senior Yoga Medicine teacher Allison Candelaria created this fascia-freeing flow to find more mobility in the backside of your body. I highly recommend fascia work myself and try to put this in my classes regularly allowing the tissue to become free of tightness and tenson.
The back side of the body takes on a lot of tension. Our postural habits, stress and natural tendency to move mostly in the sagittal plane (forward, specifically) can all be to blame. Sitting, standing, and walking make the external rotators of the hips, hamstrings, and calves tight and weak. Our low backs tend to house discomfort from sitting, over-exaggerating the curve in the lumbar spine (hyperlordosis), and even sinking your weight into one hip while standing. Moving up the body, the rhomboids (the muscles between the shoulder blades and spine) become weak from our tendency to round the upper back. And the upper traps (top of the shoulders and neck) are notorious for holding stress-induced tension. To top it all off, our necks have to work very hard to hold up our heads, so tension can get trapped in the base of the skull and sometimes send referral pain to other areas in the body.
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