Fascial Stretch Therapy

Want to increase aerodynamics, efficiency and power output? The answer might just be under your skin...

Let’s face it, we work hard in our training, we look after ourselves, follow the right diet, get all the best gear – and all to gain that extra few percent. If I were to tell you that we’ve been ignoring the largest element of the body - our connective tissue, or ‘fascia’, and that if we treated it nicely, in a matter of hours you could have long lasting gains in flexibility, and gain up to 10% extra power output – what would you say?

Your answer maybe     ‘if it were that easy, why isn’t everyone doing it’
                                    ‘fash what? – I’ve never heard of the stuff’
                                    ‘Why hasn’t anyone told me about this before?’

Koolstofcoaching athletes have all gained extra power literally overnight with this treatment. The key is to maintain this with appropriate stretching daily.
Fascia is made up 3 components – water, elastin (stretchy fibres) and collagen (structural fibres). In different ratios, fascia makes up everything that is not cell based in our body. When we refer to ‘fascia’ we are somewhat more concerned with the ‘fascial net’, meaning the large sheets and woven fabric that invest or surround individual muscles.


  
So why hasn’t anyone looked into this stuff before? It’s tricky stuff to dissect – try cutting an extremely fine spiders web out of the body with a scalpel, it isn’t easy. When we started cutting cadavers into pieces to work out our anatomy, we sliced through all this stuff - delving deeper to try and find something much easier and tangible to cut out, i.e. muscles, tendons and ligaments. These are represented in the anatomy books as individual, separate entities, but in reality they are all linked together, bound by fascia. If we look at the body in this way - suddenly the picture of this ‘new anatomy’ starts to answer a lot of questions.
We all have tightness in certain areas, or niggles here and there. One thing’s for sure – where these issues occur is not where the problem lies.

Imagine a woollen jumper – start tugging on a thread at one end, and before long, you’re seeing knock-on changes throughout the whole garment.  The cyclist’s neck position severely shortens and tightens the muscles and fascia in this region. This has a resulting knock-on effect down the whole backside of the body – in between the shoulder blades, running down each side of the spine, over the sacrum, down the hamstrings, the calves, under the heel, and finishing under the foot. Free your neck slightly, and you release this whole chain, gaining more efficiency, power and reducing the likely hood of injury.
Of course this is just one chain of many around the body, some more complex than others. Treat the whole system, and the results are astounding.

Steve Pavis is one of the country’s leading practitioners in Fascial Stretch Therapy™ (FST™), a unique system of therapy & training that dramatically improves your flexibility by lengthening your fascia.
More info can be found on his website: www.professional-pilates.com or Koolstofcoaching.com