A Brief History of Anatomy Trains the fascia

Fascia & Tensegrity

I have just been listening to Tom Myers on PT on the net he runs ‘Anatomy Trains’,(see the link). I am so excited!   Have you ever had that moment where you see a piece of the jigsaw come into place after looking for ages and ages? Well this information on fascia is part of the functional jigsaw. We are held together by the stuff like fine cotton wool or a spider’s web. It connects everything in our bodies. For every 1 nerve receptor in the muscle we have 9 in fascia. Have a look at some of info below on fascia and the u tube clip which is a bit technical but is interesting for those of you that want to see what fascia looks like. Are we not amazing? Enjoy your movement as that is food for fascia.

Tom says: "I developed the Anatomy Trains during the 1990’s as a game for students to play when I was teaching Fascial Anatomy at the Rolf Institute . All the books you can find put forward the ‘single-muscle’ theory, but Ida Rolf kept saying, “It’s all connected through the fascia.” Other than invoking the image of a grapefruit or a loofah, how do you make this real? 

Just as an exercise to cement the students’ knowledge, I began stringing the muscles together through the fascia. This idea was initiated when Dr Jim Oschman gave me an article by Raymond Dart, anthropologist and Alexander Technique student, that linked the muscle in the trunk in a double-spiral arrangement (which shows up here as part of the Spiral Line). Using this as a base, I expanded Dart's idea to the whole body, to help students see connections by stringing muscles together like sausage links – anywhere that went, or could go in some positions, in a more-or-less straight line.

"Since 1998, I have taught more than 200 workshops in the Anatomy Trains. To my surprise, interest has burgeoned from the original audience of massage therapists to PT’s, chiropractors, yoga teachers, and personal trainers. Because the increasing demand outstripped my ability to be everywhere at once, we have created more supporting products and trained a diverse and wonderful Kinesis faculty to spread the Anatomy Trains ‘gospel’ – a systems-oriented view of our musculo-skeletal anatomy.

Fascia & Tensegrity
Fascia is the fascinating biological fabric and glue that holds us together.  Long ignored, the fascial system is now getting its rightful due of attention, from both therapists and researchers.
Tensegrity is a model for understanding the geometry of the body, on both a micro- and a macro-cosmic scale, that leads to many new insights in terms of body connectivity, the relation between stability and movement, and how we can develop what might be called “Spatial Medicine”.