One thing that bothers me on social media regarding health and wellness is when some company, trainer, or whoever, puts out misinformation to bash others. Recently, Functional Patterns (FP) did this on Instagram. This will be a fisking in response. I’m not a physicist or materials science expert, so please correct me if you see any mistakes.
First, I want to say that although I know little about it, I don’t have anything negative to say about the Functional Patterns program. I’ve even thought about trying out FP, but I haven’t yet. It’s some kind of corrective exercise program, apparently teaching high-intensity movements with good form. Basically any exercise program that someone adheres to will have benefits, because exercise is good for you. Everyone wants to act like they have the secret sauce and they’re the first person in the world to discover that moving your body in some way is beneficial, but if you move with good form, your health will improve. That’s a basic fact that I bet even the Neanderthals knew. On with the fisking.
Functional Patterns' Argument
Here’s the Instagram post Functional Patterns has recently reshared. And here’s the full text of the post:
Fascia is a viscoelastic substance, meaning it’s both viscous (having a fluid component to it) as well as having elastic properties to it, which means it has the capacity to return to its original shape. Although one thing that’s never spoken about is that excessive stretching or mobility routines can ruin your fascial integrity.
More does not always = better in this situation, since there is a property of fascia called creep. This means fascia can undergo a process of plastic deformation if exposed to forces for a prolonged period of time, resulting in loss of tensegrity, force transfer, and pain.
Here are 3 things to consider to prevent fascial deformation:
1. Don’t engage in passive stretching or mobility routines.
Prolonged stretching and mobility routines don’t stretch muscles the way muscles evolved to stretch. Instead, they weaken fascia’s natural elastic recoil property, leaving joints unstable and exposing them to pain and injury.
2. Move correctly to train the function of elastic recoil.
Elastic recoil in the body isn’t optimized when you do static-based stretches like what you see in yoga. Entire chains of muscles contracting are what prime your body and fascia to create effortless and more efficient movement. Yoga doesn’t account for this at all.
3. Train in relation to the FP First 4. The body has optimal ranges of motion that it works from, all of which relate back to the functions found in the FP First 4: Standing, Walking, Running, and Throwing. Train in relation to these motions, and your joints and fascia will work the way they evolved to function.
Fascia is a crucial component of your body’s structural integrity, responsible for joint stability, force transmission, and energy transfer across your body. Taking approaches commonly pushed by the industry doesn’t consider these important factors in how fascia works, which is why you see pain constantly resurface without any real solutions.
Take it from those who have a track record of scientific evidence from our practitioners who work with clients from all over the globe: train your fascia intentionally, not habitually.
My Response
I’ll take these claims in turn.
Deforming Fascia
“One thing that’s never spoken about is that excessive stretching or mobility routines can ruin your fascial integrity. More does not always = better in this situation, since there is a property of fascia called creep. This means fascia can undergo a process of plastic deformation if exposed to forces for a prolonged period of time”
There’s actually a good amount of research on passive stretching. Even then, it’s hardly conclusive. There’s evidence that it’s good for you and I believe no evidence of serious negative effects. The only real negative effects I’m aware of occur when longer stretches, over 30 seconds, inhibit maximal muscular contraction. That makes sense, but it’s also very easy to avoid. Don’t only engage in prolonged stretching before exercises requiring large amounts of force. Interestingly, although there's little evidence that stretching prevents injury, it does appear to lower mortality risk compared to other exercises, perhaps because it reduces arterial stiffness.
Creep is real, but it’s not just a property of fascia. In fact, it’s a technical term in materials science that applies to all solids! What does “plastic” mean here? Plastic changes refer to a permanent deformation of a material without breaking, as opposed to “elastic” changes, such as a rubber band stretching and returning to its original shape. A good example of a plastic change would be...plastic. As you can see everywhere you look, plastic can be easily molded into all sorts of shapes and remain in that shape, that’s why it’s called plastic! As the FP post notes, fascia really is viscoelastic, but that’s why it’s OK to stretch fascia. We’re made for movement. Motion is lotion.
A Short Physics Lesson
Don’t engage in passive stretching or mobility routines.
Prolonged stretching and mobility routines don’t stretch muscles the way muscles evolved to stretch. Instead, they weaken fascia’s natural elastic recoil property, leaving joints unstable and exposing them to pain and injury.
They utilize a motte-and-bailey fallacy with words like “prolonged” or “excessive”, which are bad by definition, but then claim you shouldn’t engage in passive stretching or mobility at all, which is an absurdly strong claim to make. This claim is unsourced, and I’m really not sure how to address besides pointing out it just isn’t true. You can stretch a rubber band quite a bit and it returns to its original shape. Why? Because it hasn’t reached the yield point yet. Can you stretch a rubber band so hard it breaks? Sure. But, like, just don’t do that? Don’t stretch your hamstrings so hard for so long to the point of pain or tearing. I feel it’s obvious that people can become quite flexible while still having stable and healthy joints. There’s no way gymnasts could do the things they do if they had degraded elasticity and instability. Not only is there zero evidence that any reasonable stretching routine is doing permanent damage to your fascia or muscles, but stretching actually strengthens your muscles. It doesn’t give you a lot of strength, far less than resistance training, but it does. Why? Because stretching produces a load, tensile stress in this case, on your muscles, and your muscles adapt to handle that load.
Yoga Strengthens
Entire chains of muscles contracting are what prime your body and fascia to create effortless and more efficient movement. Yoga doesn’t account for this at all.
Anyone who’s done yoga knows it’s not just passive stretching. First, there’s an entire history of yoga that predates and is quite different from the hatha yoga practices of asanas that most people associate with it. Its original meaning is believed to come from the same root word as “yoke”, to join or unite, in English and meant to join the individual soul or consciousness (atma) with the universal (Brahma). More relevantly for our present purposes, you need to contract muscles to sustain even some simple postures, like warrior poses. More advanced practices like ashtanga yoga require a lot of strength and stability!
Image here
The points they make in section 3, besides the bashing of others again, sound good. Like I said, Functional Patterns is probably good for you, and I had a vague but generally positive view of it, which is part of what made this post more irritating, as I’d recently followed them on Instagram.
Fisking the Slides
While we're at it, I’d like to poke fun at the slides of the post as well.
This first slide shows images of dehydrated and hydrated fascia. Apparently, you’re supposed to imagine the dehydrated fascia is what your body looks like after doing yoga. That photo is not from someone who’s done a lot of yoga, but from a dead animal or cadaver, so, yes, the fascia is dried out and not functioning properly. Also, the text of the post doesn’t even mention dehydration, so I’m not sure of the relevance here.
The 4th slide shows an image of what I would say appears to be a healthy and fit middle-aged woman with defined musculature doing an advanced yoga pose, but there’s a black and white picture of dehydrated fascia in the background, so I guess she’s unhealthy and harming herself. The other image on the slide shows someone standing with hyperextended knees. Hypermobility can be a problem, but it’s not clear the person in the photo is actually in any pain or is unhealthy, and, more importantly, there’s no reason to think they have hyperextended knees because of a stretching routine.
The 5th slide is the most amusing to me. The illustration in the middle, of a skeleton with blue muscles, is straight from Anatomy Trains, which was founded by a former Rolf Institute instructor, Tom Myers. I’ve seen Anatomy Trains’ images regularly in other Functional Patterns materials. Being another school of Structural Integration (SI), Anatomy Trains is basically the same thing as Rolfing. If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that SI uses sustained pressure on fascia in order to loosen fascial adhesions, which would seem like exactly the kind of thing FP is warning against in their post!
To reiterate, Rolfing is good for you. Foundation Training is good for you. Resistance training is good for you. Yoga is good for you. Functional Patterns is good for you. Stretching is good for you. Dancing is good for you. If it makes you feel good, it’s probably a healthy habit, and it’s much easier to stick with healthy habits if they make you feel good and you enjoy them. Lifting weights will not turn you into an inflexible, tightened ball of high blood pressure. Yoga will not make your joints unstable. However, all of these healthy practices can be harmful, or at least suboptimal, if done too much, too fast, too long, or for some specific populations. The same goes for almost literally anything you do in your life: food and nutrition, work/life balance, and so on. Each practice grants some unique benefits that are harder to obtain than from other practices, but especially in a world that’s designed for us to be so inactive (e.g., endurance sitting in cars and chairs), it’s more important that you have some healthy habits, whatever those may be.
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