12/18/2019
❤️ FASCIA. As with much in life if you look for patterns you will find them. This is certainly true of anatomical imbalances and their transitional effects through the system be it muscular or fascial.
As you can see from this fantastic diagram, what looks like a spiderweb (taken from Practical steps in rehabilitating your horse by Sara Wyche) is actually a depiction of fascia, on the left healthy balanced with no restriction and on the right quite obviously compromised.
The pinch points where you can see the web gathering unevenly are indignant of areas of fascial tightness but just as importantly look at the secondary effects as the distal areas of the web become involved exasperating the initial primary issue (this may cause something other than just fascial issues such as muscular atrophy/injury/weakness etc but in this scenario I am focusing on fascia).
For every action there is a reaction and so more often than not fascial restriction isn’t isolated to the primary area of interest as it can follow chains and encompass full body transitional effects.
Fascia’s job is to prevent friction of not only the surrounding muscular skeletal tissue but for example also the internal organs as it surrounds and encompasses everything on both a deep and superficial level.
Imagine you have oil on your hands and think how smoothly and seemlessly you could wring your hands together in any variation of direction. Now imagine you have a piece of cling film on both hands and try to produce the same movement... it will be greatly restricted and start to bunch and become adhered, this is a similar scenario of healthy and compromised fascia.
When we treat your horse (or yourself) we work on both muscular and fascial release as one isn’t the same outcome without the other.
