Lecture (5)

Dr. Al shimaa
Mokhtar

DO , PT , PHD
When your body says, “Enough!”
Throughout life, your body is bombarded with traumas, big and
small. The big traumas are easy to remember. But the small ones
are often things you don’t even think of as traumas: a fall that you
recover from within a week, a twinge in your back when you reach
into the back seat of the car, a stiff neck after you sleep in an odd
position.
Each time, your body compensates: to avoid pain, absorb the
force of an impact, support poor posture, or work around a new
movement limitation. It finds the path of least resistance.
Over time, you incorporate the compensations into your overall
pattern of movement. Maybe you move differently to avoid pain, or
avoid certain positions altogether. You may not even notice your
“new normal”.
Inside your body, the effects of compensation may be less
obvious to you. Your internal structures (your bones, muscles,
organs, connective tissue, and nerves) may now be moving and
functioning in ways they were never designed to do, but without
causing any obvious problems – yet.
With each trauma, your body adapts…and adapts some
more….layering compensation on top of the compensation, until
it runs out of options.

That’s when some version of the “single event” that brings many
people into our clinic happens. You reach into the trunk of your
car, for example, to lift a bag and your back “gives out.” But it
isn’t the one stretch that’s done you in, it’s the accumulation of
compensations. This final event is just your body saying,
“Enough!”
What affects your fascia, affects everything;
To understand what’s really going on in your body, you need
to understand how your fascia works. It’s your body’s key
compensating mechanism.

Fascia is the connective tissue that runs throughout your

body. It’s a dense, elastic web that supports, connects,
and separates your bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and
blood vessels. It connects every single part of you with every
other part of you. So it’s not surprising that it plays an integral
role in your healing process.
Your fascia might, for example, thicken and strengthen in
one direction to increase support for an injured body
part, while lengthening in another direction to accommodate a
new position.
But as it stretches or tightens, it affects all of the interconnected
structures in its web. It can create lines of tension, put pressure
on blood vessels and nerves, and force muscles to work in new
ways. This is how trauma to one part of your body can result in
pain or chronic irritation elsewhere.

The fascia also acts as a shock absorber. When you fall, get
hit in a game, or are thrown about in a car accident, it
distributes the force of the impact throughout your body to
protect your organs – and not always in a predictable manner.

While this is a good thing, it also means that an impact injury to

one part of your body can cause a “ripple effect” throughout
your fascia and the internal structures it connects, as the force
is dispersed. The original injury may show up later as pain
in another part of your body.
 TRAUMA CAN “RIPPLE” THROUGH YOUR BODY.
 It may be helpful to use the image of a
spider’s web to visualize how your
fascia transmits the effects of trauma
throughout your body.

 Stretch the model and everything

stretches. Where will it break? Again,
at its weakest point where to bring us
back to the human body, you’re feeling
pain or experiencing dysfunction.
 We all know that when we pull on one side of a spider’s
web, it distorts the shape of the other side. In fact, it
changes the shape of the web all along the lines of
tension that we create with our tug.
 The same thing happens in the fascia, an injury happens, or a
restriction develops in one area and the effect ripples along
lines of tension to other body parts.
 This
explains why a hard backwards fall onto
your pelvis, for example, might initially cause
pain in your lower back, but show up later as an
upper back or neck problem.

 Or,why an impact injury to the area around your

liver, might cause shoulder pain later on.
Tensegrity: the principle
behind our success.
 Tensegrity, a combination of
the words “tension” and
“integrity”, is a structural
principle in architecture that
offers the most elegant model
for illustrating how your fascia
and internal structures work
together.
 How does your body
compare to a tensegrity
model? The bones in your
body float in a sea of soft
tissue; they are held in
position by tension from
your muscles and fascia.
The shape of your body
isn’t maintained by rigid
joints and compression like
a house, but by this
balance of tension across
your entire structure.
If you were to play with a
tensegrity model, you’d see
instantly how your fascia and
other internal structures
respond when you get
injured.

Press down on (injure) one of these models –

disconnected rods (bones) held together in a three-
dimensional shape (your body) with elastic cords
(muscle and fascia) – and you see that the model
distorts all over.
It doesn’t crack at the point of highest compression
like a house would. Instead, the force disperses
over the model and it concentrates, or breaks, at
its weakest point.
Stretch the model and everything stretches.

Where will it break? Again, at its weakest point

where, to bring us back to the human body, you’re
feeling pain or experiencing dysfunction.
 A common conceptual model of the spine
is that the vertebrae are stacked on top of each
other and pass force compressively from one to
the other. Problematically, this implies that all the
force is passing through the soft disks between
the vertebrae. If that were happening, those disks
would be crushed and ground apart as we move
and rotate our spines around.

Biotensegrity spinal models show that it

is possible to build a flexible and mobile spinal
column where the “vertebrae” float apart from
each other without touching.
Tensegrity structure
When one part of your
body is weak or
compromised, your entire
structure responds to
balance out the problem –
just like a suspension
bridge. Understanding this
is key to finding the cause
of a problem and not just
treating its symptoms.
The whole system reacts to an outside force with an adaptive
tension distribution.

•„ -The osteopathic approach to these tension conditions, to

the attracting and rejecting forces and the therapeutically
induced normalization of this tension with the aim to achieve
a higher order to me that is applied tensegrity.

„-If you want to change the correlation of the bones, you

should change the balance of the tension forces in the
connective tissue. The bones will then re‐arrange
themselves.

„ -links between fascia allow the transfer of tension

Somatic dysfunctions arise when alterations occur either
to the bones acting as compression elements or the soft parts acting as
tension elements or if the balance between both is altered.
How does this principle help us solve problems
in our bodies?
In a nutshell, it means that when we look for the source of
your problem using the principles of tensegrity, we look along lines
of tension in your body. Because the place you feel the pain, isn’t
necessarily its source. The source of your pain may be the place
where your body was first “squashed” or “stretched”, or it may be at
a weak point that appears unrelated.

That’s why we take a “whole body” approach to your

treatment. And it’s why we have such a high success rate in
treating chronic pain and complex conditions.
Because we’re not just looking at the place where your symptoms
appear, like the sore shoulder we mentioned earlier, we’re looking
along lines of tension in your body for their source, which might be
restricted fascia around your liver – so that we can solve your
problem once and for all.
Your body carries your history;
All the stresses, accidents, and illnesses leave
their mark and your body adjusts to deal with them.
Sometimes the source of today’s pain is something
that appears unrelated – that happened in the past.

What we’ve learned after years of experience,

is that if one area is damaged, it affects the balance
and symmetry in other areas. Tensegrity is a useful
model for understanding how damage in one area
can cause pain in other regions, even though they
appear unrelated.
Other benefits of addressing postural compensations (postural
deviations that cause pain – local or widespread) throughout the
myofascial meridians:

•Skeletal alignment and support

•Resilience throughout the body
•Improved movement patterns
•Increased Range of movement
•Reduced Pain
•Length throughout the body leading to reduced effort and
stress while standing or moving

Absolute soft tissue therapists use body postural analysis, gait,

and functional movement screening, to create a treatment
protocol that addresses fascial restrictions along the myofascial
meridians.
Thank You