Tuesday 20 September 2016

Back to the Fascias II, Using Fascia Elasticity


筋道不舒長,欲伸而筋不能伸*
When the fascia channels are constrained and short, one cannot stretch at will

發如美人之採花,收如文士之藏筆**
Sending out like a beautiful lady picks up flowers, gathering like a scholar collecting his brush




Fascias by essence being passive tissues, the main issue is, of course, how to make them participate as much as possible in motion and power generation. Stretching and particular body angles are the main way some old practices used to have the student understand how to generate power using fascia elasticity as it has been described in the section Fascia Elasticity. Still, to further understand how this works, it may be interesting to use an old martial art method, studying animals.
Being passive structures transmitting mechanical tensions, one cannot use fascias directly but only through muscles, body angles and sometimes gravity or any other outside force. If in the posts The Bow, Cornerstone of Elasticity and The Cross and the Six Directions, the principles behind the angle issue has been described in details, the muscle issue can be further explored. The first issue resides in the kind of muscles one is looking for to enhance the use of facia elasticity, mainly the difference between tender and hard muscles. Furthermore, building from the example of the hanging gibbon against working on a chin bar, one can also explore the difference in motion between the use of muscle contraction and fascia elasticity.




A Little Tenderness

The first and foremost thing that influences motion is one's structure, obviously vertebrates and invertebrates have very different ways to move for example. But one's body can also be, within its natural limits, modified according to the main purpose of one's usual motion. Hence, professional marathon runners, swimmers, weight lifters, gymnasts, soccer players, rugby players... have actually all a very particular body structure, a part of it being unborn, hard to be a professional basketball player with a height of one meter and forty centimetres, one being the result of the motions imposed by the sport practiced at a high level. Following the same logic, the use of fascia elasticity or muscle contraction as a main way to generate force will naturally have a impact on one's body structure, and especially its muscles, tenderness or hardness being sought.
To understand what kind of muscles are needed to improve the use of fascia elasticity, animals can be of help. It just take to touch a pet, a cat or a dog, to find out that animal muscles are most of the time tender or firm but never hard. Further observation can lead to find out that those muscles are also more lean than compact. This kind of muscle structure is exactly what internal martists are looking for. Hence, in the arts that had the aim to deeply change one's body, the first recommendation often made was that one should change his/her muscles from being round, compact and hard to being lean, flexible and tender. In order to do so, stretching as described in The Bow, Cornerstone of Elasticity and further posts is what should be done.

Another noticeable change is that stretching some parts of the body may have also an impact on one's muscles volume. One may use the example of the practice of "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II" and its impact on the shoulders and chest muscles. 

Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II

Contracting the muscles usually results in an obvious overgrowth of the Deltoids. Stretching heavily the whole arms, shoulders and chest muscles will, on the contrary, result in the following:

- All the Deltoids will become so lean that one will have flat shoulders, almost as if disappearing if watched from the side of the body;
- The Pectoralis being able to extend much more will look overgrowned under the shoulder when the arms rest along the body;
- The Teres Major and the Latissimus Dorsi being more active through the stretch will also grow to an extend of what was called "full armpits" in the old practices.

Since the motion sought is done with tender and flexible muscles, it is just impossible to do so with very hard muscles, one's muscle structure has to be modified first before learning how to use them differently.




Maximum Relaxation, Maximum Stretch, Maximum Firmness

An apparent oxymoron, the looser the muscles the firmer one will be, is how force is generated when using fascia elasticity.

Since fascias are considered to be passive structures transmitting mechanical tensions, one has to use the stretch of tender muscles to fully use their elasticity. Furthermore, the example of the hanging gibbon against working on a chin bar is a good way to start understanding it. Indeed, the gibbon is hanging arms straight while on the chin bar, the arms are bent. In the picture the gibbon is totally relaxed and gravity does its job. Since the arms are relaxed, muscles and fascias just stretch to their limit and tense creating an elastic resistance, we are back to the bow string. This force created is purely passive, a reaction to the pressure created by gravity. On the contrary, by contracting and bending muscles while holding on a chin bar, sometimes as obviously as in the picture, one does not relax his/her muscles and let gravity, muscles and fascia elasticity do the rest, but instead contract them to actively resist the force of gravity. Hence pull up bar is another name of the chin bar, the idea being to go upwards through muscle contraction while the gibbon just hangs through total relaxation, often having his fingers not rounded and locked around the branch but also hanging. The difference in motion will be exactly the same. Indeed, one goes from a bar to another with arms bend because of the needs of muscular contraction while gibbons move from a branch to another with their arms remaining as straight as possible.

Since hanging is a passive elastic tension mainly using gravity, one can wonder how to create an active one. In theory it is not too complicated, one has to ask of his/her muscles to do exactly the opposite of contraction, hence the incompatibility between the two motions. Indeed, instead of contracting, one will give the command to be as lax as possible and instead of retracting the muscle mass to stretch as long as possible. Still, for adults with a deep contraction reflex imprinted, changing such reflex may be a long and hard process though very rewarding in the end. Then the looser the muscles, the longer they will be able to stretch, the longer they stretch, the more tense they will become and by repercussion the tendons and then all the other fascias. Therefore, starting with postures already stretching the body and where the arms are straight, like in "Wei Tuo Presenting the Pestle II" with the correct angles, is one of the easiest way to understand and work on the active command "relax and stretch" to be given to the muscles. In such posture one will try to quarter even more the chest by pushing the whole arm with the shoulders even further away from the rest of the body, i.e. asking the muscles to stretch even further. A more advanced technique called 撐, to support or to prop up in this case, consists of having the arms, still through the shoulders, make little ups and downs while every time going up or down trying to extend even more the arms.

Therefore, as far as the muscles are concerned, for those wishing to discover how to use fascias elasticity to generate power, it is always important to understand that two issues have to be dealt with first, the muscle structure, which has to be tender when inactive, and the muscle command, which should be to relax and extend.





Of course, the particular way most of the animals move has its advantages and drawbacks. Indeed the use of fascia elasticity isn't, as anything in our world, a perfect thing or an ever working solution. But because muscle contraction and fascia elasticity work in opposite ways, it is then a question of choice of each and everyone according to his/her age, practice... Still, elasticity was before the preferred motion used by internal practices. As for exercises, if it is true that most of the time it can be more the way to do it than the exercise in itself which makes the difference between elasticity and contraction, it may be also useful to be able to recognise some of the exercises basically customised to improve one or the other. Therefore it may not be too useful to try to work on muscle contraction while holding the bridge posture or fascia elasticity while doing this type of biceps curl exercise.




*Fascias Change Canons, Stringed Together Vapours Secret, Training the Shape Discourse, 易筋經,貫氣訣,練形論. This quote needs more explaining, especially 筋道不舒長. 道 means way, path, but can also mean channel. 舒長 is interesting in the sense that 舒 means to spread, to stretch and 長 long. This part of the quote clearly states the need for the fascias to be not constrained, which hard muscles lead to, and as long as possible, hence the proverb "筋長一寸,壽長十年" Fascias one inch longer, a life ten years longer.
**Boxing Canons, Mr. Zhang Kunzhao Preface 張孔昭先生拳經序. One shall also realise that using fascia elasticity as a main mean to generate force goes together with an outside appearance of an effortless motion and an inside absence of the sensation of force, as the saying "no force is the better force" goes.

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