Alpharetta Barre, Essentrics and Pilates Club

What is Fascia? Is that what is causing my pain?

Fascia is a thin casing of connective tissue, mostly made of water, that surrounds all your muscles, organs and bones. Fascia has nerves that make it almost as sensitive as skin. When stressed, it tightens and bunches up.

Fascia pain can get worse as time goes on. If you leave your fascia pain untreated, your fascia will draw tighter around your muscles and can create very sensitive knots in your muscles, called trigger points.

Pain in your fascia is commonly mistaken for muscle pain or joint pain. The biggest difference is that muscle and joint pain worsens as you keep moving, while fascia pain gets better with movement and heat.‌

How can you tell the difference between muscle pain and fascia pain? Muscle pain is usually constant whereas fascia pain moves along the plane of your muscle. It might feel like it is in one area then another area.

I like to think of fascia as like a sock. As you walk around, sometimes your sock falls down and bunches up. You have to pull it up to fix it. Likewise, life causes your fascia to bunch up and collect scar tissue. We need to stretch to fix our fascia in our body.

Some great stretches involve pulling, twisting, lengthening. Dynamic stretches are better than static for fascia because you are actively moving in a stretch. Essentrics and Yoga is great for stretching these ways. That is way these exercises make you feel so good!

Try this standing stretching video for a quick stretch when you need it.

Scroll to Top