The Interstitium
My passion is human performance and how I can elevate an individual’s state of consciousness through intelligent movement. I believe that structure determines function and if the body and brain do not communicate properly, any tissue a nerve innervates will break down without fail - it’s a universal law. Your nerves, like the organs, need a supported space to carry out their functions. They can’t just be floating around throughout the body. Researchers have recently found a new ‘organ’ which they named the interstitium. This is what gives your nerves the structure to function properly.
We began life as a multicellular organism through the differentiation of our tissues into four basic classes of cells: Nerve, Muscle, Epithelial, and Connective Tissue.
All four types of these cells work to secrete an amazing variety of products into the interstitium that combines to form bones, cartilage, ligaments, tendons, joints, and fascial sheets. These cells are the substrate for all the others by building the strong, pliable 'stuff' that holds us together. Without this ground substance within the spaces outside the cells, we would be nothing but a puddle on the ground. The interstitium is the shared and communicative environment for all our cells, creating a harmony of symbiosis, perfectly designed to shape us and allow us directed movement.
Out of the four types of cells, the connective tissue is what I want to focus on. I generally refer to it as fascia. Anatomist Thomas Myers, author of the groundbreaking book “Anatomy Trains”, outlines how fascia is organized, distributing stress throughout the body based on particular pathways of stress, running from bottom of foot to scalp, uniquely individual for each person. Through repetitive movements and emotional situations, fascia conforms into patterns that solidify over the years, compressing our spines and even squeezing, twisting, and/or stretching our organs, leading to inevitable malfunction.
Fascia is the largest sensory organ of the body and it gets its energetic stimulus from “ionic conductors” (energy), which can also be thought of as the nadis from the Vedic teachings of yoga. The nadis are not physical, measurable, or dissecting structures within the body, but channels of energy that underlie the physical organs and help us sustain life and consciousness. In higher states of consciousness, the nadis can be seen as flows of energy, as described by the yogis. The nadis are also directly linked to what is known in traditional Chinese medicine as the 14 Qi pathways that flow through our bodies. These 14 meridians are where Qi can be manipulated to restore balance. This can show up on the physical level as either shortened tissue or elongated restricted tissue within the fascial layers. This is why acupuncture points mostly lie along the fascial planes between muscles, tendons, and bones.
As you can see, the interstitium plays quite a big part in our lives, whether we’re aware of it or not, and Eastern medicine has been practicing the ways for it to improve our health for some time now. Fascia is so important in understanding how we move, how we regenerate, how our organs function, and how we can honor our bodies. There is so much about ourselves that we don’t know yet!
Being a heavy lifter for most of my life, it was a difficult concept to comprehend for me, this movement without muscular activation or movement without reliance on overt muscular activation. But science will continue to evolve our understanding of human movement in a beautiful new light. In the coming months, I look forward to updating you on what is sure to be break-through technologies that look at the human in new and different ways.
