Myofascial Massage for the Sports-Minded. This article is not about myofascial release technique. Neither is it about sports massage.
It is about fascia and how massaging it and tight muscles can help you to recover from injury, prevent injury and keep your soft tissues in peak performance for your sporting life. What Exactly is Fascia? Notice the smattering of fat in small, yellowish clumps. You cannot simply pluck the fat off you need to cut it because it is attached to a slimy, see-through film called fascia. In fact, the entire chicken breast is sheathed with fascia.
It lies between the meat and the skin of the chicken. Humans have fascia, too. It surrounds all of your muscle tissue and organs and is integral to many functions related to structure and transport. Fascia is your friend but it can cause problems when it is injured and creates adhesions. Soft-Tissue Injury and Scar Tissue. When you suffer an injury or have surgery, your body produces scar tissue - a fibrous material similar to the chicken fat example but firmer.
Sometimes that collagen matrix lays down flat and geometrically perfect. But sometimes it lays down haphazardly and forms a little more of itself than necessary and that can cause adhesions with other tissues.
When this tissue is in a jumbled formation it can pull on surrounding fascia. The fascia is connected to muscle fibers just as you see with raw chicken. Pulled-upon muscle restricts range of motion. All of that ongoing tug-of-war can cause trigger points to form. Just like muscles, tight fascia can tear when quickly pulled which is the most frequent form of connective-tissue injury. Fascia does not recover easily on its own because it is not as elastic as muscle.
