Eliminate Chronic Pain -Become Aware of your Fascia | Superficial Rear Line & Superficial Front Line

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTBFNcl23o0

Today we're going to talk about two lines of tension in the fascia, the superficial back line and the superficial front line. When I say superficial, I am just referring to the fact that it's more surface level, indicating that there are lines of tension that are deeper than that, but we will be getting to those later. We're starting with the superficial back line and the superficial front line because they create a network of negative feedback with each other in order to create spinal support.

They are integral to spinal support and the way that people live in their lives in modern society tend to disrupt the normal functioning of these two lines. The superficial back line is responsible for bringing and holding your body upright. The superficial front line has responsibility in curling you forward as if you are going into the fetal position.

When one of them is turning on, the other one should be turning off. This isn't like an on-off switch, this is a feathering on and off. As you fetal up and you bring more and more activation into your superficial front line, you should have an equal amount of release of activation in your superficial back line and the same when you come more and more into extension.

You should have more and more activation in the back line as you get release in the front line. We want to learn to become conscious of this. We want to learn how to increase and decrease the activation of it throughout our movement so that we can create spinal stability.

As I mentioned in the seven rules video, if you don't have spinal stability, it is going to be very difficult to deal with chronic mystery pain. The reason is the nervous system prioritizes protecting the spine over everything else. As the spine becomes destabilized and it starts to bind the spine, you're going to lose mobility everywhere else in your body.

If you want to create mobility or eliminate pain anywhere other than where the spine is, you need to start with the spine. If the mystery pain or the chronic pain is along your spine, which would be anywhere in the hips, low back, mid back, upper back, shoulders, neck, or head, then you have to start with the spine no matter what. The spine moves in three directions.

We have a flexion and extension. We have a rotation and we have a lateral flexion which would be going from side to side. The superficial front line and superficial back line are involved in flexion and extension.

The superficial back line runs from the toes on the bottom of the foot across the bottom of the foot up the calves, up the hamstrings, up the glutes, up your entire spine, up the neck, around the skull, to above the eyebrows. There is, of course, two lines. We're going to talk about it as one.

There's one on either side of the body, but they work in conjunction with each other. If you read what people who really study anatomy are writing about, they're going to say that there's flexion in the superficial back line because the knees are flexing. You can kind of split it into two parts from the foot to the knee and to the knee to above the eyebrows, but for our purposes, we don't need to do that.

If you come across that, don't let it bother you. You can just imagine that if you're doing a bridge from your feet to your hand, creating an arc that the superficial back line is going to be the support of the inside of that arc from the bottom of your foot to above the eyebrows, all along the backside of your body. It is pulling you into extension for all intents and purposes, lifting you up and holding you upright.

This becomes dysfunctional just based on how we live. Since most people spend most of their time awake sitting, then it is no longer working from the feet to the hips. Even people that are adults that have active lives and jobs where they aren't sitting, they were sitting from the time they entered kindergarten or even preschool until the time they graduated, which is almost all of the growth and development of your body.

Your body developed without having proper use of the superficial back line, without creating proper engagement of the superficial back line. Almost everybody has some dysfunction here to find and deal with. Another common thing that creates dysfunction in the superficial back line is arch support in shoes and heel rise in shoes, which moves the body into a slightly unnatural position.

It also eliminates some of the engagement you'd be using if you had to support your own arches all the time. Now there's stability shoes, which are even worse because now they're helping stabilize your foot, which is in turn attributing the stabilization of your body or the natural stabilization of your body. All of this is going to move up that back line of the fascia.

It doesn't matter if you start at one end above the eyebrows or the other end under the toes. Wherever there is tension, it is going to spread along the entire line of fascia. Whenever you create tension in that line of fascia, it is going to spread from the point of creation to both ends or from one end to the other.

If you have a restriction in the middle of it, tension will spread from that restriction to either end. Also, any point another line of fascia intersects with this line of fascia will also take some distribution of that spread of tension. So this is how you could have a problem in your plantar fascia and you could feel it in the back of the palm of your hand.

So the plantar fascia is in the superficial back line at the bottom of the foot. It's going to distribute whatever is happening in there. It's going to transfer through the entire line, but there's a line of fascia from here, which we'll get to much later, that runs up your forearm, across your back, and down the other forearm.

It's going to intersect with the superficial back line. So at any point, you can have a transfer of compensation from one fascial line to another. You can essentially get a referred pain from a problem that you're having anywhere in your body from anywhere else in your body.

And this is one reason why chronic mystery pain is very difficult to find. For the example we just used, which is just random, there's no reason for it. I've never worked with somebody that had this.

It's just theoretically possible. You go to a professional in the medical industry looking to deal with this random pain that you're experiencing in the back of your hand, and then they x-ray your hand, or they take an MRI of your hand, and they don't see any problems. And that is because it is transferring through the fascia from another place in your body.

If you are in a situation like this, one of the best things you can do is find a therapist that can feel your fascia. There are several modalities of people that do fascial work, but there's a very big difference between people who have gone to school to study fascia and then practice on people once they graduate and get licensure or certification, or somebody who is consciously aware of your fascia, can touch you, can feel inappropriate tension in the fascia, and can trace that tension through the fascia, eventually finding the source. So if you do look for somebody, and you go to a fascial worker, and there isn't a drastic change in what's happening in your body, just go to the next one, and go to the next one, and go to the next one, until you find somebody who can create a significant change from start to end of a session, and then that person can trace your mystery pain from wherever you're feeling it to its source.

You don't have to do that, of course. That would probably just be the easiest way for you to start feeling relief and getting to understand what's going on. My goal in these videos is to teach you how to do that yourself.

We just have to become consciously aware of the fascia first. So back to sitting a lot, and the superficial front line now, is when we sit a lot, our psoas muscles and our iliacus, sometimes referred to as the iliopsoas, which are hip flexors, are in a contracted position. As we talked about in the previous videos that I have made, if a muscle stays in a contracted position for an extended period of time, the body is going to want to stop using energy to maintain the muscle contraction.

And so I don't mean for an extended period of time like an hour. I mean an extended period of time like you're sitting down in kindergarten, and you're going to sit down most of your day for the next 12 years of your life. Your body is going to want to maintain that contracted muscle position without expending the energy of the contracture.

So what it's going to do is the fascia that's running through the muscle is going to start to reach out with little tentacles. You can imagine it has octopus arms, and it's going to grab the fascia next to it, and it's going to literally spiral inward on itself. So when you're unwinding these things, you need to be undoing spirals, and it's going to bind on itself, creating a shorter and shorter fascial structure inside the muscle so that the muscle is able to let go, not expend the energy, and you're able to maintain the position.

So now this is happening over an extended period of years in your life, and you're going to get a glitch essentially in the superficial front line where it's shorter than it should be, and where since it's become a habit, your fascia is going to consider that normal, and it's not going to want to release that. It's going to maintain that when you are extended as far as possible. So you get to a place in life where you want to extend, you want to engage your superficial back line, and you want to raise up, and here would be straight, but right here in the body, in your hip flexors, it's stuck like this.

You can't get past this, and of course, it's not reasonable for you to walk around in life with your head down, looking at the ground, hunched over forward. I mean, you can see this in especially in elderly people, you know, when they're up with their walkers or canes, and they can't upright anymore, their body is not strong enough to compensate anymore. That's what they have to do, but when you're young, and you are able to compensate, what's going to happen is your hips are going to rotate, and you're going to encounter what's called an anterior pelvic tilt, and it is just a situation where your hips are rotated forward so that you can maintain that tension that you have in the fascia in your iliopsoas from the extended sitting, but that anterior pelvic tilt is going to create a disconnection in fascia in the superficial back line that is going to allow you to stand upright, and that destabilizes the spine.

Like I said, almost every single person I work with has some degree of this. It is less common in society to have a posterior pelvic tilt, which is like where people are leaning too far backwards. It's called lordosis.

Most people are having issues with an anterior pelvic tilt because of the continued sitting and also the heel rise in shoes, so the question is, what do we want to do in order to become aware of these two things? First, I start people sitting. You want to be on a hard surface where your sit bones or the two bones in your bottom of your hips that are going to be making contact with what you're sitting on are being pushed towards neutral, so the surface is hard and it's level. If it's unlevel and hard, you definitely don't want to do this exercise there.

The next thing we need to talk about a little bit is our breath because our diaphragm and the muscles of our pelvic floor, which also have their own fascia, are essentially two baffles in the body in between the superficial front line and the superficial back line and they are going to interact with it. When you inhale, your diaphragm flattens out as it moves down. It pushes your abdominal contents down and your hips, your pelvic floor is going to actively spread, creating a space in your hips for your abdominal contents to move into.

When you exhale, the hips are going to come together and your diaphragm is going to go from flat to pushing farther up in your body. We are going to rock gently forward and back as we inhale and exhale. The inhale is when you are rocking backwards.

We are exhaling and we are rocking forwards. We are starting to create engagement in the superficial back line as we inhale and engagement in the superficial front line as we exhale. When you do this, you don't want to go from extreme end to extreme end.

We are trying to find balance completely upright. The inhales and the exhales are going to be subtle. I'm going to rock forward.

As soon as I feel that I'm forward beyond that center point, then I'm going to inhale and rock backwards and then come forwards on the exhale and then inhale and rock backwards. We want to do this for an extended period of time. Usually, I start people at three to five minutes.

As we do this, the curling forward is going to be much more natural. People are usually stuck in some degree of forward curl, so that's going to come nice and easy. You're going to exhale and then on the inhale, you're going to rock backwards until you feel that something inside of your body is catching you to provide some tension that would stop you with more engagement from going farther backwards.

It's just going to look like this. It's going to be very subtle. If there's pain while you're doing it, you can ask me about that below.

You can describe your situation specifically, and I'll get back to you with some degree of modification or recommend starting somewhere else. One thing to think about while you're doing this is that your breath has a toroidal shape in your body. You can look up torus, t-o-r-u-s.

You can see the shape, but the interior is moving downward as the exterior is moving up and the exterior is moving downward as the interior is moving up. It's like we talked about the diaphragm moving downward on the inhale, but you'll notice if you take a deep inhale, the exterior of your body engages and moves upward while the interior is moving downward. The opposite happens if you take a deep exhale.

The interior of your body is moving upward as the exterior of your body is moving downward. When you're doing this exercise for the three to five minutes, I want you to be searching for that feeling in your breath. Obviously, if you can't, you probably won't be able to do both of those things at the same time.

You'll start with searching for, okay, I felt something catch me as I inhaled and rocked backwards. I'm coming forwards with the exhale. You want to sync the breathing and the movement together.

On the exhale, if you can't feel your hips moving open and close with the breath cycle, you're going to start to squeeze the pelvic floor like you had to pee really bad and you're holding it in. So, I'm starting to rock forward and on the exhale my pelvic floor should be squeezing. So, the things to piece together in your awareness in this movement before you move on to the next movement is inhale and exhale, rocking backwards and forwards.

We pair that together. Once you can feel that paired together, then we are going to add in developing the awareness of the toroidal shape of the breath so that we're feeling the interior and exterior of the body moving in opposite direction on the inhale and exhale as I rock forward and backwards. Once you can do that, if you're like, hey, I can feel this and I can feel the interior and exterior of the body moving up and down, but I can't really feel my hips expanding and contracting, now you're going to add in squeezing the pelvic floor as you rock forward and thinking about an active expansion of the pelvic floor as you rock backwards.

You don't want to think about a release of the activation of the pelvic floor or contraction of the pelvic floor as you rock backwards. We want active expansion. One way to help find this is you can engage and release your glutes as you're doing this.

So, as I am in a forward position, I'm inhaling, I'm rocking backwards, I'm going to start to engage my glute max which is an exterior rotation of the legs. If you can't engage your glute max, you struggle with glute engagement. Think about rotating your feet outward and then as I rock forward, I'm going to think about releasing my glute max which is the same with the pelvic floor and active elongation.

If you can't do that, you can think about rotating your feet inward and outward. We're going to start rotating our legs and adding that in and that will help us find the contraction and active elongation in the hips. It is important that we do all of these steps and we just keep practicing this exercise.

If you get to a point where you feel like nothing's happening and you haven't developed all these awareness things, don't think about I'm trying to develop something in my body. Think about you're trying to develop a feeling of awareness of something happening because these feelings of awareness of something happening in your body are going to be crucial to getting to more and more dynamic exercises and getting stronger and if you don't create them at this base level, that's a common reason why people start a rehab regimen or they start working on something and they feel great for a short period of time but inevitably they injure themselves and they flare up the problem again and they fall back down and it's a cycle. It goes over and over and over again and they become demoralized.

You have to build conscious awareness in the body in order to dig yourself out of chronic and mystery pain and I talked about that in my seven rules video and I believe maybe the eighth rule video if you have questions. So if you have questions about that, look up those videos. I'll put links to them in the description to make them easy to find.

If you're one of those people that feel like you want to do more than three to five minutes, that's fine. You can do 11 minutes, you can do 30 minutes and you can do a session in the morning and a session in the evening. Doing that and splitting it up and having a session right when you wake up and right before you go to bed will make change faster than well having one session of an extended period of time so that's not something you can do.

Eventually when I have all my videos for this entire process made, I will have them organized on my website myfractalbody.com so you can go there and follow them in order. As I make these videos, I'll create playlists on my YouTube channel so that you're able to follow them in order if you're interested and the most important thing to remember is that sense fascia always changes to support your consistent movement patterns. Consistency is the most important thing.

If you wake up and you're working on this and you just don't feel like doing it that morning, tell yourself that you're going to do it for 10 seconds, just 10 seconds. Do the movement, likely you'll get to 10 seconds and be like I can do 30 at least and but even if that doesn't happen, you'll have created a consistent pattern of movement from a day-to-day basis and that is the most important thing for change. If you're doing that, change is inevitable regardless of the time frame it happens in.

Everyone has a different time frame because everyone has different levels of injury and they have different levels of habitual patterns in their life that are keeping them trapped in that injury. Stay consistent. Remind yourself that change is inevitable and that will give you hope.

Keep moving forward. Thank you. Have a great day.