Perifascia and Deep Fascia

The structure of filmy fascia, right, the fuzz, the structure of filmy fascia, I'm going to give you another word, perifascial, perifascial membranes over the deep fascia. So why perifascial membranes? Well fuzz is literally just like a crazy silly reaction word to a texture that I saw in front of my eyes that I had no other word for. Well it fuzzed for about ten years, finally came up with filmy fascia. Filmy fascia is a great texture word, it gives you something to connect to as a kinesthetic touch person like I am and most of the people I work with.

It doesn't say anything to an anatomist though. So I made up this word perifascial membranes. So peri means around or near in Latin. Fascia is up or pertaining to fascia. So these are the membranes that are around the fascia.

It's fascia fascia. Well, if I'm feeling really cocky, and I often am, I just call it perifascial, right, I take the noun instead of the adjectives, right, because I'm going to show it to you as a fascia. Now remember this is the thin felted membrane that's transparent and slippery. You got that? You're going to forget that, right?

Perifascial. So here's belly wall number three, not Mr. Gappe, not Ray, but another form. I pre-dissected the superficial fascia, I flip it over around the abdomen, is that the money shot? No, if I walked away, I'd come back and there would be crispy bits. There's something there.

Can you see it? You can't really see it. Oh, maybe you can. Can you see that? You could miss that?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right, in your pursuit of the famous stuff, you tend to just blow through the less famous stuff. You know, you just pass by people on street, and I'm like, oh.

So there's a membrane there, and wouldn't it be cool if I could say, cut that new coidels not into a fascia? It would take a knife. There we go. See, an animus is cutting something with a knife, this is how you get the things, right? An animus, anatomy is to cut up with a knife, if you can cut up a fascia with a knife, it's a fascia.

Do you see how it's felt and transparent, slippery, it has tensile strength, one, one, one, one, one. If I let go of it, it recoils into a tiny bit of snow. There's like nothing to it, right? It actually reminds me of the arachnoid. It's different than the deep fascia, it's different than that subcutaneous adipose layer.

It has its own properties, and in fact, it's bouncing like that, it tells me it's got a bunch of collagen in it, and the fact that it's slippery tells me it's got a bunch of elastin and mucopolysaccharides, sounds like fascia to me. Now it must be just on the belly wall, right? No, let's keep looking. So here we are at the thigh, this is hip, thigh and knee. I've pre-dissected the superficial fascia, and you can see there's a membrane on the yellow, there's a membrane on the deep side of the yellow, and then there's more membrane over the deep fascia, inside a membrane system in this dissection, and look, when I pull on it, you see where you see cotton candy, right?

If I pull on it and put it in tension, I see cotton candy, if I put it back down, it's a membrane. If I pick it up, it's cotton candy, if I put it down, it's a membrane, cotton candy, membrane, cotton candy membrane, and particle wave, particle wave, which is it? It depends on how you hang on it. It might look kind of strong, too. Let's pick up a light with that a little bit, in a superficial fashion.

Is it force conducting? Yeah, force conducting. That's over. Look at how thin this thing is, I flip it around my hand, there's almost nothing there. Yeah, that's the fat layer.

Well, it's just on the belly and on the thigh. But here we're at the shin, now you've got this bone in the middle here, the tibia, on the outside it's kind of neat, there's a fibrous covering here in the deep fascia, the choral fascia, that's where we're having this image on top of the choral fascia on the side of your leg here. Now, you can see, again, the superficial fascia has a shiny membrane over it, inside a membrane system. If I walk away from this with the halogen lamps, it would cook and turn into brown crispy bits. I can shove my hemostat under it and demonstrate some pencil strength.

Now, is that the money shot, did I get to the bottom of it, that shiny bit there, is that the deep fascia? If I took a picture now, would I be showing you the deep fascia? No. Turns out there's another layer of felt, another transparent, filthy layer that would obscure the specific lines of the deep fascia. Another layer, so we've got the layer that's over the fatty layer, the one that I already ripped away, we've got another one here, how deep does it go?

How deep down the membrane rabbit hole are we going to go here? So we finally hit the dense fibrous of the deep fascia. Well, there does come a point as you pull these films away that eventually you find pulling these silver strings, then you know you've struck deep fascia. But on the way to it, how many membranes do I take away? One, two, three, pretty common.

It's dissectable as three membranes. I'm not telling you that there's three membranes around time. I can dissect three membranes. Here we are at the back of the knee. This was the shot I showed you at the very beginning when I was telling you about film and fascial or perifascial membranes, there's the glare of the camera.

And look, I'm free dropping, this is smart. I'm free dropping a scalpel with a blade on the other end. I'm catching it by the blade. Boing, boing, boing. I'm dropping it, I'm catching it, I'm dropping it to show you this trampoline quality that's inherent to this membrane.

It's a bouncy, collagenous, cool property that it has. I'm working as a gross dissector here, not as a histologist or a molecular biologist. So I observe the properties through these kinds of behaviors rather than identifying it molecularly. So structure of perifascial membranes under the deep fascia, all that was over the deep fascia. Remember, flaws over the deep fascia?

Perifascial membranes over the deep fascia. Fuzz under the deep fascia, perifascial membranes under the deep fascia. It's the same stuff. I'm giving you the anatomy of the fuzz, right? I'm not the only person who thinks about this stuff.

There's like the tensegrity group at the Fashion Congress, very interesting, smart people who also have their own considerations about these tissues, these loose area or connective tissues as they call them. And they keep saying, there's no layers. They insist there's no layers. It's just a pile of mucus. If you put your microscope in there and look, it basically looks like bubbles and strings.

Bubbles and strings throughout. And you don't get any sense of a layer. A layer is a function of gross anatomy, folks. It's not a function of microscopic anatomy, right? The scale is different.

And so the appearance is different. I think that's why we talk past each other sometimes, where we're observing the same tissues at different scales. And sure enough, the elephants is not a giant animal if your focus time is toned out, but it is a big ton. So I thought, though, with all due respect to these people who are telling me that there's no layers there, can I demonstrate differential movement in a continuous substrate that will represent what I'm seeing in the body? So I took a pyrex dish.

I put it on a cutting board here. I had put some clear jello in it, cut up licorice, made it into a vascular tree, and popped it in the fridge. Took it out of the fridge, poured more clear jello over it, cut more vascular tree onto it, made a double layer of vascular tree in this common substrate of jello and banged on it. To demonstrate, look cool. I was able to show differential movement within a common substrate.

There's no layers there. I could take a bread knife and cut it into layers, though, right? I could go across it this way and show you a sheet of vascular tree. There's one layer and maybe another one down there. I think, actually, the reason why I behaved this way is because the jello on top wasn't as cold as the jello on the bottom, and that permitted it to jiggle impossibly if there was continuous temperature and there was no temperature differential.

I might not have been able to demonstrate the differential movement, so I'm not sure I can anchor it in a continuous substrate. I thought I was trying to do my best to think like somebody else, okay? Now, this is the leg upon which that model is based. Here's the calf, the knee, and we're in the hamstring area here. That's the butt.

Here's some deep fascia still intact here. Some deep fascia still intact here. It's very thin deep fascia that's been removed here at the back of the hamstrings. We're going to zoom in on that, but I just want to let you know where we work. As I grab this bit of deep fascia at the top of the frame there, and I yank on it, can you see how the membranes are anchored in the deep fascia?

Total connection and differential movement. What we have is a transition of textures through a continuous form. I have to dissect and cut away those membranes from the deep fascia because they're continuous with it. As I do so, the striking parts of the deep fascia become more clear. Here's my three layers of licorice dancing on top of one another, demonstrating with eyes without even having to cut it, differential movement within a membrane system that appears to function in a layered way whether it's layers or not.

It functions as layers to allow the greatest amount of excursion within the system I thought that was so pretty. As I'm touching very gently, I'm not cutting with my scalpel, I'm just touching, but as I do so, I'm actually brushing the blood out of the blood vessels which are so small as to be transparent. If not for the fact that there was a bit of blood in this venule or arterial network, we wouldn't see it at all. See, here I've pushed the blood out, I didn't cut it, I just pushed the blood out and the vasculature would be invisible. And yet it's appearing stacked, functioning in a stack of membranes.

To her credit, Carla Sticco, many of you might have her wonderful book, The Atlas of the Fascia System, she includes an image very close to this exact spot on the body and an unfixed body showing what she sends an arrow into and says, loose aerial connective tissue. Again, if you're talking to a regular anatomist, they're going to call this loose aerial connective tissue, we're just going deep down the rabbit hole of that particular identification, giving it a name, calling it perifacial membranes, it's the fuzz. And we're seeing from a different perspective. Now, once I learned my lesson with my $5,000 picture on Ray, by the way, he was called Ray because when we reflected his skin, the shock of brilliant yellow on the table that was his body was like a beam of light, that's what we called him, Ray. I learned from that, not to hire laboratories for my own projects, but to just pick up pictures while I'm teaching.

So this is in a class, all the energy that you see are from classes of mine and I just go running over to my chemist. I don't know what I did, I messed it up. I asked him to reflect the superficial fascia along with everybody else, and let's observe the deep fascia. So he did that, but he kind of hacked through the deep fascia at it. So here's the heel, calcaneus, here's Achilles tendon covered in deep fascia, here's the cut deep fascia, here's a window through the deep fascia, here's a band of deep fascia still intact, here's a second window in the deep fascia, do you get it?

So there's the gastrocnemius muscle up there. I got really excited because he didn't know what he had done, but I knew what he had done. A fortuitous error. Is that not beautiful? Do you see that differential movement?

It's quite dramatic. And it's functioning by means of a membrane system. Now look, I brush, I'm trying to understand the structure of this membrane system. See, one flick at the back of my scalpel and I squidge a puddle away. Do you see that?

I made a puddle go away, there's still a puddle on this side, there's no more puddle here. I've already dried it out just by touching. That's how quickly it changes. And as I pull it up, what do you see? Cotton candy, fuzz.

I thought, hmm, let me dissect this membrane system. I grab it, tug on it, make sure I'm cutting what I want to cut. And sure enough, I can create a fascia. And as I'm absent-mindedly playing with it, I accidentally poke it with the tip of the scalpel and it doesn't break. Poke, poke.

Do you see that? Poke, poke, poke, didn't poke a hole in it. This stuff is resilient. I put down that section, I grab another bit of it. Let me see how many layers kind of cut this into.

So here I'm going for a number. This is my second cut. I didn't get the money shop yet, though. You can see that there's still a membrane down there covering the gas truck. I didn't get to the bottom of it yet.

And then I'm playing with it. I put it back, and look at the way it scrolls up like that. Wait a second. Didn't I cut that into two? And yet now it's one.

Like it's like magic or something. And you see the incredible adherence of the mucoidal quality of the tissue to what's underneath it, right? So it's both sticky and sticking to where it came from. And as I cut it into two layers, it turns into one layer. I cut it some more because I'm trying to get down to the silvery tendinous belly of the gastrocnemius muscle.

And how much do I have to cut? Now I'm kind of there now. See, I'm crinkling up there. But here the membrane system is still intact. And I'm trying to understand what exactly I'm cutting.

Because cutting is a story. It's an illusion. It's not what it is. It's what I'm doing. So I'm not going to tell you what it is based on what I've cut.

That would be false thinking. I want to tell you what it is, but I can get ideas about it from cutting it. And I've cut this friggin' thing three times, and it's turned into one membrane. You see that? It just keeps being one thing.

You watched me do it. Can you tell me better? What the hell just happened there? Because I don't know what happened. I keep cutting it and cutting it.

And I spread it out in terms of this one thing that scrolls up back on itself like a horsekin. By the way, Penis is the poster child of filming fashion. He's sad as he reaches for a water wing. Are you feeling a little damp after 30 talks? Good luck.

Catch it, anyone. But these are water wings. Do you know these things? This is not the most fun toy you've ever touched. It's always a minute.

It's always a minute. It's always the most fun toy you've ever played with. Water wings. Water wings. I only got six or seven of them.

I'm going to ask you, by the way, about the fifth one in each of these clothes. This is going way back, folks. Are you ready? Are you ready? Whoo! Oh, that's terrible.

Okay, just pass them around. Play with the water wings. You get the idea, right? It's a toroidal shape. A torus is the elongated donut, right?

It's toroidal. It's like this. It's kind of an infinite row, right? So it's slipping on itself. It's a lot like this membrane somehow.

Do this to your arm. I mean, you basically got a water wing for an arm. You feel the shearing, right? You feel it. It's kind of anchored, though.

It's anchored at your wrist, so you can't quite do what the thing does. You can go forever in your skin in a superficial fashion, and then they're around your ankles, right? Because they're anchored at these places, and yet this is very similar. Instead of rolling up on itself the way you saw it do right there, I'm kind of involuting in yet a unity. And I could take that water wing.

I've thought about this a lot. I could put that water wing on a cutting board. What about my scuffle, right? Pin that sucker down. Cut the top layer off.

Create a layer. There could be another layer through that equatorial puddle. I could cut that layer. It might be in the middle of the dome. I got two layers, and that would be a third layer down there.

I could cut through that and it would be a fourth layer down by the cutting board. I could cut that water wing into four layers of fashion, folks. And if I was really careful, I could cut that water wing into one sheet of plastic, exactly what it's made out of, that's been carefully folded and rolled up on itself. Is it one layer? Is it four layers?

I don't know. It depends on how you cut it. But functionally, right, it's a mutual relationship to itself as a system that can kind of roll on itself in its mucoidal substrate with its fibers and permit differential movement. Good trick. Now, the water wing isn't the perfect example, right, because there's just three fluid in there and a couple of snakes, if you're actually planning it, as opposed to a fibrous, a felted fibrous matrix.

But interesting enough. Now, remember that slippery property and that wet property? This is a system, this membrane system, the perifational membranes of the fuzz, is a reservoir in your body. It's a water reservoir, as a water reservoir, it's a radiator, right? It's a way of distributing thermal buildup.

You sit here on your asaphora, as heat is building up in your butt, and you stand up and move, that heat gets redistributed through the fluid network, right, reducing the inflammation that arises from stasis. Stasis yields heat buildup, think inflammation, movement distributes that heat through this fluid network, which is a movement system. It's a heat transfer system, among other things. Now, I mentioned elastin. It's an interesting fiber.

Elastin has like a hydrophobic sleeve around it, allowing it to glide within your tissues. It's also dotted with hydrogen molecules, which are atoms or whatever, which are happy to bind with anything else under conditions of inflammation, stasis, and dehydration. So, inflammation, stasis, and dehydration lead to hydrogen bonding and cross-linking of elastin fibers, with collagen fibers in the matrix yielding a more gummy or gluey texture to the slippery, wet, mucoidal nature of the substance than it would be otherwise, right? So, you could, that's what I was talking about in the first piece, right, and I was actually in science behind it at the time. I maybe wasn't 20 years ago. But now, it appears clear, right, that these processes take place in these very memories under conditions of stasis, dehydration, and inflammation, and you end up with hydrogen bonding and cross-linking of the fibers in a way that changes its texture, lowers its conductivity, lowers its, and I wonder when the reservoir goes down, right?

Now, you're lowering, again, you're lowering the conductivity, you're lowering its capacitive transfer heat, you're increasing the inflammation, stasis inflammation, dehydration yields to gummy. Gummy, if let to run wild, goes to crystal. It gets brittle. It can shatter. My mama, she's 84. She steps off the curb or pendant tears, right, because she's going to have a lot of crystallization in her fascia, right, that's lowering its, that's lowered its slipperiness in a kind of hard way to fix, right?

You want to catch gummy and send it back in the direction of slippery rather than wait on it and let it go in the direction of brittle and crystalline. Someone asked me a couple of talks and go, Gil, what are the crystals? I was like, damn, that's a good question. Crystals, what are the crystals? Well, I did a little, a little quick research and called them Robert Shleit.

He's my Google profession. And it was like, what are crystals I thought? Is it calcium carbonate? Is it calcium oxalate? No, it's neither of those.

It's actually the May artifact that happens in cooking. This is when you, when you put some butter in a pan and then you throw in some onions and you go over this and caramelize them, right, all the wonderful flavors and such, or when you make the crispy or the skin of fish crispy. It's the same crispy happening inside your body, right? It's the recombining of the molecules such that the sugars start binding with the fats and the proteins in a way that not only renders you more immobile and crispy, but makes you taste better. Like a fine wine here.

So think about that, folks. But you don't have to go that way. It doesn't have to go that way, right? If you do the opposite of what Generate said, right? If you're slow cooking yourself through stasis, inflammation, and dehydration, then what's the cure?

Movement, hydration, and what was the other one? And de-inflammation. So you've got to do things that are not inflammatory, like don't listen to NPR or whatever. There's three minutes of that driving down the highway, and I'm like, oh, the world! So you don't have inflammatory emotions, but you're also like, you want to stand on the ground every now and then, right? Because the surface of the Earth is a great pool of electrons, and in your inflamed tissues are an accumulation of protons.

And a way to de-inflame that proton accumulation is to be in contact with an abundant source of electrons, which we happen to have been provided in the form of Earth. Okay? We're tracking Earth all the time, creating a giant pool of electrons, all you've got to do is stand on them. It takes about a half an hour for the electrons to actually migrate through your tissues up to your hips, another half an hour up to your head, or do what the Native Americans did, lie down on the ground when you're sick, right? And you have full contact, and they can migrate in very quickly.

Animals do it, smart people do it. You can do it, too. It's tough here. Lie down on the pavement. It's not going to work, but there are methods.

Go to earthing.com and get a mat in front of your computer. There's all ways to zero out the voltage to allow electrons to ground your bodies. Also, food is such as a lot of ways to de-inflame, but basically the key is to go from gummy to slippery, rather than gummy to brittle. By the way, touch, did you see that little flick of the scalpel that rendered that puddle dry? What do you think your hand does when it squeezes on these tissues, right?

You squidge the water out of the sponge. It goes squirting out. It's dry for a minute, and then those tissues are like, ugh, it's parchment. It calls from the capillary bed for fresh water from you, but that's pretty many. You freshen it up, right?

And along that reservoir stream, all the gum wrappers and all the beer cans and the two important cups. I'm in Canada. Go floating away, and that's why your massage therapist says, have a big glass of water after the session, because you're going to be a little toxic, right? Because you've literally rendered that possible. But if you're chronically dehydrated, by the way, the problem with chronic dehydration is not solved by sitting at your house in front of the computer going like this all day with a jug of water recommended by Dr. Batnagels.

In other words, you have an ounce for every two ounces of your body, so it's a massive jug of water, and you bring this water all day, and every time you're nice, you get off and pee. And you drink and you pee, and drinking and pee, and you never actually integrate the water into your body. You're still basically chronically dehydrated, because you haven't moved in such a way that your tissue calls the fluid into use. So you're just passing the fluid. You have to demand the fluid to get into your body.

So you've got to move to hydrate. And if you're chronically dehydrated, it's a process as simple as digestion, which takes about two gallons of water a day. We don't drink two gallons of water a day, but we recruit the water for the digestive processes from the reservoir. If your reservoir is low, then all that time when you're digesting is really low. And what's happening in the area?

You're going, you're getting done? You've got to move. By the way, touch. So touch is moving somebody. If you can't move yourself, you can get someone to move you and get the same effect.

So hindsight's 20-20, right? I called my first DVD, Skin and Superficial Fashion, my second DVD, Deep Fashion and Muscle. Now I would want to redo it. I'm not going to redo it, but I would call it Skin, Superficial Fashion and Perifashion. And I would say Deep Fashion and Perifashion and Muscle and Perifashion.

Right? Because that would be a more accurate accounting for the layers that are present in the human form, which I didn't really notice based on a layered model that didn't include the fuzz as a layer, as perifashion membranes. Let it learn. So the differential movement then in the musculoskeletal system is made possible by the perifashion membranes whether it be over the deep fashion, under the deep fashion, or within the muscle layer. Right?

You saw this, and now... I'm going to just skip to this section here. Now you understand the anatomy of what you're seeing, don't you? You've seen the structure of the perifashion membranes that permit the shearing of the superficial fashion over the deep, right? By means of those membranes that are dissected for the over and over again.

You get it? So now you have the anatomy of that movement. Similarly, here. Right? We need the membranes to enable the movement.

If the gastroc were attached to the deep fashion directly, it would be a lever. It wouldn't be a shear point. The gastroc couldn't go anywhere if it were attached to the deep fashion. There has to be something else. The membranes are the something else that permit the movement.

Right? Does that make sense? So here we are. And also then I'm just panning up to the hamstrings here where you'll see the deep fashion has been dissected away to show that the differential movement is also happening within the muscle layer. Now this is plantar flexion and dorsiflexion causing differential movement in the hamstrings.

Isn't that cool? Whether it be the nerve or the different compartments of the hamstrings and musculature. They're going in different directions. Did you know that happened while you flexed? And you do your foot, right?

And you're a massage therapist and you're like, working on our leg. I was like, but my problem was in my ankles. What does it have to do? It's one thing. And the movements impact the whole.

A local movement impacts the whole. And if there were drag in that system, if there were dehydration, inflammation, and stasis, you wouldn't have the full range of motion of the peripheral extension. Does that make sense? Damn, that's cool. So I love this particular image.

Okay, someone is holding the wrist here in this unfixed arm. Someone is holding an elbow over here. And what we're looking at is the transparent deep fashion of an unfixed forearm. It's way easier to see deep fashion in a fixed body because it's dry and more opaque. But in an unfixed body, you can actually see through it, which is to our advantage when you're trying to demonstrate differential movement.

So there's a little mismatch of the deep fashion here, and it's covered here. But keep your eye on these tendons, the tendon of the brachioradialis and extensor carpioradialis. Watch the way this one dies under and then pops out from under the other one. We were squealing when I got this footage. Okay, watch here.

Do you see that? Do you see the way it just... Right? It comes out from under. Do you want to let it go over there again?

Isn't that cool? I had no idea that was happening in my arm. All right? This is promenation, promenation of supination, and these riviny tendons are diving out from under each other and bearing themselves under each other. There's all kinds of movement happening in your arm.

Now, I'm hoping that you will add these observations to your evaluative process when you see someone with movement inhibition because this is one axis, just one of many. I ain't selling you this. This is the whole story, right? It's just added to your toolkit. It's another bit that you can add to your considerations when someone's moving like a block of wood.

Because tweaking this nerve and that nerve ain't necessarily going to get you there. You might need to deaglomerate, dehydrated membranes whose conductive potential, whose thermal distributing potential, whose movement potential have all been reduced by stasis, inflammation, and dehydration. Make sense? Don't you love that? Also, it's not just the musculature, folks, right?

It's also the neurovascular system that's also in sheathed in these membranes, peri-fashioned membranes. So, this is Ray's elbows here, actually. He did get a little more image from Ray. But just watch. It's very subtle.

Just the differential movement of the vein relative to the biceps tendon, right? The vein is doing this whole dance here around the biceps tendon as the elbow rolls along. I see a different movement, different movement. You can't have the vascular tree anchored onto the musculature. That would be dragged on the system, right?

You have to have a difference in the movement of the vascular tree and the neural tree relative to the musculature. Here's Ray's inner thigh. We're looking at the great satin's vein in blue here. And as I rotate around the hip a little bit and extend and flex the knee, you're going to see differential movement between the vein and the musculature. Isn't that cool?

It's like, whoosh, whoosh. That's great, the sound effects. Feel free to do it. Look at that. See that?

They go on in different directions. That's differential movement. No differential movement. You're a tree. That's so cool.

Now, the proof of it, right, is that I have to dissect the vein out of the leg. The vein isn't a piece of linguine lying in there independent of everything else, right? We have total connection and differential movement. How do we pull that off in the musculoskeletal system? We do it through a membranous network, through perifashion, I'm calling it, through the fuzz, through loose aerial connective tissue.

Loose is what makes it possible. And it's also maybe even within the tree itself. We saw a differential movement within the layers of vasculature, right? Now, think about it. If I'm on the outside of the merry-go-round, have you ever done so with a kid?

You put your kid on the merry-go-round and they pick a horse here on the outside and you're going to chase after them. And they're crying. That's okay, honey. I'm going to get you all good soon. You're going on three more times, right?

Now, the dad on the inside, he put his kid on the one by the pole and he's like, it's okay, baby. It's going to be a nervous one. Because they're not moving at the same rate, right? Well, look at this. The vasculature, there's pop and pop, where the vasculature on the inside isn't moving at the same rate as the vasculature on the outside.

Here's your merry-go-round, right? So you have to have differential movement within the system and not a tree. Now, you remember this image I showed you at the beginning of the fuzz under Mr. Agape's rectus femoris. It goes from a flow speed to a fuzz. I'm going to dissect rays like in the exact same position and I'm going to show you with a flick on my scalpel the difference, again, between the dehydrated membrane and the wet membrane.

Because it's the same thing, it's just in a different state, right? Just like Santa, okay? So as I lift this up, what am I doing? I'm dissecting the membrane system. Same thing I was doing with my finger.

When I went through the fuzz, I'm basically ripping the membrane system in half. Some goes up and some goes down. And actually, if you look back at that shot of Mr. Agape, you could see the membrane there. I couldn't see it at the time, though. At the time I dissected it, it was invisible to me.

But look, there's some cotton candy at the horizon. And yet what we're looking at is a membrane covering vastus intermedius, a membrane on the deep side of the rectus femoris. It turns out that the membranes, they're the silk stockings. That side are all silk stocking. That's what enables that beautiful movement.

But instead of the word gliding, we need the word shearing. Because shearing is the more accurate description of differential movement in continuous tissue. See that? Gliding is a hockey puck going over the ice with a little bit of water in between. That's gliding.

No fibrous connection between a hockey puck and an ice surface, a fluid interface instead. Glass slip on a glass slide with a drop of water. That's gliding. This is shearing. Can you see that same dance of the bass wheelchair as I pull back and forth on inside the membrane system?

It's a multilayered stack. It's dissectable that way, whatever it actually is. So stasis, dehydration, inflammation, make for gluiness, and then on to brittleness. So you've got to care for your reservoir, movement, touch, grounding, joy. There's an antidote for those inflammatory motions.

Like enjoy yourself. I'm not a big fan. So filming fascial qualities, it's slippery, right? It's dissectable as a fascia, right? It's the filtered one rather than the regular fibrous arrays.

Looks like cotton candy when it's dry and intention and pulled apart. Get it? I put intention and remember it and put it back down. It's a membrane. Cotton candy membrane, cotton candy membrane.

It's multilayered because it looks multilayered. I can cut it into layers. Just like I can cut your water weenie into layers. Don't take those home folks. They've got to come back to me.

All of that's my weenie. It's distensible by a part. Shearing, super high-graded, slippery interfaces. It's bouncy and lasted the way I showed it to you. And it shears or translates by means of what?

A gelatinous new coil. That plus fibrous network of stacked membranes, maybe. That's like a deep fascia thrower. How about this one? I'm proud of you.

I'm doing this. I've got these lights with the skin on them. And then I've reflected the skin. I'm showing you the superficial fascia. And then here's the deep fascia.

And it's pretty far along actually. I can't grow figs in Vancouver. I've been across the whole continent here. I mean, I grew up here from Florida. It's over 4,000 miles from here.

I can grow figs in Florida. But I've passed through certain parts of the U.S. where I can't grow figs. I'm only here. I was amazed at how big the fig leaves grow in Florida.

Which is really convenient. If you need a big free move. So watch this little cartoon here. So watch the thighs. Do you see that how they bulge?

Bulging thighs. Bulging thighs. You ever see a little kid make a muscle? Oh, you mean they make a muscle, right? So proud.

You get a little squeeze. And it does such a big muscle. Look at those gums. Make a muscle. What's happening there, right?

Are the muscle tissues are bunching up underneath the deep fascia, which is bulging. And that chain renders us impressed. What are you laughing at? That wasn't a joke. A little learning deal, a little learning.

Okay. So let's look at the movement. So the deep fascia now. What role does the deep fascia play in movement? Here we are back to a clip we saw earlier where we're focusing on the middle of it now.

Look at the deep fascia intact. And what's it doing during that dorsiflexion and plantar flexion? It's bulging. We don't see any excursion of the deep fascia, though. Why?

Because it's anchored on the bones. Deep fascia is sending off ribbons of septa that go to the periostatium and are in continuity with it. The outer projections of the bones anchor into the deep fascia. And the inner projections of the deep fascia anchor into the bones. And we really have one continuous network of skeleton and exoskeleton in a very particular way that renders the deep fascia stable as compared to the stuff moving underneath it and the stuff moving over it.

Let's talk more about it. Here's a neat clip. So watch this beautiful compression stocking, which is the fascia lata of the thigh. I'm flexing and extending the knee over here. That's up by the hip.

Watch the beautiful fiber organization here of the deep fascia. Do you see how it leans during the movements? It kind of leans. But it can't really go anywhere as a whole because it's anchored into the bone. So it distorts in response to the bony articulations and the muscular movement.

It distorts and bunches. But it doesn't particularly go anywhere. And the way that it bunches... Okay, now watch this. See that vein?

Watch that vein. See that vein? See it move underneath the deep fascia. See? Right there.

There's excursion of a vein in the membrane system deep to the deep fascia during the flexion and extension at the ankle. Michael, what's the deep fascia doing? That is indulging a little bit. It's the relatively stable component of the fascia movement system. This was surprising to me.

I didn't quite get that when I only had one fascia. Because I thought, oh, fascia is a plastic medium. That's what I was told when I was also in my training. Fascia, the body. It's a plastic medium.

And in fact, we were told the story about the thixotropic effect where through pressure and heat that was introduced by the manual therapist, you could actually chemically transform the deep fascia. We were definitely thinking about the deep fascia from a solid to a gel. And once it was in that gel state, I could mold it to my purposes. So the idea was to change it. And then once you changed it, to mess with it hopefully in service of that person's movement potential.

Well, that was the story we told ourselves. I learned that in the first part of my training. And in the second part of my training, I had a privilege of studying with Robert Schlag, who said, oh, I don't know about that. He says, because the thixotropic effect, he says, if you look at it very carefully, you can see that it takes the weight of an elephant, right, to induce the thixotropic effect of deep fascia. And you are not an elephant, too.

So you are not inducing the thixotropic effect. I don't know what you do. So he might have got a PhD after that conversation. I had to see if he could figure it out. But all he figured out was that there are mild fibroblasts in deep fascia that are the mechanism of its tone, right, and that those mild fibroblasts operate at a completely different rate of contraction than the muscle tissue, and that those contractions are developed slowly and hold forever.

And they don't let go, right, until some other demand is placed on a tissue that will slowly encourage them to have a different tone, right? But it's not like, in seconds, I'm inducing a thixotropic effect, right, that I can then rearrange those fibers and they'll suddenly turn into a different pattern and it won't be a grid on my thigh anymore. So when I looked at literally hundreds of bodies and seen a consistent pattern over and over again so that I can call it out when I see you or you or you're not going to look at your body, I know there's going to be a really loose grid of two layers here, and there's going to be a really tight grid of three layers here, and there's going to be a tight grid of one layer here, and I can kind of call that because, as surely as I know, there's going to be probably two bones in this arm here. I can pretty much also tell you there's going to be a hatched 90-degree pattern of loosely organized fibers in the forearm. And yeah, they might be a little thicker and intense, but they're a little thinner and a little lighty, but the basic organization doesn't change, right?

So I'm not converting that tissue the way I thought it was. What am I doing? Ice skating with my elbows. Ice skating with my elbows. But seriously.

So okay, new story. New story. I anchored my elbow into the deep fascia the way I always did, but instead of inducing a fixatropic effect on this, this is leaning on somebody's body. And as I do that in gravity, I can only hold the same position in gravity for X many seconds, right? And after a little while, I just changed the weight and pressure a little bit, and I feel that the movement is happening where? In a membrane system.

Movement is happening in a membrane system, and I go ice skating on a membrane system and dig around in there. Now, this is not a bad thing. The activity is the same. The technique is the same. All that's different is the story.

I tell you, hold your good techniques that give you good results very dearly. Don't throw out the technique because your story sucks, right? The techniques are good, but hold your theories, your stories about them very lightly. We are all telling stories to explain what we're doing that are fairly ridiculous, right? And that's okay.

That's okay. We kind of restore a storytelling breed, okay? But the thing is, don't fight each other over the story, right? Encourage each other over the good techniques, right? Borrow each other's techniques, and maybe borrow each other's stories too, but hold those stories very lightly.

And by the way, I can anchor this and float around in the membrane over the deep fashion. If I'm anchored in the same spot, I'm calling for movement underneath my pressure, right? I'm going to be getting differential movement in the membranes under the deep fashion. Well, that's cool, right? So you can actually intentionally access different membranes through the way that you touch and a way to do service to that.

And I assure you, the metaphor that you're showing up to the body with is not induced isotropic effect like elephant and mold deep fascia, but engaged membranes in a way that hydrates, de-agomerates, and results in flow. You're going to touch differently. Again, what you show up with story-wise is going to affect your behavior and the way that you interact in relationships. Dense fiber spatial qualities, palpable texture, strappy, dissectible, and this is the famous one, highly regular visible rays of dense collagenous fibers, multilayered, but these multilayers have no excursion, have no movement potential between them. They distort like a fabric like your clothing, but the multiple strings are just like that tape at the beginning.

They're stuck to each other. There is a differential movement between the layers of threads, the way there's differential movement between the membrane stack or between the lobules in a superficial fashion, relatively stable. It's flexible, distortable, elastic, but stable relative to its surroundings, so I call it exoskeletal. I won't blame you for it, but I often falsely attribute it with qualities that actually belong to somewhere else. When you see arguments going on on the internet about what fascia does and doesn't do, we're not always even talking about the same tissue, but now you people have seen three different types of tissue that all have different structures, functions, and movement potentials all working together to permit play within the unity, differential movement within the musculoskeletal system.

This is what we got to so far. One body, many textures, differential movement without separation. One body, we can go large. What about this? This picture's showing class one body, many textures, differential movement without separation.

I see it performing. I see one body, many textures, many textures, differential movement without separation. How large can you go? One body, one body, how big? One body, many textures, differential movement without separation.

I'm going to turn off the mic while I do. That's been five minutes ago, and when you see me jumping around on stage, that means we're getting back to it.