Fun Facts with Stefan and Zack
● Stefan - Every single foot step you take in nature contains 300 miles of mycelium (fungi network) (1).● Zack - The resting tone of the musculature while you sleep oscillates up and down with different cycles of sleep (2).
Our Definitions Of Mobility
● Stefan - Mobility is the ability to attain a certain range of motion in a controlled way. Flexibility is not mobility.● Zack - Mobility is the ability for soft tissues to change shape, including bones, to expand and compress.
The Importance of Mobility Beyond just Functional Movement
1. Fluid Dynamics:
● Mobility allows for the expansion and compression of soft tissues. This allows for fluid movement.● Fluid is a currency of health within the body. It is more than just the heart moving fluid throughout the body.● 4 Regulators of fluid movement: Nerves, Arteries, Veins and Lymphatics. - Nerves: a. Somatic nerves activate muscular tissue to contract and create muscle pumps. b. Sensory nerves tell the Central nervous system what is happening so that it may compensate fluid flow top down. c. Autonomic nerves: innervates smooth muscle in arteries, veins and lymphatics to compress and expand fluid tubes. It also innervates fascial tissue to "contract" which may also change pressure and fluid mechanics (5).
 - Arteries: Bring nutrients around to supply tissues. Every artery has a nerve that innervates it and every nerve has an artery that supplies it, this is the Neurovascular relationship (5).
- Veins and Lymphatics: are drainage tissues. Have smooth muscles in their walls and a valve system to aid in fluid return but also rely on muscle and fascial pumps to help move them back towards the heart and lungs (3)
● Fluid Flows from a high point of pressure to a low point of pressure. The body uses this principle to move fluid efficiently when all tissues are capable of doing their job.● Fascial tissue will package these 4 regulators of fluid movement together so that when a force is applied, each vessel may use the force to their advantage.● Even nerves are fluid tubes, axoplasmic transport is a part of the nerves ability to function (4). - pH measures the voltage potential of a fluid - How nerves grow and connect in fetal development in the central nervous system. The fetus grows in a fluid environment encapsulated by a membrane which similarly, nerves growing into networks within the fetus’ brain is the formation tissue within an open fluid space but how does one nerve find another? Nerves have something called growth cones, and they develop through this liquid environment by way of chemical gradient, but this chemical gradient is based on an electrical charge. At the tip of these cones are calcium ions, receptors that are able to pick up on positive or negative concentration of chemicals in the fluid space and based on these charges will know where to travel to form synapses. (5)● The body is a giant pulley system that is an accumulation of a bunch of small pulley systems. If you have one side of the pulley pulling more than the other, like in an immobilized joint for instance, it will change the fluid dynamics on both sides of the joint over time. The short side stays in a compression and the long side stays lengthened which can also be considered as a transverse compression. This will do the same to the vessels, compressing longitudinally on one side and transversely on the other side of that joint, impacting how fluid can move. You can look at this globally or locally, immobility will change how musculoskeletal and visceral tissues get proper drainage and supply of nutrients. ● The diaphragms are great examples of fluid pumps as they change pressure drastically.● Mobility is needed to allow proper fluid flow and therefore proper recovery. When considering an athlete, they will need mobility beyond what is just needed for the sport so that fluid may move optimally to keep them healthy.● The sympathetic nervous system (Fight or Flight) has sensory nerve endings within the fascia and vessels around a joint. What may happen to this system if joints become immobile? Potentially larger sympathetic or stress response.
2. Coordination:
● Whole goal of mobility is to have a coordinated motion in a purposeful way. If you cant coordinate well you wont have good mobility.● Movement is involuntary in many ways. You get to choose the task but your brain chooses how to complete that task during the majority of movements in your day.● You have different tracts (Pyramidal and Extrapyramidal) and reflex loops that maintain upright posture along with other conscious tasks. Your brain gets loads of feedback information from the joints, muscles, fascia, the visual system and vestibular systems which serve to create a map of where your body is in space. With this map the brain has an idea of what it has available to accomplish the desired task. As soon as you throw something in like a previous injury, that injury will not only skew the perception/coordination of that area directly, it will skew the perception that the brain has of that area requiring it to renegotiate how it will complete a task with these changes. This might mean structures around the injury will be made to do more work to compensate for the injured structures. This compensation may still be evident even after the injured tissue has healed.● Those injured, previously injured, or immobile areas may not be as well reflected in the brains map. As a protective mechanism, the body may just restrict those joints and require the areas that are well reflected on its map to take on a larger role (hypermobility)Energy comes at a cost to the body, the more that is used to keep your body upright, the less you have to accomplish other important processes.● Compensations are not bad, they show the body's true ability to adapt. However, the more you accumulate the more energy is required to work around each area of compensation.● Compensations in the musculoskeletal system are also reflected in the fluid vessels as vasoconstriction and vasodilation. This will influence the nutrition and energy that is available to all structures as a result.● You can also leverage reflexes of different systems (vestibular, visual etc.) to then revitalize the mobility of the musculoskeletal system.● You may, after improving immobilized areas, feel tired or sore because the body needs to identify and integrate the changes that have been made which will require energy. That being said, if the compensation pattern can be improved, potential energy can be reclaimed since the body will not have to work around the compensation anymore.
Why assessing and treating yourself can be difficult
● It can be difficult for an individual to assess and treat themselves because the perception of your active movement will skew the perception of your sensation leading to confusing interpretations as a result. The body is very good at hiding immobilities with hypermobilities within compensation patterns which result in different sensations during self-assessment.
Benefits of Mobility not Hypermobility
● There is a balanced relationship between mobility and stability. You need stability to create tone but then mobility so that tone may fluctuate and allow fluid to move.
Compensation Patterns can change over time
● Can start via motor tracts which stimulate muscle activation or tone increase to hold position of structures. Over time, the body tries to stay as efficient as possible, it will lay down fibrotic tissue within the extra cellular matrix (ECM) so that it does not have to actively hold the position any longer, it can hold passively through chemical changes in the tissues (6).● This can make it more difficult to treat whether it be through mobility training, manual therapy or other modalities.● This also takes away the function of the soft tissue further impacting the fluid pumps.
Pain is not always (rarely) the site or cause of issue
● Relationship between pain and strain. Generally, pain comes from the lengthened side rather than the side of shortening or compression. This can be seen across joints or in different planes of motion.● Tension may still be in the area where pain exists but the tension is being caused by a compression somewhere else within the body.● Pain is sensory information, it is subjective.
References:1. Stammets, Paul. “6 ways mushrooms can save the world. Ted: Ideas Worth Spreading, March, 2008
2. Burgess, C., Lai, D., Siegel, J., & Peever, J. (2008). An endogenous glutamatergic drive onto somatic motoneurons contributes to the stereotypical pattern of muscle tone across the sleep-wake cycle. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 28(18), 4649–4660. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0334-08.2008
3. Scallan JP, Zawieja SD, Castorena-Gonzalez JA, Davis MJ. Lymphatic pumping: mechanics, mechanisms and malfunction. J Physiol. 2016 Oct 15;594(20):5749-5768. doi: 10.1113/JP272088. Epub 2016 Aug 2. PMID: 27219461; PMCID: PMC5063934.
4. Takenaka T, Kawakami T, Hori H, Hashimoto Y, Hiruma H, Kusakabe T. Axoplasmic transport and its signal transduction mechanism. Jpn J Physiol. 1998 Dec;48(6):413-20. doi: 10.2170/jjphysiol.48.413. PMID: 10021495.
5. Marieb, E. and Hoehn, K., 2016. Human Anatomy & Physiology. 10th ed. Pearson Education Limited, pp.425.
6. Mahdy MAA. Skeletal muscle fibrosis: an overview. Cell Tissue Res. 2019 Mar;375(3):575-588. doi: 10.1007/s00441-018-2955-2. Epub 2018 Nov 12. PMID: 30421315.