#FastFasciaFacts EP08 - Tendon and Ligament Health, Conscious Interoception and Fascial Hydration

⚛️ JOIN THE SCHOOL: https://schoolforlivingscience.com/me... 🦶 LEARN KINETIX: https://schoolforlivingscience.com/knt1 📆 SECRETS OF FASCIA LIVE CLASSES: https://schoolforlivingscience.com/se... ********** // VIDEO DESCRIPTION // ********* This is our 8th and FINAL #FastFasciaFacts episode! Thank you so much for nerding out with me the last 8 weeks. If you’re looking for previous episodes, search YouTube for #FastFasciaFacts and you’ll see the previous episodes. Our final episode packs a punch :) Fun fascia facts: Tendons and ligaments are fascia (connective tissue) - denser more fibrous, but still fascia. Fascia contains a multitude of - and prioritizes responses to - interoceptors. You have more interoceptors within your fascia than proprioceptors (and you have 10 times as many proprioceptors in your fascia than muscle fiber, so this is a LOT of interoceptors!) Optimal fascia is made of up to 70% water. Why the above matters: 1. Tendon and ligament injuries (like tendonitis or tendonosis, or ligament tears like the ACL in the knee, etc) are a huge part of common injuries experienced by human beings. Often, these injuries are treated in western medicine as exclusively relevant to the injured tissue without taking into consideration its relationship to the whole. Here's the thing: Tendons and ligaments are fascia...much more fibrous and dense than the kind of fascia found in the muscle belly. However, it's critical to remember that tendons form FROM within a muscle belly - all the fascia that wraps a given muscle's fibrils and fibers, bundles and the whole muscle group come out of that musculature and attach to a given bony attachment site. Ligaments are more "free formed," forming from and attaching to your bones. In my opinion, ligaments will take longer to heal than tendons for this reason. Your tendons need to have access to that ECM to self repair. Your ECM needs access fresh blood to replenish itself. You learned in a previous episode about the difference between fasciacytes and fibroblasts. It's the fibroblasts that synthesize collagen, and fibroblasts respond to pinning and stretching (while I theorize that fasciacytes respond to loaded compression and "shearing" of the fascial fibers). In both cases (ligament and tendon injuries), what they need is blood, and a healthy ECM surrounding the injured area. And if you want to heal an injury, release as much fascia around that joint or tendon/ligament as possible. 2. Interoception is your felt sense (sensory perception) of everything that happens inside your body, and consists of feeling sensations like hunger, warmth, cold, feeling at home or ill at ease etc. Interoceptors are free nerves endings (non myelinated, like proprioceptors). Because these are free nerve endings, there's a delay in processing the message between your body and brain. This has a lot to do with YOU. Whether you feel at home in your body or at war with it will certainly be felt on that interoceptive level. If those nerve endings exist in such rich quantity in your fascia, do you think they impact your fascia? I believe they do. I believe what you FEEL about yourself and your level of self-awareness will profoundly affect the quality of your fascia...which in turn impacts the quality of your life. 3. You are made of more water than any other substance - anywhere from 55-70%, depending on gender, age, lean muscle to fat ratios etc. The average is considered to be 60%. Most of this water LIVES in your fascial system, primarily in the extracellular matrix which consists of 70% water (the rest is collagen and glycoproteins etc). Your cells OBTAIN the water they need from the water that exists in the ECM, which in turn imbibes it from the water you drink (remember: hyaluronic acid imbibes water). So cellular hydration is dependent on fascial hydration.