Julia Blackwell is a fascia release practitioner, educator, and creator of The Fascia Remedy.
Julia was born with severe nerve damage to her right shoulder and grew up going through the broken Western medicine system. After 23 years of being told her condition would never improve and feeling no lasting relief from any treatments, she was introduced to a unique type of fascia release bodywork in 2010. In just 3 months of this fascia specific work, she saw more improvement in the feel and function of her arm than she had in 16 years of traditional treatments!
This experience catapulted Julia into learning everything she could about fascia, the critical roles it plays in our movement and overall health, and how to restore it. After learning multiple modalities and working with clients for 12 years, she’s formulated her own approach for bodywork & foam rolling work called The Fascia Remedy. Using this methodology, she's been able to solve her own bouts of low back, knee, and neck pain in a matter of days, as well as help her community of professional athletes and everyday movers quickly alleviate pain, restore movement, and perform at their best.
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Hey mama, welcome back to another episode of the well -nourished mama podcast. If you have ever struggled with pain in any way, whether it's chronic or acute, you are going to find today's episode helpful.
Today we are learning all about fascia and how it is connected to literally everything in our body, but more specifically pain that we experience. I sit down and I talk with my friend Julia and she teaches us all about this complex organ in our body that literally nobody is talking about that has so much influence over how we feel, how we age, and just the quality of our life in general.
And let me tell you, I'm going to be totally honest, normally when I interview guests I have a pretty good fundamental understanding of the topic that we're talking about, especially if it's nutrition or exercise related.
And so a lot of the questions that I ask, I already know the answers to, but I'm simply guiding the conversation on your behalf. But with today's interview, I literally knew nothing. So I had to do some research beforehand and learn just enough that I could even like come up with an outline for this interview.
And then the entire time that Julia was talking, I was like so intently paying attention because I was learning right there along with you. And hopefully you can hear that in my intonation, but today's conversation is just so good.
It's so chock full of really, really good, helpful, tangible information. And I walked away with a lot of new things that I can do to improve my health in a very, very easy way. And hopefully you feel the same way.
So really excited for you to listen. As always, don't forget to leave a rating and review. Subscribe to the podcast. all the things that help us just be better friends and share the good news with all of our mamas.
So let's jump into today's episode with Julia all about fascia.
Julia Blackwell is a fascial release practitioner, educator, and creator of the fascia remedy. Julia was born with severe nerve damage to her right shoulder and grew up going through the broken Western medical system.
After 23 years of being told her condition would never improve and feeling no lasting relief from any treatments, she was introduced to a unique type of fascial release bodywork in 2010. In just three months of this fascia specific work, she saw more improvement in the feel and function of her arm than she had in 16 years of traditional treatments.
This experience catapulted Julia into learning everything she could about fascia, the critical role it plays in our movement and overall health, and how to restore it. After learning multiple modalities and working with clients for 12 years, she's formulated her own approach for bodywork and foam rolling work called the fascia remedy.
Using this methodology, she's been able to solve her own bouts of low back, knee, and neck pain in a matter of days, as well as help her community of professional athletes and everyday movers quickly alleviate pain, restore movement, and perform at their best.
Hey Julia, thanks so much for joining us today. Hey Brooke, thanks so much for having me. I am really excited for our conversation today because I know a little bit about a bunch of different things with my different guests, but I actually do not know a lot about fascia.
I just know that it's a part of our body. And so I get to learn some things today and so I know our mamas are going to get to learn a lot. But before we jump into that, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into your career?
Yeah, well, I have been living out in Denver, Colorado for the last almost 14 years, which is pretty wild. And I am a fascia release practitioner and a foam rolling instructor. I've been doing that since 2011.
The story of how I got into this is a little lengthy, but it literally started when I was born. I was almost a 10 pound baby and in the process of being born, I got stuck. So in an effort to pull me out, the doctor ended up stretching and tearing most of the nerves in my right shoulder.
It was just a real bummer. Yeah. Did you have shoulder dystocia? Is that what it was? Yeah, they tore all the nerves and most of the nerves in my brachial plexus area, which is this bundle of nerves right near the shoulder.
Kind of more towards the chest, though. OK, so I did have a big nerve regraph surgery when I was about four months old, which did help bring my arm back online, if you will. Yeah. However, I still was left with a lot of tension, limited mobility.
and limited strength. So I grew up going to so many different doctors and practitioners. I tried just about any modality you could possibly think of at least that you know Ohio in the 90s and early 2000s had to offer.
Mm -hmm. And nothing truly made a lasting impact. Either I feel better for a couple of hours and it would go right back or largely I didn't feel a difference at all. So I still like to try things out just to experience them see if there was a way for me to get some relief from this incessant tightness get this mobility back in some way but everyone had told me growing up that this condition was never gonna get any better in fact it was only gonna get worse most likely which is frankly an insane thing to tell anyone but that's neither here nor there at this point.
So it wasn't until So 2010, I moved from Cincinnati to Boulder, Colorado, and I happened to meet this lady who did a very specific type of fascia -release bodywork. And I knew barely anything about fascia, and I'm an exercise physiology major.
They touch on it so briefly in the form of, hey, this is connective tissue, it's what's attaching your ligaments and your muscles to your bone, and that is about it. So I really had no idea what to expect from this specific type of work, but I saw more results in the feel and function of my arm in a couple of months doing this specific type of fascia -release work than I had in a lifetime of typical treatments and other modalities.
So it was a very significant moment in my life. I completely changed the trajectory of my career. I had started as a corrective exercise specialist and a personal trainer, and essentially dropped most of that in an effort to do fascia release instead.
I've learned just about anything I can. I'll grab any book I can get my hands on, although sadly, there's still not enough out there, in my opinion. It's a pretty newly researched topic, but that allowed me to open my practice and I've been helping people with pain and mobility and performance since, yeah, 2011.
That's amazing. So would you consider this kind of like a subset of physical therapy? Like, are you considered a physical therapist and this is your specialty or is this something different? No, I'm not a physical therapist, but it is a subset.
The way that I am doing this specific type of work, it involves a lot of active movement. So it's not the same passive treatment that you get where you simply go into your massage and lay on a table.
out for the next hour. It's a very proactive and interactive type of release so it does require a little bit more muscle and nervous system effort than your average more passive modality for sure. Okay that's really cool.
I love your story and I love that something that you struggled with for so long ended up I guess creating your career in a sense right? It's I guess was a blessing. I don't want to say that like I wish you ill but it sounds like it was a blessing in disguise and now you're able to help so many people with something that you know I'm not familiar with and our mamas probably aren't familiar with so that's really cool that you were able to take that and turn it into something positive and I want to dive into that.
So can you just start us off with the very basics. What are fascia? Is it plural? Do I say is or are? It's one system. It's one system. one system. Okay, what is fascia? Sure, yes. So fascia is the biological fabric that holds everything in our body together.
So you can think of it like plastic wrap. It wraps around every single muscle fiber, every muscle fiber, every muscle group, every bone, ligament, tendon, nerve, organ, blood vessel. It's all wrapped in this material like a three -dimensional plastic wrap suit that we wear on the inside.
So if it were to magically disappear out of your body, you would go tumbling to the ground in a pile of bones and goo. That's how imperative it is for our shape, our structure, and our texture. That's absolutely wild that like, I don't know that, but it's so important to our body.
So is it really sensitive, I'm assuming? Like if it does hold all of us together, are there lots of nerve endings that make it really sensitive? Yes, it's the most highly sensitive organ that we have.
So it's covered in free nerve endings, and these things called proprioceptors, which we can dive into later when we talk about stress, that are constantly taking in data about our external and internal environment, as well as where our body is in space and how we're supposed to use it.
So it's very sensitive, but it has lots of different roles than just, yeah, attaching things together. We're creating our posture. It's also what allows us to absorb shock. It's the system that helps bring nutrients to all of our cells.
So it's how we get all of those lovely nutrients down to the cellular level and how we carry waste out. It's also how we stay hydrated. It's what's bringing water to all of our tissues, but it really does so many different roles.
and for the longest time when they would do dissections on cadavers and such, they'd be like, what's all of this crap around the muscles? I just want to see that. So they would literally throw it in the garbage.
So it's such a cool topic because the more we start to study it, almost the more mysterious it gets. We keep finding more and more roles that it's playing in our body. And again, that sensitivity and that interaction with ourselves in the world around us plays such a huge role in how we feel and how our body moves.
Okay, my mind is literally blown right now. I feel like you just opened a can of worms and I have so many more questions. Okay, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you said that it's an organ. Did I hear that right?
Yeah, it's considered. It's one uninterrupted interconnected system that functions as a unit. So yes, it's considered an organ. Just like our skin is an organ, right? Yes. Okay. so fascinating yeah so that means not only is it sensitive to like touch and movement but like you said it's sensitive to nutrients and what's around it and toxins and all of the other things that are inside our body right so in a sense it's it sounds like it's kind of the how do I put it it's kind of like the first line of defense of what gets deeper in our body right if it's sensitive to the nutrients and all the other things that are floating around in our blood and in our body then it sounds like it can really affect us at a really deep level if things aren't right yeah it's the only system that touches all of the other systems right if it's wrapping around bones and blood vessels and organs the lymphatic system all of these things are contained within our fascia so by improving the health of your fascia or restoring space that's been lost or hydration that's been lost in your fascia we're able to help all of these other systems of the body simultaneously wow that is amazing okay so how do we know if our fascia is healthy or not yeah well I would say if you are experiencing absolutely any aches and pains that's a big sign that fascia is unhealthy and that can range from oh you know your back feels a little stiff and sore when you wake up or after you do a workout your shoulder kind of aches or your knees are a little sore all the way to chronic pain fibromyalgia things like that a lot of times what we think is a joint problem a tendon problem a disc problem is actually a fascial problem you might experience a loss of mobility or flexibility that's a good sign that things aren't going quite right in your fascia if you feel chronically dehydrated just feeling heavy If you're very injury -prone or my least favorite thing that I hear in the entire world from clients is if you feel like you're quote -unquote just getting old, that's usually a pretty clear sign that you're a fascist little dehydrated and restricted.
So so interesting. Okay, so if let's say, you know, there's let's say we have an achy shoulder, like you mentioned, right? I know in fitness, you can't spot treat fat loss, like you can't do an ab workout to lose fat around your stomach, but can you spot treat your fascia?
Like if your shoulder is hurting and you suspect that it might be your fascia, can you spot treat just that area or is it just something that you have to treat as a whole? That's such a great question.
You can spot treat. The short answer is yes, you can. So if you've got an achy shoulder, you could start releasing areas. and then the pec, and the lat, and the bicep, and it's not directly on that spot, but you're working on things nearby, and that absolutely can be huge in helping relieve pain.
I would recommend in the long term, as we were talking before about how health of your fascial system helps all of the other systems in your body, so eventually I think it's smart to move around the body and try to release all of those areas that are feeling really tight or tender, but you can absolutely start with the areas that are causing you the most pain or giving you the most issue.
Okay, good to know, and we kind of been hinting at this for a second, but what are some things that we can do to keep our fascia healthy? We've talked about some signs that things might be off, we've talked about how maybe sometimes there's a specific spot that's kind of achy, or just getting old in general, so to combat all of that, what are some things we can do to keep our fascia healthy and really just stay on top of it?
The easiest one, I say easiest in quotes, because it can be tough at times, but movement, movement is such a critical part of how our body is designed, and most of us are not moving the way that our bodies are intended, myself included.
We're both sitting down as we have this conversation, right? Yep. You know, but movement causes fascia to slowly, and it usually happens very slowly over time, but it'll slowly start to shrink down and stick to itself, because our body isn't trying to hurt us, it's trying to help us, and it'll start to mold into different positions and shapes that are going to help us be the most efficient in things that we do the most often.
So if you're spending a lot of time sitting at a desk for work and then binging Netflix for a few hours at night, that's a lot of time where you're in a seated position. So that's certainly going to affect things.
So the more you move, some kind of more dynamic full range movement. So reaching your arms over your head, twisting, bending all directions, that's gonna get hydration to all areas of our fascia. So unfortunately, drinking water is not the only answer here.
If most of the time you're spending on the couch or sitting down, if you drink an extra water bottle a day, all you're really doing is giving yourself a recipe to be in the bathroom every 30 minutes.
That water has nowhere to go. So when we move our bodies, it doesn't have to even be a workout. It can be a walk. It can just be a more dynamic, active stretch. That's going to allow all those little droplets of water go through the fascial system and get to the areas that we actually need it.
Now. it is still important to drink water obviously not saying to skip out on water but movement can hydrate you just as much as adequate water intake um what goes along with that is also releasing your fascia so imagine we were using the plastic wrap analogy imagine you have a crumpled up all of plastic wrap somewhere in your body and you slowly dump a bottle of water over it how much water is realistically going to get to the inside layer of the crumpled up all of plastic wrap well almost none if any right yeah so by releasing fascia where we slowly start to pull the wrinkles out of the plastic wrap and bring more space back into that area now when we pour a bottle of water over it all areas of that spot are going to get hydrated so releasing fascia can also be very important to improve your overall hydration we've got to give your body the space to receive that water that you're drinking absolutely i love love love that you touched on that water is not just enough because i preach this from a nutritional standpoint where moms are coming to me saying i am trying so hard to keep up my milk supply and i'm drinking so much water why isn't it helping and i'm like you need electrolytes you need minerals to deliver that water into your cells and so here you are from a different perspective also saying just water isn't enough we need to couple it with movement and intentional movement at that being aware of our lifestyle so that our body knows where to put all of that water that we're drinking and then when we have the minerals from our diet now we can actually deliver it so not only are is the water being moved to the right place but now it can actually be delivered to the doorstep into the house right of our cell and it all kind of works together so I love that you pointed that out because now it's not just me that's pointing that out yes minerals in the water huge you know I'm no nutritionist by any means but eating your water can also be really helpful for fascia so fruits and vegetables that already have a higher water content that actually has a special water type of water in it called structured water which you also have in your fascial system and that's a great way to add a little bit more hydration as well but the movement and the release I would say are your top two ways from a different perspective to feel more hydrated perfect okay let's dive in a little bit more into the release part because I'm sitting here saying okay that's great I need to release my fascia but how the heck do I do that can you talk to me about how we can do fascial release on just the very basic And even like a daily level, right?
Where something maybe like five minutes a day, something small that we can do to do that. So the good news is because fascia is so plentiful and it's everywhere in our body, pretty much anything you do as body work is going to help your fascia a little bit.
But I found over the years that the best way, what's made the biggest impact for me and the people I've worked with over the last 10 plus years is compressing an area of fascia and then actively moving.
So much of the treatments out there are very passive and those can absolutely work, but it takes so much longer. We really need to get the nervous system on board with the changes that we're trying to make.
And we wanna be able to stretch the big sheets of fascia multi -directionally. So most of the way I teach people to release fascia involves a foam roller. So let's use a foam roller as an example. We've all probably rolled back and forth on our quads on a foam roller, right?
We're in that plank position. We're using our arms a little bit to pull us back and forth and we go up and down along the quads. Well, instead of doing that, if you stay on one area of the quads, the same position, but you find a spot that feels a little tender or sore and then you stay there, you let your body sink into it, you breathe and then you start bending your heels back like a hamstring curl.
So we're bending from the knees and then straightening back out. And so now we're moving different joints. It's gonna feel totally different than when you simply were rolling up and down the leg. After a few times of bending and straightening, I usually tell people to stay bent and then rock their heels side to side.
So now we're going from an even more different direction and we're able to stretch. release that fascia in a much more multi -directional way and that's the kind of release that tends to last. If you've ever experienced you know rolling an area and then it feels tight the next day it's because you didn't get the deeper layers of fascia or you weren't able to cross fiber it or stretch it in enough directions to really pull out the wrinkles of that plastic wrap.
So highly highly recommend that you know if you already have a roller or a massage ball of some kind instead of simply rolling around on it just pick a spot that feels sore you can use your intuition on this usually it's pretty obvious when you compress an area you're like ooh ow yep but then stay there and move around a nearby joint as long as you can keep that one area compressed and move very slowly and intentionally it has such a greater impact for fascial health than simply laying on one or rolling up and down.
So you were the person that I avoided in high school after track practice. I'm listening to you just to talk about rolling out and I'm imagining a lacrosse ball in my head and I'm like, you are the person that I actively avoided in high school.
Oh my goodness. I know, the good news is when you bring in the brain, the way that we're doing with active release, when your nervous system is on board, it's so much quicker to interrupt poor movement patterns or tension patterns.
So even though it's maybe not fun, you can spend way less time doing it when you do it this way, as opposed to you needing to foam roll for 30 minutes. It's a much more direct, like let's get in, let's get out, let's breathe, go through this whole range of motion and you're done.
Perfect. Okay, so obviously foam rollers are good for like our legs and our back and maybe even our arms and our shoulders, but what about like more fine tuned spots? Would you suggest a lacrosse ball or something similar to that?
Yes, exactly. I typically use a lacrosse ball, but any size, similar size is great. That allows you to get into smaller pockets, like into the pec, into specific areas of the neck and the traps. And then sometimes I'll actually just use my hands to compress the spot if it's really, really specific, because our fingers are small and we can get in there.
But I find if you release the bigger areas of fascia first, a lot of those little tiny spots that you think are an issue, no longer are an issue. It's usually coming from those deeper, bigger strips of fascia.
Okay, one last question about release before we move on to stress. Can like our partner or our friend help us with fascial release like through some sort of massage or is this really something that's just with ourselves with some sort of tool like a foam roller or a lacrosse ball?
It can be both. You know, I've certainly talked couples and partners through how to help each other do a more intense version of a release, but you can honestly just do it yourself. And in fact, there's a lot of benefit when we're doing it ourselves.
So one of the rules of our fascia that I don't think we touched on is it's a protector. It wants to protect us from impact and prevent our body from changing easily because otherwise every time we accidentally banged our elbow against the wall or crashed our mountain bike, if our body changed easily, we'd be screwed, right?
Fascia does not change easily at once. to protect us and hold our current position. So when we do the active movement ourselves, it really helps the body understand that it's safe to access certain ranges of motion.
It's safe to change. And I personally think you can get a lot of results simply doing this on your own because you're working with your own nervous system. Okay, love that. So all my single mamas, you're taking care of.
You can do this yourself. I love it.
Okay, let's dive into the stress connection with our fascia. You talk about a lot, blah, podcast. You talk about this a lot on your Instagram page. And so I know this is something that you're really passionate about.
Can you talk to us about how our emotions affect our fascia and the connection between stress and our fascia? Yes, so we already touched on we have all of these free nerve endings and proprioceptors in our fascia and proprioceptors are little receptors that tell our body a lot of information so it'll let us know where our body is in space how we need to move our limbs how much force to use but it's really taking in a constant data collection from everything that's going on in our environment it's just a constant feedback loop if you will so it's taking in all of the information about what's going on in the world around us but it's also taking stock of what's happening internally so if we have a lot of stress anxiety god forbid maybe PTSD as well your body is going to register that as a threat and we actually perfect time and we just touched on one of the rules of fascia being to protect us.
So when the body registers some type of a threat, whether it's a real physical threat, such as you just use the example like crashing your mountain bike, but it doesn't react any differently if that threat is internal.
So if we're really stressed and the body thinks, oh no, there's a threat, something's about to happen, it can't tell the difference between what's real and perceived. So fascia is going to respond accordingly, whether that stress response is from a real thing or from our internal environment.
And what largely happens with that is fascia contracts. So our fascia has its own contractile cells, which means it's able to contract independent of our muscles. So you may feel, you know, squeeze your muscles and think, oh well, my muscles don't feel very tight, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your fascia isn't stuck in a contracted state.
And studies have shown that over time really prolonged stress, it's very prevalent in PTSD, but chronic anxiety can do this as well. Fascia will start to thicken because of its constant time under contraction.
And as you can imagine, that makes the lymphatic system very sluggish. It makes our nervous system very sluggish with the ability to fire nerves and it makes everything a little bit stiffer and harder for our body to move easily.
So stress can play a really big impact over time and how much pain we're feeling and just our general well -being if we feel stiff or heavy or dense. But yeah, one of my old mentors used to say, fascia is like the paper your life story is written on.
You know, all of this information that our proprioceptors are receiving means that every thought, emotion, emotion experience and trauma you've ever had has passed through your fascial system and has been logged by it So what this sounds like to me is the concept from the book your body keeps score or the body keeps score Yes, that's where a lot of these studies are from Okay, so I haven't actually read that book, but I'm familiar with the concept.
So is is that book talking about fascia or Is that just kind of the connection we're making today where? That's that's basically what we're talking about is our fascia is what's logging everything in our book of life it touches on You know stress responses to coordination and muscle tension and a little bit of fascia Mostly that book is talking about it from a more psychological side of it, but it's easy to make these connections We have such a powerful mind -body connection.
There's really no way to separate the two. So we have to keep in mind that a very stressful life or having a lot of anxiety is going to physically show up in our body at some point. Okay so maybe that's why my neck pain never really went away in high school because I was stressed all the time and I could always feel it.
I know our mamas that are listening can't see what I'm doing but you can see me. It's like right in the back of my neck it kind of goes down my traps like the back of my shoulders. That's where whenever I get stressed that's where I feel it is right here on both sides.
Yeah you may notice if you have something more chronic especially like neck pain or back pain if you have a week that's more stressful that pain goes up that's part of that stress fascia connection but I had the same thing you know when I was growing up I had these terrible stomach aches and I went to the doctor so many times and my mom was trying so desperately to figure out what was wrong and it took till I was a teenager to be like oh that's just anxiety.
The physical manifestation of all the anxiety that I was having so yeah it's really important to understand that you might have pain that has more of a emotional root cause. That is so so fascinating to me so what that sounds like to me is that our fascial system is that the right adjective am I saying that right?
Yeah okay so what it sounds like to me is that our fascial system is connected to our nervous system is that correct? So they do talk to each other but your fascia can actually communicate outside of the nervous system within itself it has its own network of communication which is wild I could talk about this for another you know hour here but nerve signals can fire at about 150 miles an hour.
Their tracking signals firing and fascia at about 700 miles an hour. So it is not only communicating just as much, if not more than the nervous system, but it's doing it way faster. So it's a really fascinating organ that's talking to itself and all other parts of the body very, very quickly.
Wow, that is so interesting. Okay, so in regards to the nervous system aspect though, in one of your Instagram posts that I was looking at, you talked about how a reactive nervous system makes it difficult to release fascia.
Can you talk to me about what a reactive nervous system might look like and some things that might be going on in our life that are contributing to this negative feedback loop? Great question. So I've discovered over the years, there's a couple different types of nervous system patterns that I see.
see, not everyone falls into one of these buckets, but the reactive nervous system is one of them. And what that looks like is as soon as someone pops on their roller or if they're working with me in my office, as soon as I can press any area of fascia for them, there's a gasp and there's holding of breath, there's squeezing of eyes shut, there's moving really quickly through the range of motion and almost, yeah, like a hyperventilating type of breathing if they're not holding their breath, which is not a necessarily normal response.
And nervous system patterns, there's no right or wrong. It's just an accumulation of experiences you've had in your life and everybody's a little bit different. But if you are looking to release fashion, yeah, you're huffing and puffing and squeezing your body really tight and moving through all the active ranges of motion really quickly.
Unfortunately, that's not really going to effectively change your fashion. We want to be as much as possible in a more parasympathetic nervous state, which just means we're accessing the calmer side of our nervous system.
I will say it is a practice, right? So normally when we feel a lot of sensation like that, it's normally a bad thing, right? We've sustained an injury or it's our body trying to let us know that something is off and maybe a certain movement is unsafe.
And so we have to retrain our brain a little bit to say, okay, there's a lot of sensation in this area, but I'm going to breathe really deep through my diaphragm. I'm going to move as slow as I can with good control and train your body to be more calm through that sensation.
But it's such an incredible way to improve your overall resilience to being able to breathe through sensation is very important but the good news is even if you can't do that right now because you find you yourself have a very reactive nervous system there are ways that you can just decrease the intensity so wrap your roller in a really thick workout mat to add padding you could straight up put a pillow between your body in the foam roller if you like or of course just let off the compression that you're doing with the lacrosse ball if you're using your hand to add compression so there's a lot of ways to just decrease the intensity there's really no reason to push through something needlessly painful yeah well there is a lot of sensation to it know that yeah you don't get any stickers at the end of your foam rolling session pushing through something that was an eight or nine out of ten so we want to make sure that you can breathe that you can move slowly because that active movement is such an important part of this, you've got to find a way for your body to feel a little bit more calm.
And I have seen that over time, that nervous system pattern starts to change as long as you're putting the intention into it and really focusing on that breathing aspect. Fascinating. Okay, so would you say that nervous system regulation is a precursor to fascial release and fascial regulation then?
I really don't want to make it sound over complicated for people. I think if you can really breathe deep through your diaphragm, so breathe in and out, ideally through your nose, breathing in and out both through the nose calms the nervous system.
And when we breathe all the way down through the diaphragm, we stimulate the vagus nerve, which is what turns on that parasympathetic nervous system. So all that to say, if you breathe really deeply and slowly, thinking volume on your inhale, length on the exhale, you can do fascial release right now.
Okay, well, that makes me feel a lot better. I know we're always crunched for time as moms. It honestly feels like even trying to scrounge up five minutes to do something for ourselves is like impossible most days, especially like at the end of the day.
So that's really good to know that it's not like, okay, well, I have to do this before I can try and let go of some of the stress or whatever. I like that it can kind of be packaged together if you're, I guess what you're trying to get at is being intentional, right, and really getting that mind -body connection there so that you are mentally present, you are trying to really feel where you are trying to feel and be mindful of that movement and that release and that sensation so that you can really just be as thorough as possible.
Absolutely, yeah, that's it. Perfect. Okay, now for the part that I've been most excited about. I want most excited about, I want to talk about specific areas of the body that could be connected to fascial stress or just, you know, needing some release here and there.
A lot of these places in the body are things that I think us moms struggle with a lot, especially during pregnancy and postpartum. If you're breastfeeding or just trying to heal from birth and pregnancy.
So I want to pick your brain and see if there's specific recommendations that you have for each of these areas. Can we get into that? Yes, absolutely. Okay, so first one is going to be our head, neck, upper shoulders, traps situation.
Like I mentioned earlier, this is where I feel a lot of my stress is right in here. So what would you recommend if that's an area that we're... feeling a lot of tension and want to try and release. How do we do that?
Yeah, so most times with that specific area in the back of your neck and shoulders feeling tense, it's coming from the front of your body. So think about you know how I know you said you had this as early as high school, but you might have been slumping in your chair while you were sitting in class day in the front part of our chest and shoulders and even the front part of our neck.
If you have gone through a pregnancy, you suddenly have a lot more weight in the front of your body. It's going to be harder to not roll your shoulders forward. Even after you've had a baby, you're holding that baby in front of you and so what really gets super tense is the front part of our chest.
So getting a lacrosse ball in that pec area and moving your arm up and down overhead like a shoulder press does wonders for that back of neck pain. You could even work on the front part of the neck. I don't want to throw to me like medical terms, but we've got a lot of musculature on the side of the neck and then right next to the column of our neck that can be worked very gently with a lacrosse ball and it helps so much.
I literally was like straightening up here on the floor as you're talking like yeah you know you might have been slunched over and I was like oh okay I'm gonna straighten my back now. Right? Okay so that's good to know so maybe and I don't know if this applies with every part that we're talking about but at least in this scenario it's kind of thinking about the opposite right so if it's if it's the the back of our neck that's hurting then it's probably the front that's being pulled or compressed.
And so focusing on that will help relieve that tension. Is that kind of what you were getting at? Yes, the pattern of opposites happens a lot in the body So if you've been working on something you've been working on this area and it's still a problem.
It's Your sign that that's not the root cause, you know where we feel pain is almost never the problem. And so Your whatever pain you're experiencing the root cause may be somewhere else. So that crumpled up all of plastic Plastic wrap you may not realize this in a different area and once that area is released the pain goes away.
Gotcha Okay, so I'm really curious what your answer is gonna be for this one because we're talking about opposites. What about low back? Yeah, so quads is this kind of an opposite? It's close enough.
Quads is the number one reason that people experience low back pain Um, I also think the IT bands, which are essentially your outer thighs going down from the hip to the knee are also big contributors.
So I'd say those are my top two areas that play a huge role for low back pain. Okay. So maybe a foam roller for those. Um, and like you said, focusing on one spot at a time rather than just rolling back and forth and calling it good.
Right. We definitely don't want to roll up and down on the IT band. The IT band is mostly fascia and is responsible for keeping our hips feeling stable and it's not supposed to be lengthened. It can't really be lengthened, but when we roll up and down, sometimes it can cause the IT bands to get even more tense because it thinks you're trying to lengthen them and they want to stay at a certain tension level to keep the hips stable.
So definitely make sure that you just hold on one spot in the IT band and bend and straighten your knee or do some type of movement instead of just rolling up and down. Love that. How about the pelvic floor?
And this one, I'm going to put a little asterisk by it and say whether or not we've had kids, usually here on the podcast, the pelvic floor is in conversation with being pregnant or postpartum, but I know that we have a pelvic floor before we get pregnant and you've never had kids.
And I know you have a pelvic floor that needs love. So talk to me about the pelvic floor. Ooh, yeah, pelvic floor is huge. So technically all of our fascia is interconnected. I mentioned that earlier.
It's one system, but there are certain trains of fascia, as they're called, that are more interconnected than others. So it's like, if you were to pull on one end of the body on this area of fascia, this entire series of muscles and bones would move with it.
So there are these sections that are more connected. So we have a deep front line that goes up our calves. through the inner thighs through the pelvic floor and our pelvic bowl and it goes all the way up through the front part of our core and it ends up at either side of our jaw through our neck and this one is huge for anyone who whether you've had kids or not this one is just an area of tension I've heard it be called the trauma line so if you're really stressed this is an area that tends to start to shrink and get pulled in so for pelvic floor I actually work with a lot of people on pelvic floor my top two areas to release would be the adductors which are your inner thighs and then in that core itself because that's the meatiest part of that line which will help both the pelvic floor but it could also help with things down in the inner knees all the way up to the jaw so that's the cool part about working one area of these interconnected lines is you get the benefit from all the way from start to finish of that line that is so fascinating i had no idea that was all connected so does that mean that when i'm clenching my jaw i'm basically creating this chain reaction that is adding stress to all these places yeah dang it everything is connected but the good news is that you can always release fascia there's no point in which your fascia is too far gone to start working on these areas the one caveat i'll say is we've been talking about foam rollers and lacrosse balls please don't use either of those on your core you want to find a soft more squishy ball when it comes to working near the organ so before you just hop on your lacrosse ball please don't do that thank you for that i thought you were going to say please don't like sit on a lacrosse ball on your pelvic floor like trying to do that and i was like yeah i don't think i want to do that either that doesn't sound comfortable you can sit on the softer squishy ball you can do kegels or you know just do a couple of pelvic floor exercises while you have that proprioceptive feedback from the ball sometimes that can be really powerful and we're still stretching these tiny little areas of fascia but we can affect it with those larger groups through our core and our adapters for sure okay tiny tiny little tangent do you have any advice for people that clench their jaw regularly i find myself doing this more often um like when i'm doing a task like i'm washing the dishes and i'm deep in thought i find myself clenching my jaw or i know some people clench their jaw when they sleep and you mentioned how that's all connected do you have any advice for us jaw clinchers that want to try and lower our stress a little bit i mean i i think you're already hitting the nail on the head what are other ways you can help with your stress that's usually some type of a stress response.
There is a possibility that if you can lift your chest a little bit in your rib cage and put your head in a better position right over your shoulders, you may not need to clench your jaw quite as much.
But it is difficult when you're doing it sleeping because you're like, I can't give myself to unclench my jaw while I'm sleeping. But there is a whole other conversation. There's a lot of fascia you can release in the masseter and in the areas of the jaw with your hands, but that's a much more involved process.
But that can really help relieve tension from clenching your jaw regularly too. Good to know. Okay, let's move on to number four. This one is the sciatic nerve. And I know a lot of my pregnant mamas are like going to be sitting on the edge of their seat.
Talk to us about the sciatic nerve. Yes, that's such a big one with all of the pregnant people that I have. worked with as well. So largely what's happening when you're growing a tiny human inside you, things are constantly shifting around.
Your weights being distributed differently week to week, day to day sometimes. I have a couple clients that when they come in I see them week to week I'm like your hips are shifted in a different position every time you come in.
It's just a part of the process that your body is shifting around. Tell me, we feel it. I can tell you right now I feel that. Anytime we end up getting a shift coming from our pelvis, fascia can start to tighten to compensate for whatever that shift is in order to keep us more stable.
But anytime a rotation is happening the sciatic nerve can get compressed depending on which way we're rotated. So my easiest advice would be release the quad on the same side that you feel the sciatic and then release the IT band on the opposite leg of where you feel the sciatic.
So that's a kind of a temporary solution but you may find that that sciatic could change side to side and I would keep with that pattern just to relieve the tension for now. But it's normally due to the rotation happening from the front of the pelvis and then the other ones rotated back.
Right and I'm sure that daily movement and even some strength training to try and keep our body strong despite all of the changes during pregnancy or even if this is something that we struggle with regularly is going to help as well because then we're less likely to compensate, right?
Yeah I would highly recommend like do those two releases and then go for your walk or then go do whatever exercise you are going to do so that you can reduce your pain and reduce the likelihood that you're going to be compensating because of pain.
It's a great way to reduce if not eliminate. the pain so that you can go do what you want to do perfect okay this one has a question mark next to it um i'm curious if you have any suggestions for mastitis this is basically just inflammation in the breast due to um an oversupply of milk um it's usually accompanied with like a fever and an infection and moms get sick and i'm just genuinely curious if there's any sort of fascial work that we can do to kind of help bring down that inflammation and help the process get through the sickness anytime there's inflammation in the body there's some type of a lymph stagnation and so we have lymph nodes all over all over our body but we have a lot in our neck in our chest and then right down under the armpit those are some really big ones that are nearby the breast.
So I would certainly say go lighter with your compression but releasing areas in the chest at the top part of the ribs under the armpit and possibly in the neck as well is going to help free up your lymphatic system to carry out more of that inflammation and possibly reduce the time that you have an infection.
So we need to get lymph moving for sure. I would just recommend using a little less weight. It doesn't take a lot of weight to stimulate the lymphatic system. We just want to make sure that it's flowing.
It's kind of like a hose that's barely got any water running through it. If we have any kinks in the hose that's going to be that's going to play a big role. So we want to make sure that that is still flowing as much as possible.
Okay I'm so glad you had an answer for that one. Oh that makes me feel so good. Okay next one is C -section scars. I'm pretty sure that well now I am pretty sure the surgeon has to cut through fascia to get to your uterus to get to baby.
So we're actually like splicing some of our fascia and so there's not only healing from all of the incisions but like just all of the proprioceptors and all of the nerves around that incision site on top of having to heal from pregnancy in general.
So what tips do you have for our C -section moms that want to minimize the pain around their scar, minimize the scar tissue and just everything that comes with having a C -section? Yeah I know that's a big one.
Yeah there's no way to not cut through that fascia. Well a couple things but for sure make sure that your scar is fairly healed right like we don't want to be doing this with any kind of a fresh scar but you can absolutely start.
doing some gentle core release, like we were talking about earlier, with a really soft squishy ball. Being able to just compress an area and breathe really deeply in and out can start to gently stretch all of that scar tissue and fascia that may have become tight in the process.
You can also manually work on your scar a little bit, and that means using your hands. So you can gently pull your scar in and compress it a little bit. You could even vibrate your hands a little bit to give it that little bit of vibration.
If it's healed enough, you can also stay compressed with that scar and then gently spread your fingers apart to stretch that fascia within the actual scar. So I would recommend that you go bigger areas of fascia first, so release the core a little bit first, and then go in with your hands and start working on more of those specific spots.
but that will help break up some adhesions and certainly get more blood flow to those areas. And ultimately nothing in our body can heal without blood flow. We gotta get that blood flow there. Right, perfect.
That's so great. I personally haven't had a C -section, so this is something I'm trying to learn a lot about. So really grateful you have some tips for that so that we can add to that repertoire. And this one's gonna be on the spot, this last body part.
I forgot to put it in our outline. But I'm curious about the feet, especially like plantar fasciitis. This is something my husband has struggled with for most of his life, and especially pregnant women.
You know, our feet just are aching, aching, especially in the third trimester. So what tips do you have for the feet? The simplest one will be go after releasing the calf. And it is important to note, I don't mean stretch the calf.
I mean, put your calf on a roller, point and flex your ankle, move your toes in and out. Like we need to do that multi -directional stretch. I have seen over the years, people that simply throw their toe up on a wall and lean into it and just crank on their calf, trying to stretch it.
It can make plantar fasciitis worse. So we wanna make sure we're restoring that space in the fascia and not just trying to crank on the calf and stretch it. I think that's the easiest solution. What also happens, especially with pregnancy, as we were talking about earlier, is all these little hip shifts and rotations that happen as things are moving along and the baby is growing.
So you may find that there are certain areas of the legs, and it could be on a totally different, could be on the other leg that give you relief in your heel. That's a bit more complicated, but I'm happy, you know, if anyone's really struggling with this, plantar fasciitis is a very solvable problem.
So I'm happy to help with that. Otherwise, simply start with the calf. Okay. Love it. And lastly, before we close, I thought of one more thing off script. I'm curious, do you know anything about dry brushing or gua sha?
Yeah, yeah, that's dry brushing is mostly about simulating the lymphatic system because our lymphatic system lives in our superficial fascia, which means it's just pretty close to the skin. So it doesn't take a lot to keep the lymph moving.
Gua sha is doing a similar thing. I think they're great. I certainly am not here to discourage using either of those tactics. I love them. If you're really experiencing pain, I would say you wanna get a more multi -directional or cross -fibering movement on fascia.
Most gua sha on dry brushing is going with the fibers of your muscles and fascia. Okay. on that note would you say that those therapies and techniques are more helpful maybe for just like daily facial health and more of like a maintenance level rather than like a reactive I'm trying to fix a problem approach okay those are both great okay awesome I started getting into dry brushing and I noticed it just like makes me feel better I don't I don't know if I've necessarily seen any like visible changes or I don't know if I can like put my finger on anything specific or I'm like this feels better because I've been dry brushing but I was sitting here listening to our conversation I was like I'd like to think that maybe dry brushing is just helping with the lymphatic system and the circulation so that maybe it extends the life of my fascia or it's making my fascia more resilient so that I don't experience as much pain later on absolutely any type of stagnation in the body is where pain or inflammation tends to happen so anything that you can do to just keep those fluids in your body flowing whether it be blood flow lymphatic system or the water that we have in our fascial system all those things are really wonderful okay I think that is the end of our notes this has been such an incredible conversation Julia I have loved so much learning about this as you can tell I just kind of put you on the spot a lot because I kept having things pop in my head so thanks for putting up with me this has been such a good conversation I want to ask you one last question that I ask all my guests and that is what is a non -negotiable to you to living a well -nourished life well I am now addicted to fascia release so I personally need fascia release in my life to feel well But I'll also say a close second is I live in Colorado so I'm very lucky.
It's sunny 350 days a year, but I need to go outside I'm a very outdoorsy person and I need my nature time. So that's a close second. I love that. That's a great answer I think I don't know if I've had anybody say sunshine yet or like being outside.
So Congratulations. Thanks for that Um Okay, Julia, how can we connect with you? How can we work with you if we want to dive deeper into our fascia and maybe some healing going on? How can we be a part of your world?
Yeah, I'm the most active on Instagram and my handle is at movement by Julia and If you want more details on all of the other Services I offer if you want to work together if you want to learn how to release special on your own with a course All that information is at movement by Julia calm Perfect.
Julia, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today, Mamas. We will see you in the next episode. And that's the end of another episode. I hope you loved today's topic as much as I did. You can find all of today's show notes and details at thewellnourishedmama .com slash podcast, as well as all of my recipes and resources on the blog.
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