What is Fascia?

Your body has two forms of fascia: dense and loose. Each type is key to facilitating movement.

Dense fascia is made up of sturdy collagen fibers, helps give your body it’s shape. It holds muscles, organs, blood vessels and nerve fibers in place. It helps your muscles contract and stretch, and stabilizes your joints. The more slippery loose fascia allows your muscles, joints and organs to slide and glide against one another like a well-oiled machine.

How Does Fascia Get Damaged?

In 2007, an anatomy professor named Carla Stecco at the University of Padova in Italy found that fascia is alive with nerve endings. This means it can be a source of pain. The longer it is damaged or inflamed, the more sensitive that it becomes.

When you are sedentary for a long time, fascia can shorten, become overly rigid and congeal into place, forming adhesions or densifications that limit mobility, said David Krause, a physical therapist at the Mayo Clinic. Over time, inactivity can also lead fascia to reshape itself. If you spend most days hunched over a computer, the fascia surrounding your neck and shoulder muscles may change so that your posture becomes curved.

Fascia can also become damaged from repetitive movements, chronic stress, injury or surgery – becoming inflamed, overly rigid or stuck together. And it stiffens with age.

Finally, because it consists of a matrix of fibers, fascia that is too short, stiff or sticky in one part of the body can lead to pain and dysfunction elsewhere, by pinching or pulling in the wrong direction, Dr. Stecco said. The body can also compensate by changing the way it moves, causing other issues through compensation.

It can be tricky to determine wheter pain is coming from your fascia or your muscles and joints. Generally, muscle and joint problems tend to feel worse the more you move, while fascia pain lessons with movement.

How Can You Care For Your Fascia?

The most effective way to keep your fascia sturdy and elastic is to stay active, and move through a complete range of motion as possible as often as possible.