[MUSIC PLAYING]
TOM MYERS: Hi.
And thank you very much.
Very glad to be here at Google.
And the subject, really, today
is three different subjects,
and the first is movement.
You see nine people--
I think there are seven
or nine people being
given the same
choreography in what you're
looking at on the screen now.
And yet they execute that
choreography all differently.
So I have been just
fascinated with human movement
for my entire life, partially,
because I'm such a bad mover.
You know we all teach
what we need to learn.
And the way the
brain runs movement
has fascinated me
since I was very young.
And I submit that we
don't know very much
about that, number one.
And number two, the model
that we've been using for that
is getting badly
outdated rather quickly.
The idea that a muscle
attaches to a tendon that
goes across a joint that
is limited by the bone
shape and the ligaments
and, therefore, movement
comes about on a leverage
principle on Newton's laws.
Einstein came 100 years ago.
We're just now bringing a
relativistic point of view
to body therapy.
And I really wanted to do this
today, particularly at Google,
because you guys are
really forward thinking
into the future.
And no matter--
I talked about your
digital obsession.
And it's not just yours.
It's an entire generation's.
It's all of humanity.
I'm 70 years old or almost.
And if you take my
phone away from me,
I begin to jones for
it after half an hour.
And I live my life on
email like everybody else.
But this happened so fast,
so fast to everybody.
Concerned.
And it's an irreducible
fact that we have a body.
I came in on an airplane from
the West Coast yesterday.
And I was looking at
how much of the airplane
is taken up with the fact
that we are biological beings.
If we could only hold our
water for 10 or 12 hours, which
doesn't seem too much to
ask of a biological system,
we wouldn't have had to
have bathrooms on the plane.
If we could only hold our
breath for a few hours-- that
doesn't seem like too much to
ask of physiology-- but it is.
So we have to have
airplane that we carry
with us up to 33,000 feet.
And here you are,
working at Google,
and you irreducibly have a body.
For the first time in history,
we're looking at a world
that we create around
ourselves that doesn't
require us to move.
Now how does that
sentence finish?
That doesn't require us to
move enough to stay healthy,
enough to stay in a
really ideal state--
we don't know, because we've
never had a time in history
that's like this, never, ever.
And as you guys move
into the future,
and we move into
driverless cars,
and we move into
more and more things
that our phones do
for us, with us,
then we have to
think about, hmm,
how do we educate kids to move?
So I'm going to spend
about 15 minutes on that.
And I'm going to spend about 15
minutes on fascia as a system
because the new way of
thinking about movement
is dependent on understanding
this new system.
And then I'm going to spend
the last 15 minutes thinking
about what I particularly
did with that, which
is called the "Anatomy Trains"
of putting the muscles together
like strings of sausages.
So we're going to go one,
two, three on those things.
You're not the only one
who are digitally obsessed.
Even us old people are
digitally obsessed.
So I promote through
the "Anatomy Trains"
an idea of structural
integration,
which is deep bodywork.
Those of you coming
to the workshop
afterwards, we'll be
looking at how do we
interact with our hands into
the tissues of the body,
and how do they,
in fact, change?
But I am not an apologist for
only structural integration.
I am a great friend of yoga
and palates and weightlifting
and training and body
work of all kinds
because they all have value, and
we need them all in the world.
But we have to think
intelligently about what is KQ?
We're pretty good at IQ.
With the help of a lot of women
this week and Daniel Goleman,
we're beginning to learn about
EQ, emotional intelligence.
We haven't begun to map KQ,
the intelligence of the body.
And I'm pointing to
the center of gravity
of the body, what's known
as that Dan Tian or Hara
in martial arts.
It is the center of your fibrous
body, the center of your moving
body.
We don't know that the even
of kinesthesia and movement.
And we're going to need
to find out this century,
in particular.
Because this century,
in particular,
we're going to find out
how to change behavior.
Hm.
Medicine is really good
at changing chemistry.
Psychiatry was
supposed to be really
good at changing behavior.
You can have your own opinions
about how they're doing
with that particular task.
But we work with movement.
And therefore, we are very
close to changing behavior.
So the massage therapists, the
trainers, the body workers,
the movement teachers,
the physical education
teachers of this
world right now are
going to have to
figure out, what is KQ?
And how do we have, at least,
a minimum program of KQ
for our kids?
Look at what has happened to us.
Are humans natural?
And I can go on for half an
hour just on that subject,
but I'm going to.
I'm going to suggest
that there are
five things that have really
taken us away from nature.
And one of them was standing up.
That happened way back in paleo
times, not 200,000 years ago,
200,000 generations ago.
So our DNA has had
200,000 generations
to get used to standing
up, which takes us away
from our noses.
So out noses become
less important.
Our eyes move around to
the front of our head
because we were arboreal apes.
We stood up, and
that distinguished us
from natural animals.
Again, natural is a
really hard concept.
We could play with that
concept for quite a while.
But just go with me with this.
One of the things that
we did when we stood up
was put all our soft
sensitive bits right up
in the front of the body.
No other animal is so stupid as
to put the groin, the genitals,
the belly, and the breath
and the throat right up front
and go into the world
with those things first.
Umph.
This is the most
postural problem
that you will see across
the world is that we
shorten the front of our body.
And I've been enough all
over the world to say this
with some confidence.
We shorten the body
along the front
to protect our soft underbelly.
And so you see these
kinds of patterns.
Or you're working at your desk
out of these kinds of patterns.
And your breath is not
supporting your body,
your ribcage is not
supporting your shoulders,
therefore, your neck hurts,
duh-da, duh-da, duh-da.
It goes into the production.
You cannot get away from the
fact that you have a body,
and you're working with it.
Anyway, we stand up on our feet,
unlike any other animal, 16,
18 hours a day.
Only 30,000 generations
ago, we tamed fire.
We don't know any other
animal that tamed fire.
That really took us
away from the rest
of the animals, divided us
from the rest of the animals
in a serious way.
I've got about an
hour on each of these,
but I don't know who do that.
But you understand
that, once we controlled
fire, which is way back--
paleo people are
talking about going back
20,000 years or 30,000 years.
600,000 years ago, we start
finding ashes regularly
in the archaeology
of human habitation.
And agriculture, which we
depend on for the food that
is out there at the food
stand outside this hall,
we depend on agriculture, which
only came in 12,000 years ago
or 600 generations ago.
Your DNA has gotten
600 generations
to get used to farm work
and cultivated food.
But then we went another
step, and we moved away
from the natural environment,
our regular contact
with the natural environment,
which really is only
over the last 20
generations or so, we
started making things-- that
chairs that you're sitting on.
So now we live in
an environment that
is an industrial environment.
We make so many things.
And everything that you've
learned about the body
comes out of an industrial era.
So if I say, what's
the heart like?
What are you going
to say right away?
It's a pun.
Lungs are a bellows,
the brain is a computer,
the brain turns
out to be whatever
is the most complicated
thing going on at the time--
we call it the brain.
When I was young, it
was a telephone system.
When my grandfather was young,
it was the telegraph system.
When Descartes was
here, the newest thing
was those little
pneumatic machines
like you have at the bank
that sucks your cheque over
to the teller.
So he thought-- you put
your finger near a fire,
and a little message went up
a pneumatic thing like that.
Because that was the
most complicated machine
of the time.
So now it's a dual
processor, I don't
know what laser, quantum--
you guys would know more
about this than I do.
But whatever it is,
we're going to say,
oh, the brain is like
that because the brain
is the most complicated
thing that we know of other
than the whole human universe.
No system-- because I'm not
going to talk about the brain
very much.
No system has been
more mechanized
than your
musculoskeletal system.
It is a machine.
We think of it as a machine.
Your training regimen is to
do things to your machine.
But in the last two generations,
we have done the last step.
Well, I don't know if
it's the last in history,
but the latest for us, is
stepping into a global brain,
stepping into something else.
So the body has to
become something else.
I'm too old, and it's not quite
far enough into this revolution
to say what the body
will become or what
kind of physical
education that we need.
But it's probably
not preparation
for agricultural work.
Only 3% of the population
is on the farms anymore.
And it's not even preparation
for industrial work,
which, as you may
have noticed is
going south NAFTA or no NAFTA,
just going south in the world
because robots can do anything
repetitive better than humans.
So the one thing-- because
I'm [INAUDIBLE] this thing
to get it down to 15
minutes, which is we
need to teach our kids
to do original movement.
Repetitive movement is
no longer what we need.
Because we don't need people
on the lines with scythes going
cross cutting the field.
We don't need people on an
assembly line turning nuts.
We need people to
do original stuff.
So that means our physical
training has to change,
not so much jumping jacks and
pushups and stuff anymore.
So we look at spatial
medicine, and we
see that this is the model
of what I was talking about.
A muscle goes across
a joint, and that's
how it works on the body.
I would suggest
instead that we have
to look at what our
kids are going to need
in terms of movement hygiene.
Movement is food.
Movement is medicine.
What do we need in
terms of movement?
You're sitting
there in your chair.
Civilization has
made chairs something
that we use very much.
So get off the
back of your chair.
And if you're listening to
this, you can do the same thing.
Get off the back of your
chair and onto the sits bones
at the bottom of your pelvis.
And if you rock your pelvis
forward and back a little bit,
you'll feel that you're
going towards your tailbone
and then towards your pubic
bone on these sits bones.
And that, in
somewhere in that arc,
your low back feels
the most comfy.
That, if you really go
onto your pubic bone,
your low back will
feel arched and tight.
And that, if you really go
back onto your tailbone,
your chest will fall, and
your breathing will suffer.
Is that fair?
And where is the middle?
That's fine.
We can spend an
hour on this too.
But my question for you is,
did anybody coming into Google
or coming into your school life
teach you how to use a chair?
No.
You just fell into
the use of a chair.
We have to actually
now teach kids
to use a chair
because they're going
to use a chair for
so much of their life
on airplanes, in
cars, and at work.
How many of you are
now saying, how long
is he going to have
us like this, right?
Because certain muscles
need to get stronger.
Certain muscles maybe need to
relax a little bit for this
to be an easy place for you.
But if you let your hands
float up to your keyboard
or to whatever you
interface with-- just
let your hands
float up to you're
comfortable position
of interface.
Hold those hands there imagining
that you're on a keyboard
or whatever, and drop back
into the behind your sits bones
and feel what happens
to your shoulders.
Your shoulders lose support.
You are now using the muscles
of your shoulders and arms
and neck in a
different way in order
to get the hands out there to
interface with your keyboard.
And we could spend a
long time, but I'm not
going to on the distance
between your screen
and your eye which fixes a whole
bunch of stuff in your neck.
But that's a little
more obscure.
So part one is, never before
in history have we needed this,
but now we need movement.
They went to Ethiopia
and took a tribe--
I've forgotten the name of
the tribe-- on the Omo River
and put Fitbits on them.
They mostly take
15,000 steps a day.
I don't know if you've
got a Fitbit on.
I hate them, personally,
but can't you
feel inside your body?
Do you need a machine to tell
you what your body is doing?
Argh.
But these guys we're doing,
and women we're doing,
15,000 steps a day on average.
And really, it's hard to
get up to 12,000 steps a day
in a working environment.
So they were much more
active than we were.
So what's the minimum
amount of activity
necessary for
health, mental health
as well as physical health,
for your brain to work?
Your body doesn't stop here.
This is a hydrodynamic system.
It needs water to get to it.
Exercise from below
helps you above.
[LATIN]
So you really
ought to understand
if we take the fact that we need
to educate our children in how
they move, then you
could have a look
here at a dissection
of the fascial system.
This is a dissection
of an untreated cadaver
by Andres Pilat in Spain.
And that's why you get the
flamenco dancer every once
in a while.
But he's showing
you what it really
looks like under the skin.
And we have had
an altered picture
of what it's like under the
skin by looking in the books.
Whatever anatomy you learned
in the books, that's great.
But there's a whole
system of stuff.
And it really is stuff
around the muscles
like the skeleton of an orange.
And it's that part that we're
going to be looking at here.
Now, if you were
all therapists, I
would be starting to talk to
you about how you would affect
the very deepest
level, the endomysium
that you can see looking
like a honeycomb there.
That honeycomb is
around each muscle cell.
And then you see around the
bunches of muscle cells,
in the middle
picture, you can see
the perimysium, which
is the lubricating
fascia inside the muscle.
And then on the
outside, the kind
of ribbon candy that you
see down in the lower right
is the epimysium, which is the
Saran wrap, the plastic wrap
that goes around all
the muscles, which
will go into the tendon of
that vastus lateralis when
it gets down to the bottom.
So we could parse
out this thing.
But the fascial system is
a great big unitary net
that goes all over your body.
It doesn't just
hold your muscles.
There's fascia around the
bones, there's fascia around
and in the cartilage, there's
fascia around your organs.
Let's have a look
at it as a system.
Here, coming from the
end of the 19th century,
is a French surgeon's version
of seeing the fascial plains in
between the muscles by
cutting the muscles back
and leaving the fascial plane.
So this was an early
way of looking at it,
taking the muscles out of the
inner leg of the inner thigh
and looking at the fascial
sheets that are left.
You just don't have an anatomy
that really shows this.
We're just beginning
to get them now.
A few people are
beginning to publish them.
But if I take a piece of the
thigh, which you see here,
going down the
middle of the thigh,
you see the femur in the middle.
The skin and the fat have
been taken off the outside.
So you're seeing the
fascia profundus,
which is the fascia lata,
which is a thin sheet that
goes around all the muscles
and squeezes in on them.
What you haven't seen in
500 years of anatomy, what
you haven't seen
is, what happens
if we take the muscle out of
that and just leave the fascia?
Now you see the
fascia as a system.
You see the fiber of the body
as a wholly separate system
that we have never seen.
In 500 years of
anatomy, we do not
have a picture of this system.
This is the best I can do, and
it's only a piece of the thigh.
There is work under way now in
the plastination lab in Germany
to make some representations
of the system.
But it is a really fairly much
a Cinderella of the body systems
in that it has been
fairly much ignored,
and we're working
with it, of course.
Whatever you do with the
body, with your own body,
you're working with
the fascial system.
Whatever you do
with other bodies,
you're working with
the fascial system.
But could we do it better
if we did it consciously?
So there's layers of fascia.
Pick up your skin.
Anywhere on your body,
just pick up your skin.
You just picked up the
first layer of fascia.
That's this thin line that
the indicator line is pointing
to next to the fat layer.
That's the superficial
or adipose layer,
which is what allows your
skin to move around on top
of the rest of your body.
Then you have the unitard that
really holds you in the shape
that you're in
underneath the skin.
And then Saran wrap
around, a plastic wrap
around each of the muscles,
intramuscular septa,
like the divisions
between the orange,
between superficial
muscles and deep muscles,
and then the periosteum
around the bone there.
Each of those layers
are different layers.
But if we went back to
this, we would see it
as a single system.
It's useful to put it
in layers, but that
is a human distinction.
Almost anything, like
the iliotibial tract,
or your ankle ligaments,
or your diaphragm--
these are names that we have put
on something which is unitary.
So what you want in
those fascial layers
is that they slide and
glide easily on each other.
And that's what allows
you full range of movement
and easy coordination of your
movement for whatever motion
you're going to do.
The trouble is, when it
becomes dry or overused--
so it dries out; it
loses its fluidity.
Or it gets overused, which
makes inflammation, which
means it loses its
fluidity, or inflammation
from other reasons, like
you're eating something
that you shouldn't be.
Any of those things can make
this fascia stick together.
So do you see the adhesions here
from the skin to the muscle?
And you don't see those
fascial adhesions here.
Or they're are so
small that they're not
going to interfere with
the movement at all.
But we really do
see these adhesions
when we do dissections
so that you can see them.
But you wouldn't see
them in an anatomy book,
because that's the
stuff that's taken
away so that you can see the
muscles in the anatomy book.
So you're not seeing
the thing that's
actually restricting movement.
We do run dissections
on untreated cadavers
where we are looking for
those kinds of things
and trying to document that
so that people can see it.
But those of you who
learned your anatomy
from books, which is where
I learned my anatomy first,
you get, not a false picture,
but a massaged picture
of what's going on
inside the body.
Come see for yourself is the
meaning of the word autopsy.
And so if you look at the
fascial system, the things
that you could
take away from it--
I would say it's alive,
but I put that separately
because that's an opinion.
It is made by cells.
Your fascial system-- and
we're going to go into that
in a minute--
is made by cells.
But the things that I would
like you to take away,
whether it's alive or dead, is
it's unitary from top to toe.
You can cut it with
a surgeon's scalpel.
It starts at day 15 of
your embryological life.
Looking like the gel
that's around frog eggs--
have you ever seen
frog eggs in a pond?
Or is that too far
removed from Cambridge?
Come on, go out to Walden
Pond, find the frog eggs,
and you'll see the gel.
And that's what starts
your facial system is
a gel around the cells
in the very early embryo.
And it stays unitary.
So you can talk about all
these different things,
of this ligament
and that tendon,
but they're not separate.
They're part of a unitary
system from top to toe.
So it can get cut
with a scalpel.
It can get torn in injury.
It will fray with age.
That's what's making the
lines around my eyes.
But it is unitary from top
to toe and birth to death.
And it transmits and
accommodates the forces,
not in a way of just the
tendons going from bone to bone,
but a whole system of a cobweb,
a three-dimensional cobweb,
pulling in on a bone
system that's pushing out.
We'll also talk-- we'll
talk a little more later,
but we'll talk about how
it responds and transmit.
But if you have this idea that
the skeletal system is pushing
out and the myofascial
system, meaning
the muscle and the fascia
together, the white stuff
and the red stuff,
are pulling in,
that yin and yang,
the pulling in
of the soft tissue and the
pushing out of the bones,
is the balance
which ends up being
our posture, our movement,
our posture in action,
the recognizable
pattern of movement
that we have
throughout our life.
So you can change
that by training,
or you can change
that by changing
the fascial stuff itself.
And finally, the last
two bits is that most
of your body sensing--
you say, I'm going to stretch
my muscles with some yoga.
Your feeling your fascia six
times more than your muscles.
You have six times more
endings in your fascia
than you do in your
muscles on average.
So you're really feeling this
system as you stretch it,
and it's telling
you what's going on.
And finally, all injuries-- if
you're working especially with
a chronic injury--
has a fascial component to it.
So it's worthwhile
learning about this.
Now, because it's Google,
I really want to do this.
I want to present you
with a design problem.
All life on the planet
started as single-celled life.
And they did lots of
things like grew bristles
which were sensitive.
They managed to move
through the environment.
They did all kinds
of interesting things
as single cells, as
cyanotic bacteria, E. coli,
the whole thing from
prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells.
But then the eukaryotic cells
started getting together
and making organisms.
Now, when you make a
whole bunch of cells
together in an organism,
each cell has to still live,
has to get food delivered and
have its garbage taken away, et
cetera.
So you develop systems.
And when you have
70 trillion cells--
that's about the best estimate
that we have right now.
If you included the cell
inside between your mouth
and your anus, would probably
be more like 100 trillion,
but in any case, this
is just a guesstimate
because we don't really know
how many cells there are.
But how are you
going to keep them
in the proper relationship?
You can't wake up tomorrow
and have your heart
down in your left hip, right?
It has to stay in place.
So how did we get all these
cells to stay in place?
Well, when you think about
the problem a little bit,
you're either going to
have to glue them together,
or you're going to have
to weave them together.
And the answer for evolution
or Darwin or your mom or god
or whoever you think does these
things, the answer was both.
Your cells, which are very
delicate little fatty droplets
of proteinous activity
wandering around in your body,
have to be both woven
and glued into the system
to either stay
where they are or be
allowed to move in the way
that is appropriate to them.
So the extracellular
matrix, the stuff
that's around the cells in the
picture that you see there,
is a combination
of woven fabric--
which, if you know anything
about fascia at all,
that's probably what you
know-- is they discovered these
collagen--
the cells discovered making
collagen fibers among others.
And those collagen fibers are to
us what cellulose is to plants.
It's what holds us together.
But we're also glued together
with mucopolysaccharides,
other words, mucus.
So I caught a cold on the
plane yesterday coming back.
I'm sorry that I have
a cold here today.
But it just makes a
point that my body
is getting rid of
some of the stuff
that it uses to
glue me together.
You have mucus all
over your body.
You couldn't live without it.
Most cells are coated in it.
It is the interface between
the woven fabric and the cells
that we go through.
And the condition of
that gel, the condition
of the gel between the
fabric, between the cells
is really, really
crucial to how you
process water, how you process
your food, how you can move.
The fabric is
great, but the gels
are really fun to listen to.
So your fascial system
is your meta-membrane.
It is the thing that keeps--
you think it's your skin.
But the fashion is really what
is the interface between you
and the outside world.
The skin is the direct interface
with the dry world outside,
but the fascia is what
keeps you in your shape.
Quickly, we have really
four different kinds
of cells that develop
out of the ovum.
One of them is really
good at conduction,
but boy are they delicate.
Cut them, and they just
don't repair very well.
Take away oxygen
for a few minutes,
and your nervous system
is really impaired
for the rest of your life.
They're very delicate cells,
but boy did they conduct well.
Muscle cells specialized
in contraction,
connective tissue cells
make the materials
that make for support.
How do they make
those materials?
They exude out-- oh, I have
to put the fourth one in.
The epithelial ones are
the ones that do linings.
They line your lungs.
They line all your capillaries.
They line your gut.
Anywhere you need a lining,
you use epithelial cells.
But connective tissue cells
make all these different kinds
of things to hold
the cells together.
When there was only
a few cells, great,
you just make junctions
between the cells
like this, ways of holding
the cells together.
But as you get more
and more cells,
you need something
to connect them.
And it is the connective tissue
that makes, out of these three
elements-- just fibers
and the glue that you see,
the brushy-looking
molecules are the glue.
And it looks like this in vivo.
This is the only
film of living fascia
that we have made by a
French surgeon, Jean-Claude
Guimberteau.
He put a micro camera
into his patients
while he was doing tendon
transfer operations
and got all of
these and many more.
Look up "Strolling
under the skin"
if you want to see more
of this kind of thing
where you can see how
the fibers are in life.
So we had been doing dissection
of dead connective tissue
and gotten one impression of it.
But when you look
at it living, you
see what an adaptable,
three-dimensional spider
web of connections is really
going on in your body.
And it's changing
moment to moment
as the muscles move
and the forces change.
Fascia has properties that are
really important in training.
I'm going to leave that
here except for one, which
is the second one-- elasticity.
Let's just have a look at it
as we also see this on stage.
I'd like you to notice
just how much effort I
am using to keep the
carabiner going up and down.
I could do this all day.
If I was doing this, how
long would it take me?
So what we've discovered is
that the fascia is viscous,
like you see on the screen, but
also elastic, as you see here.
So it has viscoelastic
properties.
And this elasticity means it
can store and give back, store
and give back, store
and give back energy.
And that's what the runners who
are using the forefoot running
are storing and giving
back, storing, giving back
so they're not hitting the wall
so soon because they're not
using up the stores
of sugar in their body
by doing concentric
contractions.
If you look at my hand, I'm
doing an almost isometric
contraction to keep
this thing going.
I have to do a little
contraction to keep it going.
If I just stop
contracting whatsoever,
it would stop going.
But with just a little
bit of a contraction,
I can keep myself moving
along if you understand.
The kind of therapy that
massage people might use,
certainly, the kind
that I teach depends
on a third property
of the fascia, which
is called plasticity.
You've heard of neuroplasticity.
But this is fascial plasticity.
So if you watch, as
I stretch the fascia,
which I'm doing
in the microscope
here, beyond its
elastic capacity,
it still can go back
to where it was.
But when I let
go, it's not going
to go back to where it is.
It has taken on a new length.
It is this kind of ability
to, not only stretch,
but lengthen, to ease out.
to restore the glide that
is the basis of
hatha yoga, which
is the basis of the
kind of work that I do.
And there are a
number of practices
who are going to reach into
these kinds of properties
of the fascia.
And if you start to look,
I'd draw your attention
to this structure.
We start to see the
relationship between the fascia
and the bones as being
one where the bones are
floating inside a balanced
set of fascial pulls.
So these sticks are not
touching each other.
And the response
of the system is
a response of the whole system.
And when you injure a system
and one part becomes fixed,
then the rest of it doesn't
respond properly around that.
And the pain may
end up over here,
even though the
injury is over here.
So understanding our body
in a different way from--
there is a skeletal framework.
Muscles are hanging
off skeletal framework.
I will use supraspinatus for the
first 15 degrees of abduction,
then I will use the
deltoid, until I
get to 89 degrees
of abduction, then
I will use the trapeze
for the remaining degrees.
That is a robotic idea which
has gotten us a lot of knowledge
over the last several
hundred years.
But that model is running
out of its usefulness.
This model is, I think, going
to be more useful as we move
forward to understand how
the athlete, the performer,
the person who's getting
old, the person who
has neurological problems
or post-injury problems,
that we can restore this
kind of dynamic balance
where everything is
giving a little bit.
Tiger Woods, when he
was doing his swing--
if you watch my feet now,
never mind my golf swing
because I don't play golf--
I'm going up on the
outside of my right foot
and the inside of my left foot.
In other words, I'm
supinating on my right,
pronating on my left, I
expect to be right on my feet
at the moment that I
connect with the ball
on the tripods of my feet.
And then I expect
to do the opposite
to come onto the
inside of this foot
and the outside of my left
foot during the follow through.
If you watch him
in the early days,
he did all of those things
except in the follow through.
His left foot stayed
on the ground.
What does that do?
That means that
rotational energy
is going to be thrust
up to the next joint.
So where did he end up having
his first set of problems?
Not in his back, but
in his left knee.
But the problems
in the left knee
where the lack of
movement in the left foot.
So if you start thinking about
the fascia in a dynamic way
this way and thinking about
the fascial system in this kind
of dynamic way, then
your treatment plans
and operations
change, especially
for what you're going to
do from chronic injury.
We tend to focus on
the part that's hurt.
We tend to focus on the
structure that failed,
not looking at the context in
which that failure takes place.
So especially for
chronic injury,
this becomes very important.
How did the body--
I'm still on my design question.
How did the body get
through this design thing?
What you're seeing
here is the engine.
You've got millions of
these cells crawling
around your body.
They're called fibroblasts.
That means they're
making the fiber.
And if you look-- the fiber is
green, and the cell is orange.
If you look at this
film from Friedel,
you see that the
orange cell is leaving
a trail of green behind it as it
moves through the green field,
right?
It's on a three-dimensional
spider web.
It's literally got
little hooks on it,
and it's crawling its way
through that spider web
and leaving a trail
of slime behind it.
So hate to tell you
this, but you've
got millions of little slugs
running around your body
leaving trails of slime.
And then what happens to
those trails of slime?
Well, if you're a couch potato,
they remain trails of slime
and become part of
the sloopy bit which
is stopping you from having
circulation happening around
your body.
If you are moving, then that
slime forms into all the things
that the slime can form into
to make your body work--
bone, cartilage,
tendon, ligament--
whatever it needs to be
according to the needs
that you put on it.
Over the arch of my school,
when I finally have one,
will be a golden thing that says
the body responds to demand.
So whatever demand
you put on the body,
you're going to get that body.
A palates body-- I can recognize
people who've done it--
puts a palates demand,
creates a palates body.
I know palates is getting
different now and all that.
Same with yoga-- there's so
many different kinds of yoga.
But you can recognize what
runnering does to a body
because it's a running demand.
You can recognize what
Olympic lifting does to a body
because it's an
Olympic lifting demand.
And different bodies are
suited to different bits.
And when you load
these cells up--
that's the same cell in the
center of the picture there.
And you can see in this, if
you take the time to examine it
that, if you don't do enough
to stimulate the cell,
you're going to get fibrosis
and lacks of flexibility
and a lack of strength.
If you overdo it, you're going
to get another kind of fibrosis
and edema around the cell.
And if you just
do enough-- that's
the gray one in the
middle-- then you'll
maintain the status quo.
But trainers are looking
for that green idea
of building the fascia.
Now fascia builds
slower than muscle.
You can't get the fascial
system to build up
as fast as a muscle.
That's why lots of
people get injuries
when they come into you and say,
I got to get in shape for my--
whoa.
I've got to get in shape
for my thing this summer.
Please get me in shape.
And so you build up the
muscles if you're a trainer,
and they have a fascial injury
because the muscles build
faster than the fascia does.
The consequence of
this is, we start
to look at how the muscles are
strung together in the body
to create these things
that I call anatomy trains
or myofascial
meridians to understand
the way in which the body
pattern works as a tensegrity
so that we can understand how
these things are communicated
from one place to the other,
how the problem in the arch
becomes a problem in the knee
becomes a problem in the back.
So we've been looking
at these kinds of things
and coming up with the different
ways in which the body connects
from one side to the other.
I am just going to call a halt
to this now and leave time
for people who want
to ask questions.
AUDIENCE: Do you
have a discussion
about how much diet is
related to this in terms
of keeping the fascia healthy?
You touched on it a
little bit about what
we're putting in our body in
terms of having inflammation
and not have inflammation.
So is there something you
could say to that question?
TOM MYERS: Absolutely,
although I am not a dietitian.
I personally am on
a seafood diet--
if I see food I eat it.
However, but the idea here is,
you need the 22 amino acids
to produce the various types
of collagen and other proteins,
fiber, nectin, et
cetera hyaluronan
that you have in your body.
So adequate supplies
of protein, which
can get a little dicey
with a vegan, a really
restricted diet.
Otherwise, the main
thing that I can say
is that we put maybe too many
irritants in there in terms
of hot food and coffee.
Some people, that will really
affect how their body works.
But the main thing is sugar.
I said that the gluey stuff
was mucopolysaccharides.
The more sugar you eat, the
stickier that stuff gets.
The stickier it gets, the
less it lets the nutrients
through to the
muscles, the liver, the
whatever it is around.
So oversugaring our kids,
oversugaring ourselves
is probably the dietary
thing that we do the most.
Then, beyond that,
it's individual things
that people are allergic
to or semiallergic to that
just make it harder for
them physiologically.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
I think we're just discovering
how bad sugar is actually
for us.
TOM MYERS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, OK, thank you.
TOM MYERS: You're welcome.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Tom.
I had a question about
the plastination.
Do you know what the
state is that that is in?
Are they getting close to having
something that can presented?
TOM MYERS: Yes.
They have some things
that have been presented.
They're going to be presented
at the 5th Fascial Research
Congress, which is
taking place in Berlin
in a couple of months.
And they have done things
such as that, like the thigh
that I had where we went
down through the layers.
They've gone down through
the layers in the wrist
from the bone, and then you
see the next one, the next one,
the next one out to the skin.
That's one that
they have looked at.
They took a section
of the lower leg
and took out all
the muscle, again,
looking like some of the things.
They're trying to recreate
some of the images
that we already have.
But because fascia is the
context for everything else,
it's really hard to take
everything else out and leave
the fascia intact.
So what you would like--
I would like to go back
to the Vesalius's lab
and steal all his knives.
Because when we went to
examine the human body,
we examined it
with the same thing
that hunters did with animals.
We cut it up with a blade.
And our anatomy that
you've seen in your books
is anatomy of a blade.
But if I could get back to
the Vesalius's workshop,
take my time machine
and go back to 1540,
I would take away
all these knives
and leave him with a vat
of furniture stripper
or some other kind of solvent.
And he would come in the morning
and say, (WITH ITALIAN ACCENT)
oh, somebody took
all of my scalpels.
So I will instead put
the body in the solvent
and see what happens.
And he would have taken
out the extracellular
matrix which is the thing
that every cell lives in.
It would be a three-dimensional
network that wouldn't just
cover your muscles.
It would show you the shape
of your brain, of your liver,
of everything has to
be in this network.
So it draws together, not only
all the parts of the body,
in a very real way, the
fascia draws together
all the branches of medicine.
And I think we're going to be
discovering a lot more about it
in the next 40 years.
It's not that fascia is more
important than anything else.
It's just we haven't paid
much attention to it.
So we need to pay some attention
to it now just to catch it up
to the other places.
Yeah.
Did I get to your
question at all?
AUDIENCE: I found it interesting
that you were stating
that many of the injuries occur
from people trying to get fit
and building the muscle
before the fascia has a chance
to catch up to it.
So I'm curious if there are
activities or things that
help to promote
fascia or to help
the development of the fascia
in the muscle come more
in alignment, or if it's
just slowing down training.
TOM MYERS: Slowing
down training is--
most of the people
who come into training
have that real goal-directed
rather than process-directed
mentality.
And it's the job of the trainer
to slow them down a little bit.
You think of the people who
have been working on training
for 2,000 or 3,000 years.
Yoga generally goes-- I know
there's all kinds of yogas now,
but yoga generally went
very slowly so as not to--
I don't have a piece
of plastic up here.
But if you can imagine me with a
plastic bag, if I do it slowly,
the bag will stretch.
If I do it quickly,
the bag will tear.
So moving slowly is
definitely a boon
to not having overuse injuries.
So if yoga is slow, the things
like Tai Chi move very slowly,
and that is going
to have less injury.
The other thing
that I would love
to see for kids, because all the
movement that we do with kids
is so directed towards
a goal, and I love--
I studied with a woman
named Emilie Conrad who
did biomorphing motion,
like, animal-imitation motion
just to have flows and
waves go through your body.
And I would love to see kids
get that kind of training
instead of how many
pushups can you do?
Or can you go up the peg board?
Can you climb the rope?
Those kinds of things,
those are great.
I'm not putting them down.
But for kids simply to
explore their movement
for the joy of movement and
to emphasize what they can do
rather than what
they can't do, I
think would be a really nice
thing for the next generation
of kids that we're bringing up.
Kids are going to become very
precious resources, guys,
in your world.
We used to have
seven kids in hopes
that four kids would
live to take care of us
when we were old.
I kid you not.
It is now a tragedy
if a child dies.
If you had a child
die in your family,
I am really sorry for you.
There is nothing worse
that I can think of.
Because we invest so
much in each child--
and now my daughter,
who works for Google,
and lots and lots of people who
are probably not going to have
children--
and that means that the children
who are here, the Indigo
children or whatever
you want to call them,
those kids are going to
be very, very important.
Because they're going to take
care of us when we're old.
That's you, when you're old.
I'm already out of here.
But in order to do that,
those have to be super kids.
So we'd better raise them
really strong and healthy
because they're going to have
to take care of lots of people
when they're old.
I know it's not going
to work that way,
but you know what I mean.
Kids are precious.
How they get taught into
movement is an important thing.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
