Healthy Movement, Flexibility and Your Connective Tissue

Good flexibility of the body’s connective tissue is a major component of physical health.
May 2, 2010 | By:

Good flexibility of the body’s connective tissue is a major component of physical health.  If all the other tissues of the body were swept away and all that was left was the organized connective tissue of the body, we would, probably still be recognizable as ourselves. As a Registered Physical Therapist, I help patients deal with problems of discomfort, pain and loss of flexibility by working with the connective tissue of the body—otherwise known as the “fascia”. This fascial network facilitates our movements whether they involve breathing, walking or running.

Marshall McLuhan once wrote that   “Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible.”  

Back pains are a common problem when our flexibility decreases. However, it is movement that helps improve flexibility, not always the reverse. In the evolution of vertebrates, fish swim by bending their spines from side to side to move themselves through the water.  When human beings appear on dry land with a pelvis and legs attached to the spine, and dealing with gravity, the spine has to rotate around its centre of its axis to rotate the pelvis and legs for movement or locomotion. So what makes us walk—is it our legs or our spine?  Dr. Serge Gracovetsky, a biomechanical engineer, has made it clear that human locomotion/movement is initiated in the spine. Where in the spine?

Author, Thomas Myers suggests walking starts at the mid-spine, specifically at the T12-L1 junction where the psoas emerges.( “Present Movement Awareness II: Respiration and Locomotion” by Shane McDermott (2003))    The psoas muscle is the primary core muscle that rotates the pelvis, and it attaches along the low back right up to the mid-spine from its origin at the groin, where, coincidentally the diaphragm also attaches to the spine.   The psoas could be pictured as an elongated hand, starting at the groin, and reaching across the inside of the pelvis to have each separate finger attach to a separate lumbar vertebra in the low back. Hands-on therapy like physiotherapy or massage therapy helps to reestablish better coordination between the psoas muscle attachments.

“Your Core is where all movement in your body originates.  The core muscles of your body are your center of gravity.”  ( “The Core Challenge” by Oswaldo Koch, P.Eng., M.B.A.)