What is Fascia?
Fascia is the connective tissue between your muscles, bones, nerves, and organs. It makes up your potential for pain-free movement.
Fascial restrictions come from previous injury, stresses, or traumas on the body. Over time these restrictions formulate poor movement patterns and can cause mysterious pains throughout the body’s fascial system.
Restoring fascial glide between these tissues means enhancing movement quality and awareness of the position of the body, achieving a functional and efficient movement pattern. This relieves tension, reduces pain, anxiety, and fatigue, improves circulation, aids digestion, and decompress neural tension.
What is Rolfing?
Developed by Dr. Ida Rolf, Rolfing is a soft tissue manipulation and movement education that organises the whole body in gravity. Rolfers affect the body’s structure by manipulating the fascial system (connective tissue).
Rolfing bodywork is a succession of fascia manipulation techniques combined with movement to restore a complete body function, delivering the most beneficial treatment to the individual for optimal healing. Rolfing creates efficiency in muscle and patterns of movement by allowing glide between tissues. Rolfing has also been shown to significantly reduce chronic stress or pain and enhance neurological functioning.
What’s the difference between Rolfing and Massage?
While both Rolfing and Massage involve soft tissue manipulation, the intention is different.
A Rolfer affects the body’s structure over the long term, changing the shape and function of the connective tissues. Unlike Massage, which often focuses on circulation, Rolfing is aimed at improving body alignment, fascial glide, and function.
Also, Rolfing is different from deep-tissue Massage in that the Rolfer is trained to look at the overall structure of the body. While deep-tissue Massage focuses on releasing tension in a specific area, Rolfing looks for balance throughout the entire body. This way the overall structure of the body becomes more organised, alleviating chronic strain patterns, hence decreasing pain and stress.
To accomplish this, a Rolfer will incorporate movement while working the soft tissues innervating fascial glide, while in a Massage the client is most likely passive.
What is a movement screening?
Screening movement pattern involves looking at HOW a person executes a movement,
for example, a lunge or a squat. Whilst looking at an isolated movement we mimic how you might get up from sitting or pick something up from the ground. How you do that is called your movement pattern.
A movement pattern is something that is learnt, like a child learning how to walk. A baby will go through process of core stabilisation through breathing, rolling, crawling, squatting to eventually standing. Imprinting is when a child watches how a carer moves and then mimics that movement.
During injury and stress one formulates a movement pattern to get them through the day whether it be eating, sleeping, working, or training. This goes on until the tissues have repaired, up to 18 months. Once tissues have repaired and rehab is complete the body will continue to move within that faulty movement pattern learnt during injury. Also, due to the inflammatory processes within tissues during injury, there is a loss of the sense that tells the body where it is in space called proprioception.
Principles of Pilates
Founded by Joseph Hubertus Pilates, it is in the honouring of the Pilates Principles that the depth of the work is achieved. These Principles are traditionally cited as:
Breath – Concentration – Centring – Control – Precision – Flow
In order to keep the tissue changes made from Rolfing, it is essential to combine it with movement. Hence, using the Pilates foundations, I have formulated an interactive way for my clients to continue to progress in the evolution of their habitual movement pattern by offering and combining movement with my bodywork sessions.
What are Kettlebells good for?
Strong First is a global provider of strength education. Instructors specialize in safe and effective kettlebell, barbell, and bodyweight training.
Kettlebells are used to perform many types of exercises, including ballistic exercises that combine cardiovascular, strength, and flexibility training. I use them as great tools for postural alignment as well as shoulder, core and pelvic rehabilitation.
Fascia Flex 