Your Body, Your Yoga

We make precise movements thanks to our nervous system’s innervation of the muscles, and yet our fascia has far more nerve endings. What are they all doing? Providing feedback. This is called proprioception—

There are 10 times more nerve endings in our fascia than in our muscle! This is a remarkable fact given how much fine control we have over our muscles.

The ANS in turn has two branches: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which controls our responses to stressful situations; and our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which activates the complementary responses to the SNS—our recovery and rest responses.

The newer model of an articulating limb is bone, fascia, muscle, fascia, bone—with the fascia consisting of the dynament of tendon and ligaments together. Tightness in the ligaments is simply one more form of tension that stops us.

If you feel tension reducing your range of movement, it may not be because of tight, short muscles but rather due to fascia that has become shortened or stuck together.

Understanding that fascia provides a sliding surface between muscles helps us realize how tension can arise in our tissues and is one answer to the question “What stops me?” For a muscle to contract or stretch, it has to be free to change its shape without interference or resistance from neighbouring tissues.

. If the sensation in the tendon is a sharp, burning pain, stressing that tendon so much is not advisable. If the sensation is one of tugging or pulling, it may be quite healthy to allow it to continue.

may be more skillful to teach your students to differentiate between healthy stress and what it feels like, and unhealthy stress and the pain that usually accompanies it.

The fascia of the muscle limits how far it can be stretched. Fascia is made up of several types of proteins, but the most common one is called collagen, which is strong and inelastic.

The final activation option is where the muscle tries to contract, but it is held at a constant length: this is called isometric contraction, but again it is not really contracting, so let’s use the term isometric activation.